There has to be a way for bloggers to have sponsors, make money, share a percentage of that money with the people who build the blogging platforms, fully disclose who's paying whom AND keep their editorial integrity, says Halley.
Halley also points to comments from Mitch Ratcliffe (also noted by Dave Winer). Referring to blogs that covered a Microsoft conference, and making the possibly untrue assumption that all five blog writers had their travel and hotel expenses paid for by Microsoft, Ratcliffe says:
four out of these five sites that apparently received airfare and hotel expenses did not discloses this conflict or, in order to distinguish themselves from those who did take the free trip, state that they did not receive any value from Microsoft.
Perhaps those four sites will respond to this concern with disclosure. I'm certainly curious. (Doc, who is not one of the four, has already addressed it.)
Whenever enthusiastic speech is monetized, it is open to the suspicion that money could be the cause, and not simply the effect, of the afflatus. So far, blogging has set itself apart from most other forms of published stuff by virtue of being non-commercial. Whether personal, impersonal, or suprapersonal, the mode has so far had little cause to be accused of being warped by the interests of someone besides the writer.
If it were to become apparent that some bloggers were failing to disclose relevant commercial relationships, the result could be ruinous to what blogging seemed to be trying to be and to do. See, if I know that so-and-so is a lying deceitful corporate tool and that everything he says about certain products is at least potentially shaped by the undisclosed convergence of personal and commercial interests, I am going to remove links to that blog. I will probably go further, and remove links to blogs that link to that blog. Well, you see. Pretty soon the ties that bind aren't even loosely joined.
Right now, blog links are assumed to be of a certain order that involves admiration, curiosity, shared passion, etc. Hally suggests color coding them. The relationships of editorial to commercial interests might be more convoluted. Maybe money isn't changing hands, only gifts. Or only access. Or information, or something even less tangible. Right now, blogs - most of them - might be open to various criticisms, but they aren't designed to be making any money for their authors. And it's worth pausing before discarding that little halo. As much as we want to agree with Halley that there has to be a way.
