Blogworld 09 Thursday Afternoon Keynote - Sponsored Blogging

As an occasional user of Pay Per Post, this talk was of particular interest to me. Jeremiah Owyang was the moderator and the panelists were Ted Murphy from Izea, Jennifer Lezio (sp?), Lisa Baradokin (lawyer, spelling?) and Wendy Piersall a blogging network owner that uses sponsored conversations. You can find detail about this session here.

The panel is being billed as a debate on this topic, but I'm not quite sure I follow why there's a debate in the first place. It's not like when you use Izea to make money on a pay-per-post you don't let eveyone know you're doing it. When they took a quick show of hands poll in the room, about 70% of the room were in favor and 5% were against it. The rest were undecided. Here are my notes from the conversation.

• Lisa the lawyer discussed the recent changes in FTC regulations. She claimed the regulations are pretty simple and I blogged about them here.


• Product placement and similar sponsored conversations has been going on for years


• Jennifer is against it because they're not for everyone. My initial reaction is who is she to decide who should do it and who shouldn't? She's playing the nanny, worrying about others' reputations. I can worry about my own branding, thank you very much.


• Wendy agrees that it isn't for everyone. Again, who is Wendy to tell me what I can or can't do?


• Wendy's view of herself is much larger than she really is. Wendy had a sponsored conversation! Great Caesar's Ghost! Now how will I ever manage to change the oil in my car?


• Ted supports sponsored conversations, but has a strong position about declaring that such things are happening.


• Jennifer is bothered by our relationships with our readers, afraid that we're making money off of our audiences by our sponsored conversations. Her issue is do you want to be a spokemodel or a thought leader? She claims you can't do both. I'm glad she's worried about me.


• Wendy wrote about some product or another and the link she had used to the product site had been sold and it now pointed to a pr0n site. Um, so what?


• I'm getting ticked off now. CNN was licking the sweat off of Saddam Hussein's balls so they could have access within Iraq, so now we've all got to be like them? 60 Minutes knowingly libeled General Westmoreland, but they're not a sponsored site? Dan Rather spreads absolute crap from forged documents about George Bush trying to get John Kerry elected and he's the one we should emulate?


• The gist of it is that Wendy and Jennifer want to look over my shoulder as I write. They dont seem to find their own lives sufficiently interesting to fill their days. Neither do I.


• If these dingbats had ruled the place in 1840, the US's western border would still be in Indiana.