Natural Selection in the Blogosphere

Last week, I chimed in on the PayPerPost controversy, sitting squarely in the middle since I believe that natural selection will prune the bad seeds from the tree. Jeff Jarvis has a quite nice description of this process in a recent post:

Is there danger in this? Of course. One can be corrupted by the siren call of popularity and, worse, money. But if one corrupts one’s product and credibility along the way, then you can bet that the audience will see through the manipulation, become disenchanted, and leave. That is true of newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and blogs. And in the case of the Business 2.0 bloggers, they can also lose their jobs.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Paid popularity

Many still contest that any form of paid writing in the blogosphere is simply wrong. I can't really support that particular point of view, if only because it is somewhat alarmist. Certainly, the more useful course of action for all concerned parties is to openly engage in dialogue about how to better demark these areas and how to prevent any harm that might come to the credibility of the blogosphere (an already turbulent topic).

technorati tags:payperpost, media, monetization, blogging, blogs