Jason Calacanis, writing in the context of tech blogging, rejects the view that Pay Per Post is a “necessary evil” for those who can’t hope to attract ad dollars to their blogs because they believe there’s no longer opportunity to break through to the “A-List” of bloggers:
The PayPerIdiots are trying to make their DECEPTIVE service into a class war–so, so obvious guys. There is a reason why you guys came up with such a dumb service, and your arguments prove exactly how unintelligent you are. It’s ***not*** a class war, it’s an ***integrity*** war. If you want to have no integrity do covert marketing with PayPerPost, if you want to have integrity don’t–but let’s not make this about the “haves and have nots”–that’s just dumb.
I don’t agree (and I’m not alone). There are two things here: Whether there is an “A-List,” and whether Pay Per Post is an answer to those who despair of ever joining it.
I do think Calacanis is right that quality ultimately will tell, in terms of the Pay Per Post issue. I explain that more below. But I think it’s naive to say there are not existing cliques in the blogosphere who hold the keys to success, and that there are a lot of established players who aren’t all that good or all that consistent. This is to be expected in any medium as it matures.
And as to pay-per-post, well, I wrote this in the New Jersey Law Journal earlier this year. It’s a little clunky because it was not written on a blog (I’ve added a couple of links, but couldn’t link in the column) and because it’s for a non-blog-savvy audience:
Op-ed
Hands Off Blogs
Mandatory disclosure of payment to bloggers runs counter to free expression
By Ronald D. Coleman
New Jersey Law Journal
January 26, 2007
No one is free from bias of some sort or another, especially people who spend their time (paid or otherwise) writing opinions – whether in daily newspaper columns, legal newspapers or blogs, the newest, most exciting and most democratic medium of expression in the real and virtual worlds.
Opinion writers are understood by axiom to have an opinion; and it is just as axiomatic that opinions can be “negotiable” in all sorts of ways, overt and subtle.
Yet in the emerging world of blog publishing, there is a troubling trend toward mandatory disclosure of one kind of bias – the kind directly attributable to payment of material compensation to a blogger addressed specifically in a Dec.7 Federal Trade Commission informal opinion involving a company called PayPerPost Inc. – that is misguided, contrary to free speech principles and a threat to the growth of a dynamic economic and cultural phenomenon.
Almost two years ago, the blogosphere – the community, or group of communities, of ardent blog writers, commentators and readers – hiccupped with the discovery that a top liberal blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, of the DailyKos.com blog, a vocal supporter of the Howard Dean campaign during the 2004 election, had been a paid consultant to Dean. The blogosphere erupted with that characteristically exaggerated self-importance bloggers love to show in a debate over whether, how and what had been disclosed. Read the rest of this entry »
Martin Kramer says at his Sandbox blog (and I paraphrase) that Jacob Weisberg must be dizzy after his dervish-like rotations in Slate on Bernard Lewis, in which Weisberg claims Professor Lewis soft-pedals the Crusades — anything to bury neoconservatism, which Weisberg pronounces very dead. Weisberg is so giddy over how the ocean of spilled Moorish blood has led to this development that, in his own turn at revisionist history, he pronounces that the”less principled, more effective pragmatism associated with Bush 41, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker” was… “more effective.”
That sounds like a stretch, though Plimpton’s unusual career and talent certainly do seem to be entitled to a some kind of memorial. But a target for Manhattan pigeons? He was of that old WASP stock, true — the sorts of people who do have statues in the park. A literary man — he founded 
