I hadn’t ever read Jeneane Sessum’s blog before the recent Ze-scapades. I was looking at some of the other recent posts and to my surprise, I saw her posting a very similar take to my on the whole PayPerPost thing. She struck all the same notes – hypocrisy of those making money blogging while taking umbrage at others doing the same, socio-economics of those who really might need the money, etc. Check out her take here and here.
It’s nice to see that at least one other person agrees with my perspective. I was wondering if I was really that far adrift, at least until Jason Calcanis showed up to leave me a comment telling me my arguments were stupid. That was a nice shot of external validation. The beautiful part of that is that he made his “purity of the blogosphere” argument about how bad “covert marketing” is and then seemingly without irony explained how one moves from Z-list blogger to the A-list by covertly marketing oneself. Really. I’m not kidding, it seems too good to be true but it happened.
I read Jeneane Sessum’s article, also, as I am tracking Mike Arrington (Mike Arrogant) posts via Technorati Tags. The man has balls of iron to rail on Pay-Per-Posters—he is not only one of the biggest whores in Silicon Valley, he is technically inept and clueless in matters of the values related to the Clue Train Manifesto.
I posted to Steve Gillmor’s blog on Sunday, in a separate matter, and termed Arrington the “Antichrist of Attention”—Steve wrote me back and concurred on Arrington’s cluelessness (see: http://surfingthechaos.onevoicemm.net/?p=25)—why he is still keeping him on his show is a wonder .
Jason Calacanis is another matter: his pontificating on moral purity in blogging is sheer sophistry. Jason is NOT “clueless”—that may make him more morally culpable.
As I pointed out to Steve in my rant, the entire web is consumed by the same forces of manipulative marketing that have eaten Western Capitalism’s ass for 50 yr.s now. The model of Attention metrics militates against such tactics.
Sadly, it works, and to the victors go the spoils—including the ability to squash the upstarts, or even those who attempt to eke out an existence.
It is the economic model that forms the political system of demonization as the rationale to eradicate —as it is above, so below.
Pay me enough money to write and I will write. Don’t pay me at all and I will write—and I will write the same damn post. Arrington can’t say that! Not sure Jason can, either.