Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

I just read an interesting article over at SiliconValleyWatcher.com.

Some of the noteworthy points include calling out Technorati, using conference panels to pitch products, and commercializing the blogosphere:

What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati's expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals. Mr Whitmore barely mentioned his company, and I didn't pitch anything, maybe I should have :-)

But I did get an interesting peak into the world of "selling the blogosphere" and how there is a large and growing number of companies, such as Technorati, that would like to make a lot of money from the work of millions of bloggers.

This resonates with a conversation I followed over the weekend:

"PR People Are Morons" link

"Given the assignment to discuss PR in the age of blogging, he invited a client, whose product actually has a reputation for being spyware, to announce a new version. And that was it. No one else on his panel, no discussion about the future of PR." link

"The word-of-mouth network is so efficient that if bloggers don't watch their brands they'll lose readership, respect, and, worse of all, if liars try to show up at conferences they will get called out and derided." link

A few thoughts:

1. I've been to more than my share of conference talks that turned out to be PR pitches. I used to advocate getting up and leaving en masse, but it turns out a better method is to call the person out in the Q&A and then blog about it.
2. I wonder if it really is effective when spammers are publicly identified.
3. Reading all the comments and trackbacks involved there's an underlying sense of dread of things to come which I'm noticing more often these days. It's not uncommon for people to always express the feeling of "thing were better before", but there seems to be a surge in the attitude that commercial interests and spammers are succeeding in diluting the conversation.
   
   We're already seeing interesting innovations crippled in their infancy like tag spam on Technorati and possibly My Web 2.0.
   
   I'm curious to see if the blogosphere follows the same path as Usenet (along with email) and evolves into something much less effective because of a diminishing signal to noise ratio as well as spam. Hmm, Usenet also had a strong sense of self-policing that occasionally turned into a mob mentality, but it never seemed to recover from the spam invasion when it hit the hypergrowth phase.