Disclaimer

Right about the same time I received my first request to plug someone else's website on my blog, the February 2008 copy of WIRED Magazine came around with some pretty interesting articles about blogs.

Back in January, I commented on the Secret Life of a Blog Post article. Reading that article was the first time I had ever heard of a "spam blog." (Did I pick a nice color of poop for the words spam blog?). Since then, I've actually seen a bunch of them through Technorati. Technorati says my blog has an authority of "32" (other websites that link to my blog). When I click on it to check it out, I find a whole slew of these spam blogs that use a standardized format of, "[Fake gibberish user name] wrote an interesting post today on Here’s a quick excerpt..." and then a copy of text from my blog. I've been meaning to ask CC or Sarah how they get the copyright thing to appear on their blogs, but then... I don't know what good it would do. What can you do against these anonymous plagiarizing spammers???

Aside: I do really like the wording in Sarah's copyright blurb:

Copyright © 2008 Sarah and the Goon Squad. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.sarahandthegoonsquad.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Okay, so setting the spam blogs aside, there was another article that I found pretty interesting in that same edition of WIRED magazine. This article actually kind of disgusted me. People like this are basically dishonest blog-sluts. I mean, I understand that some people have ad-space on their blogs and earn some cash from it, and I don't have a problem with that. It just seems pretty dishonest and deceptive to me to pass off your blog as your honest, candid opinion about things when someone is paying you just to mention their product. I tend to agree with the statement in the article that they are, "destroying the authenticity of the blogosphere by disguising paid messages as candid blog posts."

DISCLAIMER

Okay, so just for the record, I'd just like to state that nobody is paying me a dime to write my blog. The products I write about in my blog are things that I have actually tried and liked (or not liked as the case may be), and I wanted to share my honest opinion with my family, friends, and anyone else searching the blogosphere for candid opinions on certain products. When I put pictures of company emblems in my blog, it's to break up the monotony of plain text on the screen and make it easy to go back and find a blurb about a particular product. I include links to other websites so you can go check out the product if you so desire, but it's because I honestly like the stuff, not because anyone is paying me.

If someone ever pays me to put something in my blog, I'll tell you.