astroblogs

The rag­ing­cow blog got me think­ing about the con­cept of Astro­turf blogs (I would call them astroblogs). A lot of peo­ple are say­ing that a blog like rag­ing­cow can’t work and yet, there is a num­ber of dis­cus­sions about it all over the blo­gos­phere. Now, if it doesn’t work, how come I now know about a prod­uct that I didn’t know about a cou­ple of days ago?

I don’t watch TV so tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing doesn’t work on me. I lis­ten pri­mar­ily to pub­lic radio so, apart from place­ments in the form of con­tri­bu­tions, I can’t be tar­geted there. I read a paper (the New York Times) every day and a bunch of tech­ni­cal mag­a­zines. What I get of pop cul­ture is from flip­ping through mag­a­zines at the super­mar­ket cash reg­is­ter, or read­ing about it online.

Online, I not only read the main­stream sites but also a num­ber of blogs. I could have been bliss­fully unaware of the exis­tence of rag­ing cow, had it not been for the point­ers to it from sev­eral blogs. Does the exis­tence of the blog mat­ter to me? Not really since it’s not a prod­uct I would buy. But what about a prod­uct I might buy? Would my per­cep­tion be affected? THIS is the ques­tion that I have.

There is no doubt in my mind that mar­keters have a pres­ence in the blo­gos­phere and will con­tinue to increase. As a result, the line between shills and indi­vid­u­als is going to grow increas­ingly hazy. If some­one goes to a prod­uct launch (let’s say a new piece of hard­ware) and get a good­ies bag and some free food and drinks, and then goes and blogs about the event, are they shilling? It’s not clear and that’s what I’m try­ing to solve with the full dis­clo­sure feed. I want to try to estab­lish a way for peo­ple to be able to tell that there is a rela­tion­ship between the writer and the prod­uct or site or what­ever writ­ten about. How can we do that?