Seth Finkelstein has a Guardian article up on paid blogging and high rent versus low rent bloggers:
There’s a class division, where membership is exclusive and expensive, while payment is common and cheap. But both are monetisation of attention. If we want there to be areas of human interaction which have some protection against commercial pressures, blogs stopped qualifying long ago.
This also follows on a discussion Dave Rogers has been having with Doc Searls this week. The ‘money quote’:
I am opposed to the unchecked expansion of commercial activity at the expense of social and political activities. Markets are not conversations, because conversations are a social activity, not a commercial one. But if you tell people markets are conversations, then it stands to reason that conversations are for sale.
We’re in no danger of losing our heads, what else would marketers have to market to? No, we’re in danger of losing the notion that life means something more than an economic calculation or a commercial transaction.
There’s a person I read off and on. This week the person has mentioned one company in several different posts. I almost wrote in comments, “Are you being paid by this company?”, but didn’t. Doesn’t matter, though, because I realized that I can never approach this person’s writing in the same way again. I doubt I’ll even continue reading their weblog.
