Ryan MacMillan

Blogging about blogging is metablogging.

Blogging about corporate blogging on your corporate blog is metametablogging.

Which means that blogging about another blog about corporate blogging on your own corporate blog is the sort of behaviour likely to trigger a small gravitational singularity over the skies of East London, thereby causing most of Shoreditch to collapse in on itself.

But it’s worth the risk to find out why Seth Finkelstein has taken an (in no way prurient, I assure you) interest in ‘the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere’
Finkelstein’s hookers are the new breed of small-time bloggers who are being paid to write about an advertiser’s product to increase its link ranking. He espys (through his luxuriant beard) a (brace yourself) ‘disintermediation’ (sigh) of influence away from the traditional elites at the top of the attention hierarchy towards marketing agenices that shower it amongst hundreds of starving student kittybloggers willing to lay back and think of Google’s PageRankings.

This, Seth worries, is the ‘monetisation of attention’ and ‘if we want there to be areas of human interaction which have some protection against commercial pressures, blogs stopped qualifying long ago.’

But hooking is the oldest profession in the world, and Finkelstein never asks why people end up working the blogosphere’s red light district (see? these sex-industry analogies are catching). As Amy once said in The West Wing, ‘no little girl ever grew up wanting to be a hooker’. Something happened on the way to the sidewalk. The internet hookers either want or need the money, and cueing up a dystopian future in which I will only talk to my friends if we can make casual reference to how ace I think Lockheed Martin is, will hardly help us think about why bloggers are willing to sell links.

Is it just for cash? And if it is, is there any moral justification in getting upset about the behaviour of bloggers who don’t share other bloggers’ ethical values?

AMUSING PARLIAMENTARY UPDATE:

It seems that Her Majesty’s government has taken it upon itself to rid Britain’s cyberstreets of whores, prostitutes and assorted persons of ill-repute by introducing a law which prohibits people from posting reviews of their own products under false names. The law applies to all types of product postings, ranging from those of authors who review their own books on Amazon.com to marketers who create phony blogs to promote their products

Well, that should stop them, then, eh? Phew…