SponsoredReviews, which recently launched, is yet another service that promises to pay bloggers for their opinions. They do this by connecting advertisers and bloggers in a harmonious relationship of money and reviews. In a perfect world, this would mean that the blogger, showered with money, would still be totally unbiased in his opinion of the products. Many people are highly skeptical that this would ever be the case.

Tony Hung makes a good point by saying

While more details are sure to come in SponsoredReviews, when bloggers set their own price, and it turns out to be a princely sum, how can anyone possibly be expected to write an unbiased review?

The real issue is that anyone, no matter how much integrity they may claim to have, will, with enough money, become biased. The price point may be significantly different for different people, but, the price point will always exist.

A BETTER SOLUTION
I used to write for a blog on the Weblogsinc network, and was paid a few dollars per post. But, the difference was that I wasn’t being paid by advertisers, but rather, an intermediary. Weblogsinc never took money from advertisers and demanded that we write about their products. On these networks, bloggers are more apt to write unbiased reviews and opinions.

Paying bloggers directly is always going to be a slippery slope. A better solution is to form a hybrid between services like PayPerPost and Weblogsinc. The service would have various blogs focusing on different categories of products, and, a number of certified bloggers in each category. Advertisers would pay the service to have their product promoted, but, the amount paid would never be shown to the bloggers.

The bloggers would then be able to see products that are requesting to be reviewed, and based on how interested they are in the product, they would review them. Only after they review them would they be paid an appropriate amount for their post. In this way, bias would be kept at a minimum.

It’s a bit frightening to think of a blogosphere teeming with bribed bloggers, and hopefully, these services won’t be riding on the slippery slope. Perhaps what we need is a microformat that contains information about how much an advertiser paid for the blog post:

<span class="amountpaid">$30</span>


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 9 – As the Macworld keynote fires up, all the press and attendees focus on Steve Jobs as he gives his presentation on stage. As usual, the drama and theatrics are high at this flagship event. Steve is a master at creating suspense and wooing the crowd. However, the vast majority of people can’t see him at all. Instead, they’re huddled in front of computer screens, staring intently at static text and pictures that are updated almost in real time as the presentation unfolds.

Welcome to the world of live blogging, where passionate bloggers beam out the instant scoop regarding current events and news. Unlike normal blogging, which is asynchronous, live blogging is more akin to a one way IM conversation. The people who really care about the topic will keep the post open, and refresh constantly to find out what’s happening. In the case of the Macworld keynote, blogs were the only way for people not in the room to get the scoop. I was one of many people who oohed and ahhed as Steve unveiled the details of the iPhone.

Blog posts as instant messaging
Live blogging is not a new thing, and has been around since the early days of blogging. Whether it’s the Macworld keynote, the CES conference, or the Oscars, there will be people live blogging on the scene. How people consume these live posts is very different than normal posts. As I mentioned before, live posts are like one way instant messages. The audience expects updates on the order of seconds and minutes, not hour or days.

During the Macworld keynote, there were dozens of blogs that were engaged in live blogging–some more successful than others. The two leaders were Engadget and Mac Rumors. Both were providing pictures along with the text, and keeping the post updated at least once every few minutes.

However, there was a key difference between the two. Mac Rumors actually implemented an AJAX refresh that updated the post without needing to send an HTML refresh of the page. This served to reduce the bandwidth needed to push out the information to a large audience, and also to reduce the potential wait time to get the information. This made the Mac Rumors live blogging experience to be more fluid and timely.

Using the right tools
The problem is that most blogging software isn’t well suited for live blogging. The blogger needs to continuously edit and save the post, using a potentially clunky interface involving form submissions. A better solution would be a chat-like interface where the blogger simply types in the next bit of news, and the post would be automatically updated in place with a timestamp without the need for a page reload. Mac Rumors probably cooked something up on their own for their AJAX live blogging page.

Live blogging is a great tool for instantly disseminating information. With the addition of comments, live blogging creates a virtual forum in parallel with the unfolding events. In many ways, this is somewhere between static blog posts and IRC. It would be interesting to peruse a whole network of live blogs, where you can peer into events across the world in real time.

Photo by Scott Beale

Nick Douglas of Valleywag has left the building. The talented and sometimes controversial writer is no longer the lead editor at Valleywag, and, they are looking to fill his shoes.

Valleywag says

Nick Douglas, editor since launch earlier this year, is leaving. […] Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go. (To reach Nick Douglas, send email to popsnap at gmail dot com.) But, to helm the site, we’re now looking for someone with, ideally, some background in reporting.

For a blog that tries to reveal everything about industry gossip and secrets, they’re certainly keeping Nick Douglas’s departure rather low key. He really was the voice of Valleywag, and, even though I don’t usually read it everyday, I enjoyed his witty banter on the state of Web 2.0 gossip. It won’t be the same without him.

Now, he can start his own blog, and, I’m sure that the first entry will be about the circumstances of departure from VW.

Also, VW has also redesigned their page, and oh, what a horrible redesign it is. They say that the original design of VW was weak, but, I think that it’s not only weaker now, it’s bad on the eyes. The original design was one of my favorites in the gawker regime.

Will this be the start of the decline of VW? Nick really had the personality within the Web 2.0 world, and, his departure will leave the new guy with a lot of catching up to do.

Michael Masnick, the President and CEO of Techdirt, was gracious enough to do an interview with us at the Office 2.0 Conference. Techdirt, which has been around since 1997, has a simple mission: getting the right information to the right people at the right time. They do this by employing a balance between human expertise and technology.

In the interview, Michael talks about what Techdirt does, including some of their new initiatives, such as the Techdirt Insight Community, which allows companies to harness the knowledge and expertise of bloggers. Find out if you can be part of the Techdirt Insight Community, and get paid to blog. Speaking of blogs, Techdirt is a great one, but what other blogs does Michael like? Find out now…

     

Click To Play

 

Today, CNET launched Webware, their new web applications oriented blog. The blog is the brainchild of Rafe Needleman, who also writes for the Alpha Blog.

I had a chat with Rafe a while back about the name Webware, which he says is a perfect description of the new applications that are being served up in a web browser. And indeed, the word webware in this context has been picking up according to Technorati.

So, once you get your fill of reviews here at BuzzShout, make sure to check out Webware for CNET’s take on next generation web applications.

Kevin O’Keefe, founder and president of LexBlog, has an interesting post about how the best blogs out there are sending audiences away, rather than keeping them in. The two giant examples on either end of the spectrum is Yahoo, which tries to trap users into their site, and Google, whose content is all about getting you out to the edge.

Personally, I’ve given this push-and-pull aspect of blogging some thought. Our goal here at BuzzShout is to create a great resource for finding new web technologies. That means at the core is BuzzShout, with links leading to new web technology sites at the end of the spokes. At present, I think that many users experience BuzzShout as a huge linked list, providing them with up-to-date information in the Web 2.0 world. However, our plan is to bake in some more functional goodies to the point where there is a balance between the urge to stay at BuzzShout, and the urge to check out the latest links.

In the end, I disagree with Kevin that you need to be massive linkers to make your blog successful. The real issue is the fundamental difference between the two types of bloggers: referential and experiential. There are many examples of both types of bloggers that have become successful through their content, not links.

This blogger classification can also be extended to sites, as we have seen with Yahoo and Google. I think that what most sites need is a good balance between the two. The aim is to make a community that is valuable within itself, but that also provides interesting links to the edge.

What do you think about this issue? Are you a fan of linked list sites? Or do you really like sites that keep the content in the center?

It seems like it’s getting easier and easier to make an equivalent of an online store. With services like Amazon Associates, MyPickList, Shopify, and BloggerKit, there’s almost no excuse for a blogger not to get in on promoting relevant items for sale, and profiting from it. Now, with the entry of RightCart, users can literally place a full service shopping cart and checkout on their site with a few lines of code.

Their screencast shows just how easy it is to setup the cart with a typical blogger account. There were only two instances of copy-and-pastes, and they’re off and running with a quick, inline, and full-featured shopping cart. The focus is on selling your own items, but, you can also sell other people’s items, which will incur a 1% commission charge to RightCart — not bad at all.

The big win with RightCart is that it allows users to buy items without leaving your page. The AJAX is slick, and visitors will barely even notice that they’ve used a 3rd party service to buy the item. That being said, there were some concerns about people making false RightCarts, and tricking visitors in giving up their credit card numbers to the wrong people. Since then, RightCart has made amends with the issue by using a unique codeword to verify that the cart is indeed served from RightCart. In the end, it really is up to the buyer to be aware of the risks.

Even though the interface for generating codes and searching for items is a bit clunky looking, RightCart has some pretty slick technology for sellers to make instant online stores. An interesting idea would be for them to take an AdWords approach (like BloggerKit) for people to sell relevant items on their blogs by automatically grabbing the items from the text context. Therefore, as soon as you create a new item for sale, it will automatically be shown on anyone’s relevant blog post. It would be like edgeio, except the listings proceed from the center out to the edge.

You can already read about PayPerPost on several blogs. Here on Mashable, on TechCrunch, and at CNET’s alpha blog. So I’m not going to give you an in-depth review about what the site does, but to give you a basic idea, they offer money to bloggers for writing good reviews about specific companies. I believe this dishonest practice is only for the most greedy and immoral blog writers out there. However, these “sponsorship” types of advertising can be seen in other forms as well.

It almost seems like you can buy pretty much anyone these days. Buy a professional athlete to tell everyone that they LOVE your sports drink. Buy a movie star to wear only your line of clothing. Sony, upon their entry into the American market, used to pay salespeople to specifically recommend their higher priced televisions. Hell, there are even cases with people permanently tattooing advertisements on their own bodies!

Journalists need to be different though; they need to uphold to an honest and, in a perfect world, unbiased code. Bloggers, who are largely not journalists by training, don’t necessarily have to follow the morals that we hope most journalists abide to. Lately a lot of bloggers have been taking advertisers on their sites. In fact, some of the blogs that I’ve linked to at the beginning of this entry, have advertisers on their sites. They have made statements that they don’t approve of PayPerPost, and will never take money to falsely write a good review of a company. While I believe this, I doubt any of them would ever write a scathing review about one of their advertisers–even if it were true.

Note: The writers of the ShoutBlog will never publish editorial content that has been shaped by money received from any outside influence. So don’t even ask!

There’s been some buzz about bloggerkit, which allows any blogger or content creator to automatically pull in Amazon ads that are relevant to specific keywords. There’s no registration required, and the process looks like a cinch to set up. The catch is that bloggerkit takes 15% of the referrals, and you end up with the rest. For a small blog with limited resources, this looks to be a good alternative to the endless clicking that all Amazon Associates are familiar with. However, for a site that depends a lot upon ad revenues, it may not be the best choice to lose 15% off the top. If you have the know-how, you should be able to write the code that grabs the Amazon ads based on your content.

Bloggerkit raises a question that I’ve been trying to answer: why doesn’t Amazon provide this service directly? It’s a huge incentive for bloggers to be able to provide context relevant Amazon ads, and it would only make Amazon’s Associate program stronger. It wouldn’t be too much effort for them to get it implemented.

There’s certainly been a lot of blog searching buzz in the past few days, including announcements of new features from the big dogs like Bloglines and Technorati. Among the buzz is the newly launched, Australian based gnoos, which is trying to break into the blog searching world with a slightly different angle.

Their interface is as clean and sleek as their response time is quick. These are key factors in persuading users to return to your site time and time again. Michael mentioned that he would be able to spend quite some time on gnoos without being fatigued, and I whole-heartedly agree with him. There’s just something pleasant about the design decisions that were made for gnoos’s front end.

Some of the differentiating features include the ability to tag, rank, comment, and show the text of each blog post result. The first three features are similar to swicki’s social search aspects, the difference being that gnoos isn’t necessarily tied to a specific site, and is more of a general purpose blog search. Technorati could learn a thing or two about the type of community search that gnoos is bringing to the table via user interaction with search results.

The fourth feature is gnoos’s ability to pull up a blog post when clicking on the “more” link. The entire blog post is shown inline with the search results. Depending on who you’re speaking to, this could be a blessing, or a wolf in disguise. gnoos is allowing visitors to view blog content without visiting the blog or RSS feed. For sensitive content producers, this could be controversial, either due to financial or copyright concerns. gnoos does have a copyright policy in their Terms of Use page, where they say that they

will never knowingly infringe (or be involved in infringing) the intellectual property rights of others.

In addition, gnoos might run up against the same wall as Google did with their page caching, where private posts that were deleted might be easily recovered. Hopefully gnoos won’t ever have to deal with privacy and copyright issues. Personally, I don’t mind my posts being on 3rd party search engines. The way I see it, the more exposure my content gets, the better.

Perhaps the most interesting tactic that gnoos is bringing to the table is localization. gnoos is heavily localized to Australia, and shows it by allowing visitors to filter by “Aussie Blogs” and “Aussie Media.” I find that localization is something that has been overlooked by many startups, and indeed, it is the secret weapon that gnoos has to gain significant market share in Australia. What would be cool is for gnoos to take the lead in localization and start localizing blogs for other parts of the world. However, I doubt that this is their strategy.

Currently, the content on gnoos is much smaller than Technorati. Their fast querying speed may be a result of their small database. If this is the case, we’ll have to see how well they scale up as they index more of the blogosphere.

Good luck to the underdogs!