Google’s billion dollar deal with YouTube is colliding with its $900 million dollar MySpace advertising deal. MySpace has a video offering of its own, but its users are posting YouTube videos on their pages. Once YouTube determines an ad model for embedded videos, MySpace will surely want a cut.
The ordinary folksy couple that was blogging about “Wal-Marting Across America” in their RV just happen to be freelance journalists for The Washington Post paid by Wal-Mart’s PR division. Paying a couple to do this is not the wrong the thing. The wrong thing is that they kept this hidden. Wal-Mart had been accused earlier by the NYTimes of paying off bloggers to write about them. But the tone of the article was way off base. That move was actually transparent and no money was offered. They approached bloggers who were talking about them positively and negatively and offered them information (or their side of a currently exposed story about healthcare), which is the ultimate currency of bloggers.
Maybe they should have taken a cue from Reuters who hired a correspondent to report on the the virtual world of Second Life.
And if you want to get back at telemarketers, either sign up for the National Do Not Call list or use a telemarketer counterscript. Print it out and have it nearby your phone.
