Another piece in the Edelman saga
A recent piece (since disappeared off the SBP website) in the Sunday Business Post's Computers in Business section stirred up some controversy in the Boggersphere recently. In a nutshell, the SBP published an article on blogging which primarily quotes/promotes a PR outfit named Edelman based here in Dublin.
The problem is - as happens so often - that the article is basically a commercial puff-piece of a type familiar to readers of the Irish IT press, with not one local blogger mentioned. The suspicion is hard to escape that the story relies heavily on Edelman-supplied material, if indeed it didn't originate there (did anyone note if Edelman advertised that week?).
Lo and behold, the name 'Edelman' has shown up again on bloggers' radar this week, this time in a New York Times story on how Wal-Mart has been seeding spin material to sympathetic right-wing bloggers in the US. Who did Wal-Mart hire to run this astro-turf effort? You guessed it.
As Atrios notes, it's quite amusing to note mainstream media outlets holding bloggers to much higher standards of disclosure than they hold themselves to. Jeff Jarvis is (for once) spot-on as well, in an important issue which should cross partisan political lines as being of concern.
Update: unsurprisingly (we suppose) some seem to welcome this 'opportunity' for bloggers.
The problem is - as happens so often - that the article is basically a commercial puff-piece of a type familiar to readers of the Irish IT press, with not one local blogger mentioned. The suspicion is hard to escape that the story relies heavily on Edelman-supplied material, if indeed it didn't originate there (did anyone note if Edelman advertised that week?).
Lo and behold, the name 'Edelman' has shown up again on bloggers' radar this week, this time in a New York Times story on how Wal-Mart has been seeding spin material to sympathetic right-wing bloggers in the US. Who did Wal-Mart hire to run this astro-turf effort? You guessed it.
As Atrios notes, it's quite amusing to note mainstream media outlets holding bloggers to much higher standards of disclosure than they hold themselves to. Jeff Jarvis is (for once) spot-on as well, in an important issue which should cross partisan political lines as being of concern.
Update: unsurprisingly (we suppose) some seem to welcome this 'opportunity' for bloggers.
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