http://www.arey...-my-flying-car/

http://blog.dom...-to-the-basics/

I’ll take your avoidance of the question not once, but three times, as an admission. Enjoy your sponsored blogging promotion, I like it and think it will deliver a nice ROI for you and fun for the bloggers. Next time you might try PPP for helping manage the entries (instead of trying to coordinate via comments/trackbacks) and to require consistent conflict disclosure. I’m sure we could arrange something…

“Michael I accept the apology re swearing and 7 year olds.

Only thing is my son now associates graffiti with fuckedcompany.com as in “Dad, is that their website advertised on the wall?””

Surely I must now win? Oh well, back to blogs!

http://www.tech...preneurs-humor/

I read Techcrunch fairly often, and enjoy Michael Arrington’s lighthearted reporting of the tech community. He has now created a contest to let readers complain about his writing style and inaccurate predictions. Rather than jumping on the hate…

How is anyone who is unable to distinguish between a contest and a salary allowed anywhere near money?

I believe the PPP issues Michael has raised in the past are 1) conflicted blogging and 2) disclosure of conflicts. This TC promotion contains both of those elements because 1) bloggers have a financial incentive to blog about TC ($1,500 tickets) and 2) Michael didn’t follow his own demands of PayPerPost to require disclosure (even though, unlike PPP as a marketplace, TC is the direct sponsor of this promotion). I’ve been asking pretty directly how Michael makes a distinction between the two.

As for the math, are you suggesting that it’s ethical for companies with plenty of traffic to generate buzz via sponsored posts, but not smaller companies? It’s possible that is Michael’s position, but I don’t know because he has yet to answer my direct question. I’d be interested to know if the whole debate is just about what a chosen few are allowed to do, but not the masses.

PPP posters talk up a product or service.

Those of us who “trashed” Mike responding to this call did not promote anything, and typically created humorous posts explaning what it was all about.

VC Dan says there was no disclosure requirement: guess what, posts without a link back to this article, which explains what it’s all about are actually harmful to Mike: Trashing TC, not being taken as humor does no good to him, why would he want that? Besides, they don’t generate a link, which is what you think this whole sinister act is all about

Getting in the math game may not have been such a good idea. You’re talking abut the $1,500 ticket as payoff, but it’s more like a raffle, since only one person will receive it. PPP may pay little (probably on par with the quality of posts) but it pays everyone, so it’s a direct deal.. and btw, they may very well spend $1500 or a lot more on a campaign.

Believe or not, a lot of those who responded (yours truly included) did it for the sake of doing a prank. In fact I spent the equivalent of your PPP payout just to buy a URL – again, for the fun of it.

Back to math – TC has 350K feed subscribers, at this moment 69,716 inbound links from 17,587 blogs: can you seriously believe that getting a few dozen links makes any difference?

The facts are so obvious, I can’t believe you don’t see them. Unlike Mike, I don’t draw conclusions re. your intellect, but that only leaves one other option: you chose to ignore the facts. And that requires thick skin.

Here’s another analogy: He’s a lot like Ann Coulter on the right or Al Franken on the left. They both make a living by attacking much bigger names, and hoping that the bigger names take the bait and respond. That response raises the profile of the attacker.

You took Dan’s bait.

Your readers are savvy. The way I usually read the comments is to breeze over them and only really look at the ones you respond to. I never would have noticed VC Dan if you hadn’t responded.

Using your analogy terms, this promotion is ““I’ll have sex with you for much more than $5 — I’ll buy you a $1,500 ticket(!), and nobody has to know about the paid part.”

Your direct answer is much better than Michael’s avoidance, but I think the details above get us closer seeing the same things…

I’m not kidding about the IQ angle. He just doesn’t seem to be that smart, and I don’t have any more time to deal with him.