By now all of you have read the entire sordid story on the People Ready campaign by Federated Media and the Valleywag post that started the whole brouhaha. What jumped out at me was the identity of the people involved in the campaign. Now I don’t know any of these people personally, but I follow most of their blogs closely, and I can say that from all my reading, I would never accuse Paul Kedrosky, John Batelle and especially Om Malik of being anything other than ethical. All the people in the list are smart, and they are businessmen, so that got me thinking a bit.

The campaign is actually rather well designed, and it’s quite apparent that it’s a Microsoft run campaign. I never got to see the ad units, but from what I can see, there is nothing fishy about anything. The bloggers/influencers are endorsing Microsoft, and obviously knew what the campaign was about, but they are not pushing products or any specific services. Om is right, the whole conversational media and business aspects of blogging are in their infancy, and the boundaries are not well understood. I wonder if the noise would have been this loud if the company behind the campaign was Apple, or better still Ubuntu. Arrington and Fred Wilson are right, but then so was Om Malik in requesting that the ads be pulled. While there was nothing wrong with the campaign, the fact that bloggers write about stuff that might show up in their ad units makes the whole concept a little difficult to comprehend murky.

Alfredo Octavio is right (in the comments to Arrington’s post): The people are not ready

Further reading
Techmeme
Richard MacManus
Between the lines