Content Matters

Austin Ventures has announced its acquisition of All Star Directories, a lead generation service for higher education.

Last year, Elisabeth DeMarse of DeMarseCo partnered with Austin Ventures on a $50M buyout fund to make acquisitions in the content space.  This is the first deal completed under that partnership.  DeMarse, of course, led the growth of Bankrate.com from $15M to more than $36M, so she knows something about the lead generation space.

DeMarse has been carefully analyzing consumer spends in recent months, to identify the market niches where aggressive growth is attainable.  Indicates Elisabeth "I've reviewed categories as disparate as travel, education, housing, health and wellness, and all the categories of personal finance. When you look at these categories as a percent of HHI, there is a strong common denominator—that a unique visitor to a destination site in one of these categories is quite valuable to an advertiser. The acquisition of All Star Directories represents our first investment in the online education lead generation space.

Mike Mathieu, founder of All Star Directories, has built a very impressive company in five years, with an excellent management team. Doug Brown, President of All Star Directories, will retain his role leading that organization. I will serve on the Board, and continue to uncover investments for AV and DeMarseCo that fit with our strategy."

All Star has thirteen directories and revenues estimated at $15M.  Its products, including All Criminal Justice Schools, All Business Schools and All Nursing Schools, among others, are lead generation  applications aimed at the rapidly growing for-profit education segment.

Google today announced that it has acquired hosted wiki provider JotSpot.
Under the acquisition, the service will become completely free.

Previous rumors this summer had Jot being acquired by Yahoo, as part of their efforts to bulk up their social software platform.  I wouldn't be surprised to see Yahoo respond with an offer for WetPaint or SocialText.

In the near term, the deal provides Google with many more page views for serving ads.  Longer-term, it will be interesting to see whether they integrate Jot with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other collaborative applications.

Last week, Google integrated its Blog Search results into Google News, providing users with a comprehensive view of both “traditional” news and blog posts for their searches. 

Yesterday, in a related move, they added Blog results to Google Alerts.  As shown, you can now set an alert to be "comprehensive" (news, blogs, web and groups) or select an individual type.  The default is comprehensive.  For those of us who track news from various sources, including blogs, this is a huge convenience.  More importantly, these two changes will begin to expose blog posts to many more users who don’t regularly follow blogs.

Today, about half the Content Matters traffic comes via Google web search (the rest is a mix of RSS readers and specialized blog search via Technorati, Google and others).  This web search traffic consists of users who are not specifically seeking out blogs.  Integration of blogs with Google News and Alerts should provide similar exposure to users of online news.

As TechCrunch points out, Yahoo last month reversed course, pulling blog content out of its news results temporarily, as they rework the results.  I expect that we’ll see an integrated view from Yahoo again in the near future.

As content from various sources begins to be included in the “news” bucket and as traditional news is disseminated through more diverse platforms, we will continue to see erosion of the traditional destination news sites.  That’s why the next ten years will bring even more rapid change than the past ten to the news industry.

Via Editor & Publisher, this article summarizes some of the findings of a new analyst report by Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Fine.
The theme of the Editor & Publisher article is that it will take 30 years for online revenues to equal print advertising revenue for newspapers.  Fine comes to this conclusion, doing a "back of the envelope" calculation using double-digit increases in online ad revenue through 2025, then 5% annual growth thereafter. 
The basic premise of the calculation makes no sense to me.  Does anyone really expect the newspaper business to gradually evolve from its current model over the next 30 years?  I see three trends that tell me that a gradual shift from print to online ad model for newspapers won't happen:

1. Newspaper and Media companies are diversifying their properties, leveraging new forms of traffic to gain eyeballs for their content. 
2. The separation of news from the newspaper opens up this market to many new competitors.  Today that includes companies like Yahoo and Topix with many new entrants to come.  Meanwhile, local search is evolving and seems poised to make further inroads into what has traditionally been the purview of the newspaper industry.
3. Young people entering the workforce today don't read printed newspapers.  While the demographic shift may not happen overnight, a large portion of the traditional newspaper market will go away sooner, rather than later.

While the newspaper industry has already gone through a great deal of change, I think the next 5-10 years will bring a faster rate of change than we've seen the past decade.  Advertisers will use different methods to reach consumers.  Some traditional newspaper companies like the NY Times and WSJ may position themselves to take advantage of this change and might see their online/offline revenue mix change rapidly.  Others will cling to their old models and see their market share and revenues erode quickly.  At the same time, new entrants will disseminate news information in compelling new ways.

A slow, 30-year transition from print to online?  I doubt it.

Google has thrown its (very large) hat into the personal search engine space with the launch of Google Co-Op Custom Search Engines.
The Custom Search Engines (CSE) are similar to those provided by Rollyo, Yahoo Search Builder and Eurekster.  You create a CSE by entering a series of URLs that you wish Google to index.  Google generates code for you to place on your website or blog and, voila, instant vertical search.

Unlike Rollyo, which limits you to 25 sites, Google indicates that there will be no limit to the number of sites you can include in a CSE.  And while the search engine results will include Google Adsense ads, you can personalize the presentation of the results page.  And, of course, you can't launch a product today without a social software spin, so Google allows you to enable users to contribute sites to your CSE.  You also have the choice of restricting the CSE to only those sites you entered, or to include all web results while giving preferred weightings to those sites you have selected.

Google also includes the Google Marker function, a toolbar plugin which allows you to add content to your CSE as easily as you might tag a page in delicious.

As a quick test, I created a content industry CSE in about 5 minutes, including content from various blogs and websites covering the content and technology space.  I'll integrate it into the blog later, but for now Update: I've added the CSE to the blog, just above the Rollyo box, so you can test both out and see which results you prefer or you can test it out here.

For more on Google Co-op Custom Search Engines, take a look at posts by John Battelle, Matt Cutts, Steve Rubel and Michael Arrington.

It's become a truism that the ROI on web advertising is easier to measure than that of traditional media.  And, for the most part, that's true.  But debate over the impact of click fraud has raised a cloud over search marketing.  And, when you pull back the covers, you can see that PPM display advertising is not as scientific as some might believe.

Sarah Lacy at Business Week Online has an interesting story on the challenges of web metrics.  While page views were never a great measure, new development approaches such as AJAX, along with the use of widgets and persistent toolbars make the page view concept even less relevant.  As RSS proliferates, so will the challenge of determining what counts as a page.

Traditional media advertisers are having debates over whether to pay for eyeballs time-shifting their programming via Tivo.  As more and more ad dollars move to the web, the old page-view model will need to be replaced by something that can factor in various usage models.

Dow Jones has announced that it has purchased the remaining 50% ownership of Factiva from Reuters for $160M.  The purchase price reflects a value of slight more than 1x 2006 estimated revenue of $290M, an increase of just 3% over 2005.  According to Dow Jones CEO Rich Zannino, the acquisition will shift Dow Jones revenue mix by dropping the print segment from 70% to 60%.

Clare Hart, who led much of Factiva's growth through the years and now heads the Dow Jones Enterprise Group, will now have oversight of the entire Factiva business.

Joint ventures, by definition, are difficult to build and manage.  Getting two companies with frequently conflicting goals and cultures to agree on anything is a challenge.  Putting Factiva solely under the Dow Jones umbrella should make it easier for them to reinvigorate Factiva's growth.

David Meerman Scott this week published the“Gobbledygook Manifesto”, a ranking of the most overused meaningless hype terms included in press releases.  David first surveyed PR execs and journalists to compile the master list, then turned to Factiva to mine their news content to see which terms were most overused.

In the analysis, he found that roughly 20% of the nearly 400,000 press releases analyzed used at least one of the phrases.  Leading the list was “next generation” with almost 10,000 mentions, followed closely by “flexible”, “robust”, “world-class” and “scalable”.  The term “groundbreaking” was used more than 2,700 times; it’s a wonder that there’s any ground left to break.

We’ve all been guilty of using these types of buzz words in our marketing communications over the years.  In many cases it’s out of laziness.  When trying to describe a product or solution, the gut reaction is probably to add a few adjectives.  Instead of simply using an adjective like “scalable”, we should provide quantifiable examples, such as “supports 10,000 concurrent users on a single server.”

In the meantime, if you’re concerned that your press releases have too much substance, and are looking to add more unsubstantiated hype and buzz, try the Web 2.0 bullshit generator.  It helped me create the headline for this post.

Sitting at a conference last week, I had a discussion with a few colleagues about the value of business social networking sites, particularly LinkedIn.
The general consensus was that LinkedIn was moderately useful, though none of us were raving fans of the service.  Then today, I stumbled across a post by Jeff Atwood, called Opting Out.

Jeff has some pretty strong feelings about the lack of value he has gotten from LinkedIn, and the fact that LinkedIn gets inherent value from its 7 million members.  Seeing no value from the service, Jeff is right to opt out (and is rightly frustrated that there's no easy "remove me" button).

That being said, I think that services like LinkedIn do add value, though the value is perhaps a bit more nuanced than LinkedIn might want you to think.

First, we should all understand that social networking in the business world is very different from social networking for teenagers.  When you're a teenager, gaining a new "friend of a friend" might be compelling in itself.  When you are measured by the size and status of your social networking, almost any addition has value.

In the business world, the value of a distant online friend is minimal and could even be a negative.  I use LinkedIn as an online tool to help me understand the network of my offline contacts.  In other words, if I am trying to find a contact at CompanyX, I'll use LinkedIn to see who in my network knows someone at CompanyX.  Then, I'll typically call that contact to discuss a possible introduction.  My goal is not simply to increase the size of my network, but rather to identify the potential reach of my existing network.  And, LinkedIn helps me do that.  Without it, I'd end up sending emails to all of my peers asking "Do you know anyone at CompanyX?"   

It's true that I get about a request a month from someone who doesn't know me to link to them.  Many of them are simply link collectors (you can see them listed with 500+ connections in their LinkedIn Profile).  In most of these cases, I politely decline, letting them know that I only share access to my network with people whom I've met.  I also have my profile configured so others cannot simply browse my connections - they only see the link when it's part of a relevant search.

But for me, LinkedIn does create value, certainly enough value to make it worth keeping my profile up to date.  If it doesn't create that level of value for you then, like Jeff (and Robert), you should opt out.

Yesterday was the 2nd annual Great Read in the Park, sponsored by the New York Times and Target.

Held at Bryant Park, just behind the 42nd Street library, the day featured dozens of authors doing readings, participating in panel discussions and conducting book signings.  We spent most of our day at the Children's Stage, where children's authors and illustrators like Mark Teague, Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart read from their books.  There was also entertainment including a reading by the Grinch from the upcoming Broadway show Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  (with  Bullseye, the Target dog, in costume as Max the Dog).

Of course, numerous celebrities have become authors, and we were thrilled to get the chance to see Julie Andrews reading with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton.  After all, it's not often that a child gets a chance to meet Mary Poppins.

The day wasn't limited to children's authors.  Frank Rich, Jonathan Alter, Adriana Trigiani, James Ellroy, Roy Rosenbaum and Eve Ensler were among the many authors participating.

With sunshine and temperatures in the sixties, it was a perfect New York day.

I've refrained from posting about the Google-YouTube marriage, knowing that thousands of bloggers and media, most (all?) much smarter than I, were covering it like FoxNews covered the Natalie Holloway story.

That said, I'm surprised that the debate continues as to whether Google overpaid.

The basic premise seems to be that valuations of web 2.0 sites were getting astronomical and that the acquirers could never achieve a return on their investment.  I'd buy that argument if it were a traditional media company buying it, but it doesn't hold water in this case.  There are three reasons why Google was uniquely well-suited to make this acquisition:

1. Google is spending about 2% of its already frothy market cap to buy this with stock. That's different from when News Corp spent $580M in cash to buy MySpace (which, by the way, seems to be working quite well for them).  Google knows better than almost anyone how to monetize the YouTube traffic, so giving up 2% of its shares for the million or so unique daily visitors to YouTube looks pretty good.  And while uniques are important, a key metric is the amount of time spent on a site, and YouTube will dramatically increase the average time spent per user.
2. The biggest argument against the acquisition, as highlighted by Mark Cuban's Blog Maverick, is that lawsuits will bog the company down and, if copyrighted content were removed, there'd be little left of value.  Fair enough.  But, Google's gained quite a bit of experience in negotiating with the publishing community and I think they'll get most of the companies to play ball.  After all, while some overprotective companies like Disney might sue, others like Viacom's Comedy Channel know that the value of having a 3-minute clip from the Daily Show is incredibly valuable free advertising.
3. The other challenge with YouTube is that delivering all that rich media content takes a lot of servers and bandwidth.  There aren't many companies that understand web infrastructure better than Google, so I doubt they'll have many challenges in this area.

Yes, there are many reasons why a traditional media company might have been afraid of the risks involved in acquiring a property like YouTube.  But for Google, it seems like a no-brainer.

The second day of InfoCommerce seemed more lively and more relevant (at least to me).

Andy Goodenough led with the keynote, talking about how they'd built Highline Media to a $50M business in just over three years through a combination of acquisition and organic growth.  It was interesting to note that Highline's data division, largely a byproduct of its editorial focus, will exceed $10M in revenues in 2006.

My vertical search panel followed, with presentations from Shannon Holman of ALM, Han Huang of FindGuru and DeSilva & Phillips Partner Jeff Dearth.  We covered a lot of ground in an hour, showing examples of successful vertical search as a core (ad supported) product, as a value-add to subscription products and as a means of driving premium content sales.

One of the most interesting panels of the Conference was the Inferential Data panel, with presentations from Planalytics, MedMeme and Kelley Blue Book.  Scott Bernhardt, SVP of Sales & Marketing for Planalytics walked us through a fascinating presentation of their weather-based business intelligence applications.  Basically, they overlay weather data on a set of proprietary models to generate forecasts for retailers.  For example, we had a cold and wet September, which translates to an improved market for rainwear, sweaters, soup and cough medicine and a down market for lawn & garden products and barbecue charcoal.  In other words, they projected a good month for Kohl's (who later reported a 16% boost year-over-year in same store sales) and a poor one for Home Depot (who are yet to report their September numbers).  I'd not seen Planalytics before and was very impressed with their offering.

Renny Ponvert, who is stepping down as President of Hemscott following its acquisition by i-Deal, led an interesting presentation on "Who's Winning and Why".  Renny, a veteran of the financial information business, got everyone's attention by describing the defensive position many publishers take: "Insecurity, masked by cannibalization concerns creates a low-growth, slow death spiral", exemplified by the newspaper industry.  On the positive side, Renny identified three tactics that content provider can use to their benefit: Visualization (examples were NY Times bubble charts and CNET Heat Maps), the use of crawl technology to scale your content business and the utilization of vertical search to reduce noise and improve the depth of your site.

InfoCommerce is a somewhat quirky conference.  Of the content industry events, it probably has the largest percentage of old media including a handful of ostrich-like directory publishers.  That said, there are always some interesting models from companies that otherwise don't show up on the radar.  This year, for me, those included Planalytics, Healthline Networks and Health Market Science.  Russell Perkins, who runs the event in conjunction with Roxanne Christensen and Megan St. John, has successfully transitioned the focus from traditional directories to now include vertical search, the inferential data companies mentioned above, b2b lead generation and other data-driven content businesses.

On Wednesday evening, InfoCommerce held a dinner where they presented their "Model of Excellence Awards" to about eight products.  Alacra was honored to receive an award for its Alacra Compliance application.

If you haven't been to an InfoCommerce event recently, I'd recommend you put it on your calendar for next fall.

The theme of this year's InfoCommerce Conference is "Becoming One With Your Market". 
The first day included presentations from a mix of old and new database publishers.  The morning kicked off with a keynote by Jim Burke, CMO of D&B.  Jim spoke of efforts to turn around this 165-year old business.  D&B has historically been, at best, indifferent to their customer needs.  They are now attempting to reshape themselves with their stated aspiration "to be the most trusted source of commercial insight so our customers can decide with confidence."  Jim points to some successes, but based upon customer experiences, I think they still have an awfully long way to go.

Dean Stephens, CEO of Healthline Networks, gave an overview of their vertical search engine for the healthcare industry, launched last fall.  Healthline today sees about 3 million unique visitors per month, making it among the fastest growing websites.  Healthline is a great example of how domain expertise can be applied to improve search.  They have developed an extensive semantic taxonomy, linking diseases, symptoms and treatments, layering a visualization application ("healthmap") on top of the results.

The day wrapped up with presentations from a few startups in the information industry, featuring Dan Savage of b2b search engine TradeComet, Frank Vaculin of social networking site Spoke Software and Shoshanna Zilberberg-Winter, newly hired CMO of ShopWiki.  ShopWiki, founded by former Doubleclick leader Kevin Ryan and others from the Doubleclick team, is a compelling search engine for shopping.  The search engine itself is pretty compelling, offering natural language search and color-based search ("red luggage").  On top of that are community-based shopping guides (hence the wiki in the name) and user-submitted videos. 

Today's session includes a keynote by Highline Media's Andy Goodenough.  I'll be moderating a vertical search panel that follows, featuring ALM's Shannon Holman, Han Huang of FindGuru and Jeff Dearth of DeSilva & Phillips.

This week, I'm at the InfoCommerce Conference at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia.  The InfoCommerce Group focuses largely on database publishing

Penn's Landing,
originally uploaded by rleigh.

The conference kicks off this morning with a keynote by D&B Chief Marketing Officer Jim Burke.  Other morning sessions include a discussion among three InfoCommerce "Model of Excellence" winners from Guidestar, Healthline and Buyerzone and a focus on workflow applications, with speakers from Congressional Quarterly, PubEasy, CVM Solutions and Health Market Science.

The pre-conference activities kicked off last night with a lovely dinner at photographic gallery The Print Center.  It didn't take much discussion before realizing that there was no more than 2-3 degrees of separation among any two attendees in this small database publishing community.

I'll post periodically with highlights from the Conference.

While the blogosphere continues to resonate with comments on Google's acquisition of YouTube, Google quietly yesterday released Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a (very) lightly integrated version of Google Spreadsheets plus Google Word Processing (past acquisition Writely).  In playing with the app, it looks like there's no real integration yet between the two applications; for example, you can't imbed a spreadsheet into a document.  The "integration" is merely placing the two application in a single location with a common UI and shared tools like file lists.  There's also some integration with email, as files emailed to the email account registered with Google docs automatically appear in the file list.

It's apparent that Google pushed this release to be timed with this week's Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, hence the light integration. 

That being said, it's clear that Google intends to create an Office-like suite that, in time may have an impact on Microsoft.  Google's model of putting betas out there then enhancing them over time, suggests that the combination of Writely, Spreadsheets and Calendar has the potential to gain traction.

Google Docs is unlikely to gain adoption in the enterprise.  Security-conscious companies are not about to entrust critical documents and spreadsheets to Google.  There are a number of markets where a free hosted office suite could take hold, particularly the education market.  The collaborative features, while modest today, could also drive adoption in niche markets over time. 

For more on Google Docs, take a look at Michael Arrington's comments, Inside Google and CNET.

 

The list of visionaries who truly understand the value of content in the web environment is pretty short.  The list of those who apply that knowledge in their core business is even shorter.  Near the top of that list is Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media.

O'Reilly is best known for their books.  Look on the bookshelf of any developer or IT professional, and you're sure to see a bunch of O'Reilly books -they're the ones with the sketches of animals on the cover.  In fact, many users know them by their animals - ask any Perl programmer for their copy of the "Camel Book" and they'll know you're referring to O'Reilly's Programming Perl.

So, what makes this book publisher a visionary?

To start, O'Reilly published its first  book on the web, the "Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" in 1992.  At the time, there were fewer than 200 websites out there.  O'Reilly launched the Global Network Navigator ("GNN"), later sold to AOL, in 1993 - the first portal and first  advertising supported website.

More recently, O'Reilly has been credited with naming "Web 2.0" and hosts an annual Web 2.0 conference.  But where O'Reilly really shows its merit is in its online versions of its products.  O'Reilly, in conjunction with Pearson and with technology from Bureau van Dijk, launched Safari Books Online in 2001.  Safari Books is a subscription service where users can rent a bookshelf where they can access a set number of books online from among the more than 3,000 in the library.  Just recently, O'Reilly has launched a new "bookshelf-free" version called Safari Library, where users can access an unlimited number of books for $39.99 per month.

O'Reilly has added SafariU, where they allow educators to compile custom textbooks from individual chapters of books in the O'Reilly library.

Another new feature from O'Reilly is Rough Cuts.  Rough Cuts are preliminary versions of books, made available electronically as they are still being written, generally 2-6 months before publication.  Users can purchase online-only versions (with PDF updates of each revision) or can pre-purchase the print copy, accessing it electronically until the printed version is shipped.  With a nod to Web 2.0, O'Reilly encourages users to submit comments and feedback about the content in their Rough Cuts books, by placing a "notes" widget on the top of each page. For developers working with bleeding edge technologies, Rough Cuts provides early access and an interactive experience.

O'Reilly Media continues to push the envelope in making content available to users in multiple formats and platforms.  Tim O'Reilly's O'Reilly Radar blog is must reading for anyone in the content or technology space.  As one of the few visionaries to "walk the walk", O'Reilly are clearly one of the fifty content companies that matter.

One of the hot buzzwords of 2006 has been vertical search. 

I've been asked moderate the Vertical Horizons panel at the upcoming InfoCommerce Conference, October 10-12 in Philadelphia.  The panelists will include:

• Shannon Holman, Director, Content Strategy & Development for American Lawyer Media
• Jeffrey Dearth, Partner, DeSilva & Phillips
• Han Huang, Director, Product Management for FindGuru (formerly ReedLink), Advantage Business Media

The focus of the panel will be on various business models for vertical search and why content companies are particularly well-suited to deliver vertical search.  We'll also explore what it takes to deliver a compelling vertical search solution.

I'd appreciate your and ideas on vertical search.  What issues would you like to see the panel address?  What markets do you think are currently underserved by search?  Where do you think the opportunities might lie?

I hope to see you in Philadelphia.

SEM provider Spannerworks has released a free eBook entitled What Is Social Media?

The eBook, while brief, is a pretty good introduction to social media for novices.  It provides quick overviews of five major categories of social media:

• Blogs
• Social Networks
• Content Communicies
• Wikis
• Podcasts

The descriptions are high level - this is not aimed at the TechCrunch community.  But, if you're new to social software, or if you're trying to get management buy-in to some of these concepts, it's a quick and useful read.

The eBook was written by Antony Mayfield, Head of Content and Media for Spannerworks.  Antony is listed as a contributor to the Spannerworks blog, SearchSense.  Surprisingly, the blog is fairly sparse and doesn't show off much in the way of social software.  But, this is a new practice for Spannerworks, so we'll have to give it some time to see how they grow it.  And, any eBook that links to the Joy Division/Missy Elliott mashup Love Will Freak Us can't be all bad.

You can download the eBook for free at Spannerworks.

Alacra today announced the deployment of Google Search Appliances as the underlying technology powering the Alacra Compliance Web. 

The Alacra Compliance Web is a vertical search engine used by financial institutions to accelerate the account vetting process.  The Alacra Compliance Web is an integral part of Alacra Compliance, which helps financial institutions employ a consistent and documented process for KYC and Enhanced Due Diligence efforts to meet Patriot Act, BSA and FSA requirements.

The Compliance Web is an index of more than 500 global regulatory organizations, hand-selected and classified by Alacra Content Analysts.  Sites include stock exchanges, government regulators, central banks, state insurance sites and more.  Using Google Search Appliances lets Alacra leverage Google’s strengths in quality and ranking and multilingual capabilities.

One unique feature of the vertical search engine is that it highlights in yellow any "adverse" terms, such as convicted, indict or subpoena.  These highlights help the user quickly identify any critical information among the search results.

Alacra has released, on a limited time basis, a searchable free trial version of the Alacra Compliance Web.  You can take it for a test drive here.

Typical questions that an Alacra Compliance Web Search might answer:
* Is Neoware listed on a U.S. stock exchange?
* Is Segoes Securities allowed to conduct business in the Cayman Islands?
* Has GLG Partners been the subject of any regulatory disciplinary actions?

For more on the Alacra Compliance Web, take a look at the FAQ.

Business Week is reporting that startup PayPerPost has received $3M in funding from Inflexion Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Village Ventures.

The scam business model behind PayPerPost is pretty simple.  Advertisers can pay bloggers to post (positive) comments about their company or product.  And, there's no disclosure requirement for the bloggers that they've been paid to write these nice things.  Put best by Jon Fine in a previous BW article, "shilling without disclosure is a bad idea."

Of course, the folks at PayPerPost spin it somewhat differently, comparing it to product placement on television or a movie.  But I don't see that.  Instead, it looks more like radio shill host Armstrong Williams, celebrating the "No Child Left Behind" policy without disclosing that he was on the Department of Education payroll.  Or, the Cato Institute fellow who wrote positive editorials and columns, in return for funds paid by Jack Abramoff.

For years, investor relations "consulting" firms offered to write pseudo investment research reports, funded by the company  being written on.  At the same time, various IT consulting firms will write a "white paper" touting various technology for a fee.  Similarly, online seeding and other online "word of mouth" marketing efforts were used to launch the career of Christina Aguilera, among others.

As I've posted previously, one of the great challenges in the world of user-generated content is how to keep ratings trustworthy.  While those questions may not be easily answered, requiring disclosure any time a blogger is being paid for their post would be a good starting point.   

For more on PayPerPost, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's TechCrunch post, PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul.

Disclosure: I have not been paid for writing this post.