My earlier status report on where I was at actually started as this post. Kind of a “hey, I’m here and here’s what I’m thinking” type preamble. But it got too long.

Lucky you.

Marc Canter is someone I’ve never had the pleasure of blogging with / to, never had the pleasure of meeting and never had the pleasure of meeting. In fact, I wasn’t even subscribed to his blog. That might be weird to say, but Marc is one of a handful of “semi famous bloggers”. His opinion is respected, listened to, etc. He has lunch with cool people. He’s apparently a rather smart Tech type guy.

The above is just about the extent of my knowledge of Marc.

Now, that said, Marc has come up with an idea he’s taking flak for. He’s pitched an idea to pay a bunch of bloggers to blog about a client’s product / service.

Marc’s idea obviously isn’t new. This is something I’ve been tossing around (Blog Advertising Isn’t Evil and Original Sponsored Posts Message and The Issue of Sponsored Posts come to mind).

That doesn’t mean I’m the originator of the idea. And it doesn’t mean Marc isn’t doing something cool. I only mention these posts, because Marc’s attacking this from the same angle I am. This only works if:

1. Bloggers get to write about whatever they want without fear of consequences
2. Readers know that a paid post is a paid post and there is never any doubt (Marc, don’t forget it needs to be obvious in the feeds as well as on the site)
3. It needs to be available for anyone to do, not just the Dave Winer’s and the Scoble’s of the world (not that I think they’d do this, of course)
4. Communication needs to be free and open from blog readers to bloggers, from bloggers to Marc and from Marc to clients as if it’s one line of communication. Otherwise what’s the point?

Again, I agree completely.

I tried leaving Marc some comments to that effect over the last couple of days but they don’t seem to have shown up (or they’ve been deleted). Which is cool. Marc, if you ever do get into this I’m very interested in helping out however I can.

Either way, good luck to Marc and his clients.