Ethics, Blogging, and the Paid Review

I discovered this interesting post on blogging ethics at CyberJournalist. I was pretty happy to see that the number one bullet on the list is “Never plagiarize.” Some of the other items are a lot harder to comply with, especially the ones that tell you not to sensationalize. How could you run a celebrity blog otherwise?

The list of ways to be accountable is excellent, except that doing paid reviews blows a lot of those criteria out of the water. However, being open about the fact that you do is probably enough to get folks to take your entries with a grain of salt. I have only done one, but I’m hoping to do more. I’ll bet you can tell which recent post was for a site I was paid to review, too.

As mentioned in the second blog link from yesterday, being paid doesn’t mean only saying nice things. The site that sent me the review specifically noted in their user agreement that I was not required to post a positive review. If they hadn’t, I would not have signed up. I don’t see any reason not to get paid to review a site, if the owner is asking, but it’s important to be honest about what you see. How else can you hold up your virtual head?

Dave Pollard and Kevin Muldoon, More Tips

I ran across a link to Dave Pollard’s blog on not just how to blog but how to do it well and how to get better. There are several insanely useful links in this post, so I'll just link to the whole thing. I've got a sneaking suspicion that my readability is not quite where it ought to be, under these guidelines. Then again, maybe I don't want it to be.

Again, I think the readability of your blog is an act of finding balance. I don't want to "dumb it down" to the lowest common denominator, but then again I don't want to alienate folks, either. If someone is looking for tips it isn't really going to help them if I like to stretch my vocabulary muscle rather than remembering that these posts are not solely for my benefit (or entertainment). I ran this post through the readability tool in Microsoft Word and was pleasantly surprised to see that I’m doing better than I thought. I was pretty close to Mr. Pollard’s specified target numbers.

As promised, I did take a peek at Kevin Muldoon’s blog as well. Apparently it’s only been up since March of ’07 but he’s packed a ton of information into it. There was an interesting entry on doing paid reviews on your blogs. It makes some good points about how to do them better and thus how to get paid more. He’s got a pile of information about making money on the web. The only real criticism that I have is that he has a tendency to forget his capital “I” and skip spaces after periods. That’s distracting for a grammar freak like me.