Pull the plug, please, Larry.
On April 29, Creative Commons announced they had joined up with BzzAgent. Thankfully, the feedback has been flowing furiously.
“Creative Commons recently launched a relationship with BzzAgent. The blogs were not amused. See Corante, Corante_II , Corante III, Just a Gwai Lo. BzzAgents has now responded poorly, calling Corante ‘liars.’ As I’m partial to Corante, I’d be willing to ask CC to pull the relationship on the basis of that bad judgment alone. But I’d be really keen for some feedback.”
You really need to read where Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent, calls bloggers liars. Nice. Or, as they say on the southwest side of Chicago…”real clazzy.”
“Bloggers as Liars
Saturday, April 30 2005 @ 10:57 AM CDT
Contributed by: Dave BalterI really wonder.
Whenever I talk to people about BzzAgent, give a speech or work with clients, they invariably ask us about Blogs. They want to know how BzzAgents can influence bloggers. How much of a role blogging has in word-of-mouth.
Let’s get this straight: Over 80% of word of mouth occurs OFFLINE. Blogs are a tool for word-of-mouth interaction, but just because there’s plenty of them out there, it doesn’t mean it’s the best place for distributing an honest opinion.
Which brings me to point two. Bloggers are destroying their own medium.
How? By being more critics and pundits than journalists. The problem is that there are no editors and no fact checkers, so plenty of what you read on blogs is just plain untrue. Check out Suw Charman’s Corante post on BzzAgent’s Partnership with Creative Commons, where she misstates nearly a dozen facts. And much of what she says is also pulled from other blogs. Guess what? Her informants are providing false information, too. A vicious cycle of lies.
With this type of reporting (whining?), it’s no wonder many consumers are going back to reading fact-checked business magazines.
How long until consumers hold bloggers up to the same standards of truth as they’d expect from word-of-mouth interactions?
Dave“
Larry, add my voice to to the list, requesting the end of this relationship.
And if you want to add yours to it, write about it and trackback here, or comment directly here (there are already dozens of comments; there’ll be hundreds by tomorrow I’m sure).
By the way, from the comments over there, the best.comment.ever, addressed to BzzAgent, from Matthew Skala:
“Hey, guys, 1998 called. They want their business plan back.”
Heh. That’s funny.
Update:
(I’m going to turn comments off on this particular post, ‘cuz the place they really need to be is over at Lessig’s blog. Add your voice, click here, and weigh in.)