Good to hear from you.

1. Spelling a person’s name right is not a nitpick. It’s the most important part of the story. They teach you that in Journalism 1. Before you hit Send, you make sure you have the names right. When your whole story is about John Battelle and his media empire and you can’t spell his name right, you lose major credibility in my eyes.

2. Good for not having too many ads. Bad for having ads IN YOUR ARTICLES. That’s my point. And if you can’t appreciate the irony of having a Microsoft ad IN AN ARTICLE about a blogger being criticized for having Microsoft ads, well, you need to calibrate your irony detector.

Good for you for correcting the typos, finally. As for the substance, I’ve written enough about this topic already. If you used the search box you would have seen that I’ve addressed this issue in two lengthy posts. I don’t feel the need to rehash it. For your reference, here are the links:

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1712
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1713

A couple points. The misspelling of Battelle’s last name was an honest mistake, even slipped by our copy editors. I think that was more of a nitpick then an honest to god problem with the article.

To your comment that I was making lofty pronouncements of journalism and ethics, I find it interesting that you decided to not respond to the actual topic (which in its face is true) and instead went for something completely unrelated to what the article was about.

There was no typo in FM, Battelle’s, or Arrington’s support of the Microsoft project. So what’s your point Ed? The point was that bloggers want to consistently be considered press, however when their feet are held to the fire, they shy away. (Not all mind you, but like Arrington, theres a vocal few that do).

You don’t have an issue with this? Isn’t this what a lot of people hate the traditional media for? That they don’t know whether or not their copy is being bought by the highest bidder.

As to our ads, we have NOWHERE NEAR the amount of ads that other news agencies do. It just so happened that Vibrant’s code picked up the word Microsoft and highlighted it.

So, if you’d like to debate the points of the article, rather than nitpicking, that’s great and I look forward to a healthy discussion (the original point of the article anyway!) But you haven’t yet, thus my response here.

In the online and offline worlds, ads are (almost) always related to content. Advertisers buy ads because the content in the place where they purchase ads is relevant to the product or service they’re selling, or the content attracts the kind of people who are interested in that product.

The big BIG difference between Vibrant and Google ads is that the Google ads do not embed themselves in my content with the specific purpose of looking like a hyperlink. They sit in a special ad zone that I designate, and the only way they fire is if a reader actively chooses to click on them.

By contrast, I accidentally clicked on a Vibrant ad at BetaNews yesterday, trying to get it to go away so I could see what was underneath it. Maybe that’s why they pay more.

I won’t pass judgment on your decision to use these ads, because that is not my place. All I’ll say is that I will never use them here, and I avoid visiting sites that do use them. I’m grateful you have full-text RSS feeds.

@Robert McLaws —

I really enjoy reading your blog but I read your posts in the RSS Feed rather than at your site to avoid the tool-tips. Google ads don’t result in a pop-up as I scroll down the page and my mouse inadvertently touches across a tool-tip.

Please see what I wrote above regarding VibrantMedia. I trust and respect Microsoft MVPs Mike Burgess and Eric Howes and know they would not include VibrantMedia in the respective hosts files without justification.

That content and ads should never mix, I completely agree. As a reader I’m much more likely to notice and even click-thru your ads as long you don’t annoy me. And I try to do with with good blogs. Although Ed is writing more than ever between this blog and his work at ZDNet, if you skim the archives of this ‘Windows Expertise’ blog it was built on the one thing that brings me back every day: content.

For that reason, I like Vibrant ads a lot better. Plus, they pay far better than Google ads do.

As you can see below, both MVPS Hosts file and IE-SPYAD block the vibrant URL so people with either hosts file software do not see the tool-tips provided by VibrantMedia’s IntelliTXT service.

Obviously, those sites are blocked for a reason. I know of one situation of a brief study conducted at just one site using that service where, within minutes, a fellow MVP discovered a tool-tip linking to a site serving up WinFixer. So, think of the person running their mouse over a page with those tool-tips and accidentally clicking that link.

See: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

127.0.0.1 vibrantmedia.com #[IE-SpyAd]
127.0.0.1 itxt.vibrantmedia.com
127.0.0.1 usads.vibrantmedia.com
127.0.0.1 usnews.vibrantmedia.com
127.0.0.1 http://www.vibrantmedia.com