Uh oh.

I really like Robert Scoble. He’s the most prototypical geek nice guy you could ever want to meet. Over the weekend, he savaged my friends over at Engadget, and, in the shot heard round the blogosphere, a real live Blog War opened up with people quickly choosing sides and numerous important bloggers commenting on it. I’m not rehashing it here, but it was ugly.

The gist of Robert’s argument was that there are no ethics in the blogosphere from A-list blogs when it comes to linking lower blogs. I find that assertion highly questionable, considering I regularly get linked from A-listers (regularly meaning lots of different ones over a period of time, not the same ones linking me over and over again) and mainstream media sites (I was linked by the Washington Post, CBS, and C-Net last year and it had nothing to do with the AOL story), but nonetheless, he believed he was being slighted. I have no reason to call his feelings invalid.

Anyway, amidst the ethics discussion, Robert made the following admission, and this is where it gets strange:

Valleywag breathlessly reports that I was paid for doing my videos.

The problem is it isn’t true.

But, that doesn’t mean I’m in the clear either.

PodTech WAS paid for doing a video, and other work, for Intel. We should have clearly marked that as sponsored content. It was not. So, eggs and tomatoes should be flying in my direction. “Incoming!”

Now, for MY videos I was not paid. I only have one sponsor: Seagate.

I really want to give Robert the benefit of the doubt, but I have to be honest… This really is a problem (to say the least) ethically. As bloggers, we constantly have to defend our hobby/trade/job/site from doubters who doubt the legitimacy of the medium. In the end, a lapse like this on the part of an obvious “A-lister” is seriously damaging not just to him, but to everyone, because whenever anyone claims they want legitimacy, this is going to be held up as a “You guys are no better” type story.

Robert may not have done anything wrong here (and I still believe he didn’t), but what he did do was create the appearance of impropriety which is just as bad, unfortunately, but in the end, the appearance is just as bad as the actual problem.

I’m sorry, Robert, but I’m really disappointed. I still think he’s a great blogger, and I’ll still read his blog regularly, but I just hope that he’ll be able to come through this. Losing credibility is hard as hell to recover from, which is why during the AOL incident I never took a single penny for the story, never placed an ad here (ads came long after the AOL story, and even then they aren’t pay-per-impression, they’re monthly ad buys), and never shilled for a product or show. I knew that the only thing I had was my credibility and if I lost it, there’s no getting it back.

I don’t think Robert lost his, but I do think he’s seriously damaged his, and I hope he can recover, easily, from it.

Webomatica also has an interesting take on it.

Technorati Tags: scoble, credibility, ethics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.