I saw the New York Times article on last weekends Blogging Conflict with it's link to Federated Media but I noticed the it was Gawker's Nick Denton that sounded the alarm.

I never really grasped the whole story but did write about it last week in The weekend BlogStorm.

"…The site, People Ready (peoplereadybusiness.federatedmedia.net), had eight Federated writers answer the question, “When did you know your business was people ready?”

“People Ready” is a slogan of Microsoft, which advertises on Federated’s sites. The bloggers were not directly paid for taking part, but in return, Microsoft bought ads on their blogs.

Mr. Denton wrote that it was disappointing that reputable Federated writers had “signed on as spokespeople.” And he noted that “the stodgy old-media industry has a rule that newspaper reporters, and TV news hosts, shouldn’t trade on their public trust to endorse products.”

The lines are blurry between what bloggers should and should not say and get involved in.  I think, given what I quoted above, not that much of substance actually happened…but that's just me … I never figured out the whole story anyway – but if this article in the Times is an accurate description of what happened last week ..I've seen a lot worse, like the Vista Laptops that were being given to some A List tech bloggers via Microsoft PR agency – Edelman  or the Edelman's fake Walmart Blog.

Or how about the iPhone?  I don't know about you …. but a lot of prominent bloggers were given the iPhone in advance (so they could blog about it before anyone else).  Now, if you you look at the Blogosphere – guess what's the #1 topic?  AttentionMax's take was that bloggers did not need Apple to give them an iPhone … most knew that just writing about the iPhone (like I did, in fact with my iPhone Review) would drive more traffic.  But still…didnt some fairly well known bloggers manage to be given iPhones a bit earlier than everyone else..just so they could generate more Buzz about the iPhone, like David Pogue of the New York Times, who got his 2 weeks before it was released on June 29th.

How about the iPhone Stress Tests done by PC World?  Granted, the only difference I see with what Apple did is they did not tell anyone what to say about the iPhone, but they did ask people who got the phone early to sign a non disclosure form.

So the lines are really blurry on what a blogger can and can't say.