PacificPelican.us

A new controversey is erupting online over paying bloggers to shill for Microsoft in banner ads. As Valleywag wrote:

‘But there are limits to journalistic endorsements, and Federated Media just crossed them.

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.’

Now Michael Arrington is defending himself on this specific Federated Media story. But here’s what isn’t being mentioned as widely: Techcrunch.com has been suspiciously hubristic about Microsoft product announcements for months. Read their cheerleading for Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie here and here. Check out Duncan Riley’s big news about Microsoft Kitchen here. Or take a look at the extreme hype that Techcrunch has thrown up around Microsoft Silverlight.

Take this paragraph by Michael Arrington from May 1, 2007:

‘The announcements around Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform yesterday were important to anyone who is thinking about where the web will evolve. For those of us watching the demos at the Mix conference the immediate importance of it was apparent - Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications. It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy. After the keynote, the main topic of conversation in the hallways centered on just how effectively Microsoft carried out its execution of Adobe.

We didn’t cover the news as it broke - I was on stage at Mix and Nik Cubrilovic was denied a press pass due to a mixup and got in very late. There was a lot of early coverage but mostly from journalists who hadn’t been properly briefed on it or who rushed to post quickly.’

Let’s see what Nik Cubrilovic wrote in a post titled “Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer“:

‘Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it - it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.’

Well–this might be an impressive new platform, this Silverlight thing, but it sounds like Techcrunch has been hyping it beyond all reason. The web may not be any richer because of Microsoft, but Mr. Arrington is.