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Over the weekend, David Watanabe, the developer of a couple of well regarded mac apps NewsFire and Inquisitor ran a promotion via his blog where you could get Inquisitor for free if you bought NewsFire. Nothing wrong with that – you can’t really complain about good old fashioned sales techniques.
Now, to boost up the visibility of the promotion he also offered a free copy of Inquisitor to anyone that blogged about the sale – this is where we enter murky waters. Just to make it clear, I don’t have a problem with what David’s doing – he’s just trying to shift product, after all (and freebies make the world go round…) – but the reaction across the blogosphere (we need to come up with a better name) has been eye opening, to say the least.
Over the weekend across most of the mac blogs I read there’s been a plague of “Check out this great promotion” posts. Check out this search on Technorati . What gets me, though, is how many of them (the overwhelming majority) don’t mention that they’re getting a freebie for posting about it:
Now, I’ve just taken 3 almost at random (I went for blogs I’ve heard of), but these are pretty representative.
I think we may have caught a lot of people with their pants down.
How many blog posts have similar carrots behind them that we just don’t know about? I think it’s quite fascinating that all these people think that no-one is going to notice that they are so easily bought.
So, take note of all the blogs on that Technorati search; you can’t trust them any more.
Comments
Ah, but you’re wrong! I actually bought NewsFire because of this promotion (even though I’m an avid NetNewsWire user) and so I got Inquisitor that way for free anyway. Blogging about it really didn’t get me anything that I didn’t already have, so if you want the license, it’s all yours. ;)
Beyond that, I take your point, but I still generally try to be as open as possible about the kind of “buy outs” I take… which have been few and far between and I still don’t know why I get any… regardless, mea culpa—I’ll go update the post, just to be super transparent. And y’know, I also list my clients on my blog in case there might be any incidences of special treatment (even though I’m usually harshest on those things which I care about most).
Hi Chris – yeah, you’re on the list as, well with all the Citizen Agency stuff it was amusing to see you come up – I know you guys would normally jump on something like that :-)
I’m sure it was just an oversight on your part, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for most people.
Hi, nice site!