arghyle

This story broke recently and it really blew up fast. It seems that Microsoft, through its marketing dept., has been giving free no-strings-attached notebooks to a few bloggers. The notebooks are Acer’s Ferrari top-of-the-line (a few different sizes were given) and are running Vista. Microsoft seems to be trying to get some blog buzz going, but at $2200 dollars a shot, it is an expensive marketing technique.

The most interesting thing to me is who they are giving the notebooks to. The people getting them are not A-list bloggers, some are downright unknowns, and most don’t focus primarly on hardware or software. Laughing Squid got one, as did this guy, who ever this is, this guy, and Heaven Games. I don’t know about everyone else, but the only one of these with which I was familiar with Laughing Squid, and that was only because I had heard about their web hosting. Anyway, this is all really strange and judging from the size of their sites, I really don’t understand the reasoning behind all of this. From what I can tell some of the people are active at Hive.net, but that’s all I have pieced together at this point.

Not everyone is happy about this, but I think some people are just jealous that they did not get one, I know I am. I think that as long as people offer a full disclosure and tell us they got the notebook from Microsoft, there is nothing wrong with taking a gift so long as they can still manage to offer a fair and unbiased analysis. As interesting as this is, I would have to say it is a mistake for MS, they have enough bad press already and seeming like they are trying to buy bloggers with with unlimited budget though this type of marketing campaign is not going to help their image. Comments like “Aero is Awesome” (link) with no other analysis is not helping improve how this situation looks either… It will be interesting to see how this goes in the future and what kind of content these bloggers produce.

One bothersome thing is that, in the eyes of many readers, this reinforces the whole “bloggers are not journalists” idea that has been getting so much attention from the MSM lately.

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