There’s been a full blown high school name calling contest raging in the Alitest blogging world since last night over Valleywag’s post “Microsoft Pays Star Writers to Recite Slogan.”

In the post, Nick Denton calls out Federated Media’s star bloggers such as Om Malik, Mike Arrington, Fred Wilson, Matt Marshall, etc for contributing text to Microsoft’s new “people ready” campaign.  You can see the offending material here at Federated Media’s People Ready page.

Techmeme has been completely swamped by the controversy as bloggers weigh in on one side or the other and Federated bloggers respond.  Om Malik is his usual classy self in his response while Fred Wilson and Mike Arrington go on the offensive and call out Valleywag for their hypocrisy and high school bullying tactics of getting attention.

Arrington makes his point with:

So here’s my position on all of this: Go pound sand. People understand that if there’s text in an ad box, someone is paying for it to be there.

The main thing I’m pissed off about right now is that they pulled all the ads, which mean we’re taking a revenue hit. We’re running a business here, and have payroll to make. We run ads to make that payroll. Those ads have now been pulled.

To which Dave Winer responds:

First, Mike Arrington implies, in the title of his post, that everyone knows about this practice. Maybe it’s disclosed, quite possibly he has written about it and I missed it. But to imply that everyone knows they’re doing it is wrong. I didn’t. I’m sure others didn’t as well.

Second, and this is the really important one. It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.

At the end of the day, we’re back to pay per posts and disclosure.  While the a listers snub their noses at pay per post platforms (and rightly so), people are using the same arguments that have been leveled against PPP scams platforms against the Federated Media bloggers in their participation of this campaign.

And here’s the lesson to be learned from all of this, whether you’re in the Technorati 100 or Technorati 100,000…

Pay Per Post, Review Me, or accepting money in exchange for some sort of content production (whether a full post or a small block of text) comes across as slimy to your readers, hurts your credibility and does more long term brand damage to your blog and your brand than short term (monetary) good.

The only reason to engage in these sorts of schemes is to make a few quick bucks… but it’s not worth your blog’s soul.

Arrington sounds a good deal like the John Chow fan club when he makes his point that he is running a business and has to make payroll, so we should all just chill out and move along… just a man getting his paycheck.  What both Arrington and the What Would John Chow Do followers are missing the point that readers have put a vested interest in coming to a blog or reading a feed everyday… and when they feel that the implicit trust or authority that they have placed on a certain blogger has been betrayed or pervated by that blogger trying to monetize attention which doesn’t belong to them, it’s not worth the money.

In our post-modern world, ideas such as “trust,” “objectivity,” “disclosure,” and “reliability” have been turned over and rendered subjective.  That doesn’t mean that these terms are meaningless, it means that things like trust are now subjective in the eyes of the beholders.  Authorial (or editorial), on the other hand, is meaningless.  How I perceive you means everything.

We’d all do well to remember that, whether we’re advertisers, bloggers, marketers, or arm chair pundits.