1. Can the power of disclosure excuse everything? How about anything?  You know, I get that mortgages need to be paid, and that we’re in the worse recession since whenever.  I get that.  But I think there’s something also to be said for the importance of credibility and personal capital.  Its great when you’re someone like Chris Brogan who has a ton of it to spend, who is largely beloved by his fans and community, who will give him the benefit of the doubt.  I am not saying that what he did was specifically wrong — but what I will say is that disclosing the relationship probably had much less of an effect on his credibility as a result.  

For lesser (and greater) bloggers, I think Duncan Riley has the gist of it: when you take money for your opinion, even if its clearly marked as such (and “nofollow’d”), what enters the minds of your readers is the possibility of the breakdown between integrity and commerce.  If you have the trust of your audience and explain the rules, it’ll probably work out (as it did in Mr. Brogan’s case) as shocking as the first case will likely be.  

But it may not for others.  And it may not for all things.  It would be an interesting social experiment, for example (pun intended) to see how elastic the trust is that Chris Brogan’s community has in him — and, for that matter, if transparency is all it takes.

Without belabouring the point (and the idea of schadenfreude aside), I think the answer probably lies somewhere between being barely intrusive and far too intrusive with the advertorialization of content, with the tension, of course, for bloggers who are actually trying to make a go of it (rather than test it), in trying to maximize profits (and therefore posts), all the time 

2. Ted Murphy is a genius.  If I told you Chris Brogan was going to be doing a paid post for Ted Murphy two years ago, you would have branded me a crazy lunatic loony tunes bat-crap super crazy (and I would have put *my* integrity at risk!).  But at the end of 2008 what do we have?  One of the biggest thought leaders in social media taking Ted Murphy up on an offer after all.  Yes, the details are clearly different and important, but I think we need to save some of the spotlight for how crafty Ted Murphy is.

He could have put his tail between his legs, or he could have stuck with it — and more to the point, wined, dined, and otherwise got to know a lot of important thought leaders in a more personal way to point out, yea, that he is fact not the Devil/ Satan/ Evil Incarnate.

I suspect many of them were (rightly) convinced, and in so doing, realized that it is difficult to write brutal posts about the enterprise a man represents when you’ve actually met the same man.  All details aside, I know I did.

3. Sponsored posting has crossed the rubicon.  Now that Chris Brogan (and others) are doing it, I think it will be a clear sign to the herd that it must be OK.  I think others are going to do it for a bunch of reasons, not including the very legitimate fact that, returning to my original thoughts, mortgages and bills must be paid, and even a little help can be a good thing.  There will be fall out of course.  Some purists will beat their chests about the death of blogging (again).  Others will experiment a little more.  Others still will dilute their blogs so much that it will make the blogging gods cry a little more. They’ll probably suffer in other ways.

But this weekend, I think paid posting crossed a rubicon of sorts, thanks in no small part due to the crafty work of Ted Murphy.  It may change subtly, but I think that blogging is probably going to change in a way many had turned their noses up to just a few years ago — and given a network of factors, it will likely continue change in Izea’s favor for the near future.

Its curently in alpha right now, but CloudShout is what looks to be a widget network distributed amongst the SocialSpark users (if not, then it will be very easy for them to implement).  In short, CloudShout looks like a platform that is looking for developers to create widgets — like an IM widget, or a MyBlogLog widget that we saw — so that people will bring back conversations back to blogs.

RATHER — not just conversations, but *attention* back to blogs as a location for things to happen.

I spoke to Dan Rua (who, I should add is much larger in person than on his blog — much like John Chow, actually) after the talk, and I “get” where the intention of this is.  They want to create an easy platform for people to develop stuff, so that the attention is focused back on blogs and blogging, and away from the splinterization of conversations — and therefore attention.

There weren’t any specific ideas around monetization, but one could see a scenario where Izea could get secondary gain from more traffic to blogs — leading to more attention to paid posts or advertising purchased on blogs.  Or, the benefits of “owning” the platform if it gets hot.

Perhaps one analogy is “an iphone apps for blogs”.

As with a great many things, I think the details are in the execution, and the proof is in the tasting (of said pudding).  I will give a large kudos to Ted and co for having some pretty ambitious dreams, and wanting to bring attention back to blogging.  Being a blogger myself, I love the medium and as I said previously, it needs as many friends as it can get.

The biggest challenge — as I said to Dan — was that in all the thinking done around the splinterization of conversations, that I did wonder if something like this, as admirable as it is to want to bring blogs as a place to BE again, that if it was an attempt at something that’s against the grain.

That is, with the evolution of things like Twitter and Friendfeed, if conversations — and therefore attention — will *naturally* splinter across different media *within* media.  That as good an effort as CloudShout is — is it therefore *un-natural* in its efforts to move people back from where they came from?

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think in order for that proposition to occur, they’re going to have to do something really really right.  It is going to be slick and sexy, and its have to take the best out of MyblogLog and capitalize on all of its lost opportunities, AND get its champions and evangelists on all sides lined up … *if* they’re fighting something that I suspect is a natural phenomena that we’re all witnessing in the social media scene:

The splinterization of attention.

PS. If you’re interested I have an extra invite … leave a comment and I’ll pick one at random in another day or so.