This morning Doc Searls has a pointer to a real interesting attempt to use blogs to do viral marketing for a teen drink. They speculate as to how big this might be. At the end of the day, though, we're all here to sell something, aren't we?
Ur-blogger Dave Winer is pretty assiduous in telling us about Userland's product offerings; Cluetrainers like Doc and David Weinberger are marketing their writing/speaking/punditry services. And if you direct your eyes just to the left, you'll see a big blue glowing Antarctica logo, and hey hey hey our Visual Net product is just terrif and y'all oughta tell your CIOs about it soonest!
There are quite a few bloggers who are here to sell a political message rather than a product.
And to be fair, my lead paragraph is over the top; there are more than a few online voices that are here just to tell us about themselves and their feelings and experiences. But you know, it seems like all the interesting individual voices I like to read come with an agenda. I think we're basically mostly OK with the notion that a Weblog has a marketing dimension, as long as we all tell the truth about what our agendas are.
Didn't somebody say something about markets being conversations?
