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Well I have been on a tear lately about paid links, buy blog comments and Google Requesting Link Narcs and I thought I was about done with it.  Yet after commenting in a few blogs who are all worried about Buy Blog Comments as the fear du jour and seeing the responses to my posts I realized that there is a giant disconnect with the "reality of web marketing" and the "fantasy land of blogotopia".  The problem lies in the belief that many bloggers have that blogging and the commercial world are not intertwined or at least should not be.

So what does this have to do with hate crime legislation?   Everything!  Let me explain by starting with actual hate crime law, which to me is going into the world of becoming "thought police".  A basic hate crime law would work like this, Joe kills Frank because Joe is a scumbag and wants to steal from Frank so he shoots him and takes his wallet.  The crime is murder and in Texas where I live and in many states Joe may very well face the death penalty.  Now same scenario except this time Joe is a racist pig and kills Frank because of his ethnic background.  Some would like to label this a "hate crime" with stricter penalty if that can be proven to be the case.  So I guess they want to kill Joe twice in the death chamber? 

The real problem with such law is it makes one victims life or freedom worth more then another's.  It it for all intents a stupid attempt to make people feel better about the core problem, violence and crime against the innocent.  The solution is pretty simple, don't worry about this nonsense and punish the guilty for the crime they commit not the intent they had when they committed it.  

Now onto paid links and the Internet.  Let's look at Buy Blog Comments as a starting point, if you have not heard about this service yet it basically works this way.   You pay a company a fee in return they go out and find blogs that practice dofollow and create links for your site.  The real intent is to drive search engine results higher.  This is a relatively new concept and it has what I call Chicken Little bloggers running around all upset and dreaming up creative ways to stop this pending doom.  They want to find anyone associated with this and "blacklist them".  

My friends that is a "online hate crime law", this is judging the intent rather then the content.  In reality for years bloggers have filtered their contents and deleted or not approved many of them.  To do this they looked at the post and simply said "does this post add to the topic at hand", "will it make my blog better", "will my other readers benefit from it" and "does it link to anything my personal blog policy prohibits".  In other words bloggers judged the action not the intent, if they guy got a link for MP3 Player or SEO Advice, so what as long as the action was with in the bounds of the personal policy the blogger set for his blog, great if not, nuked!

Simple no?  Now with this new service emerging bloggers want to "police the intent".  How are you ever going to do such a thing?  There is no fricken way you can ever be sure of the intent the commenter had so just apply the same "law" to comments you always have and rock on.  

Let's look at recent history to see how this is yet another false drama about how paid links and paid blogging will ruin everything, .  Consider when services like PayPerPost, Reviewme and Blogvertise came out.  The same reaction occurred!  Blogs buzzed with gloom and doom predictions of all blogs becoming commercial in nature and readers would "not be able to trust blogs in the future".  What a crock of sh-t!  What really happened?

Well a lot of bloggers who never made a dime found a way to earn a few hundred to even a few thousand dollars a month online.  With that they paid off debts, got a nicer home or did what ever the hell they wanted to.  Advertisers found a cool new way to reach their audiences and a great new way to build links formated the way they wanted.  In fact this has become one of the best ways in the world to get good links and good buzz because if your service is crap the bloggers will not blog about you!  In short good products and services are getting better results because an INDIVIDUAL takes the time to evaluate whether or not the subject is worthy of their time and blog.  Sure there is a fee, yet it is clear that bloggers have not sold their souls.

If fact wasn't this a logical extension of blogging?  Blogs are a lot like a talk radio show in form and function.  You get one persons unique view and you get the opportunity to agree or disagree with them.  That is the "information and entertainment" component of blogging and radio.  Then both blogs and radio have "traditional advertising".  On radio it is the sponsors you hear about several times an hour on a blog it is adsense, banner ads or text links.  Now no one gets out of shape about this.  Yet on radio there are also "select sponsors", these will be the ones your host talks about and mentions personal experience with.  He will say "I bought my car at Joe's Toyota and they are great", or "Kevin at Texas Lending got me a great mortgage and I can not recommend them highly enough".

Everyone knows the host is advertising but the ad takes on more authority and more creditability then the typical ad because of the format.  This is exactly what paid blogging is like, the blogger reviews the service or product, judges it and finds it worth of posting about for a fee.  They take the opportunity and post about it.  Now, as a reader what do you do, should you apply "hate crime logic" to it and judge the intent or apply common sense and judge the content.  You may just change the dial until the show comes back on or you might actually enjoy the paid post and learn about something cool.  

The reality though is the sky did not fall when PayPerPost and others came on the scene despite their remarkable successes.  Everything turned out fine and bloggers and readers both got a new source of content.  Some participated others did not and the free market handled it all like a champ.

Our memories are short lived though the same "hate crime concepts" came up when these paid to blog services came up.  People wanted to ban blogs that participated in paid posting from blog services or have their "feeds tagged", etc.  Why it all went back to judging the intent rather then the content and the result.  A blogger who just blogged for money and blogged about any topic with the right fee was never going to have a successful blog anyway, so why care, why bother?

Whether it is Google Soliciting Link Narcs, Bloggers trying to "blacklist buy blog commenter's" or people loosing faith in blogs because of paid postings the reality is all the same.  Making a bit of money for your efforts is not evil, (Google does it and they have a no evil policy ) and the market always does a great job at sorting our bad ideas from good ones in just a little bit of time.  In my opinion there is no room for hate crime law online, judge the results not the intent.

A company buys links for a term and get a great rank on Google for that term.  Judge the result, is the page on topic, quality, did the searcher find what they want?  If so good the system worked!  If not then it is up to Google to fix their algorithm not for web masters to narc each other out!  If a comment sucks it is up to the blog owner to use filters and moderation to keep it off his blog, not for a black list of people that often will NEVER HAVE DONE ANYTHING WRONG to be punished by some automated process.

In life and online, just judge the action and results, not the intent.  None of us have the supernatural ability required to be "thought police" and history has shown every attempt by man to do so has punished far more of the innocent then the guilty,

~ Jack

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