I have the impression that Web 2.0 is getting very similar to what old media looked like. Marketing is pushing in the most horrible practices and honesty is abandoning us. Some bloggers are getting paid for advertising their customers or increasing their SEO egos and some social networks are falling down into what Brian Solis describes as Extortion 2.0.


Money is flooding and it is becoming the curreny of many (social) media, which make them look like traditional money-biased media. The following facts are scaring me:

– Some bloggers confess they charge (some of them around 300 euros) for their posts. This used to be called advertorials.
– The East Bay Express accuses some of Yelp‘s salesmen of exchanging ads for good reviews and the elimination of negative comments.
– Most of the comments in many networks are not made by real users but by paid fake users.
– Two organizations in Spain offer companies to “buy” posts in blogs. Bloggers are not required to disclose they are being paid for writing those posts.
– Some neutral bloggers do suddenly start writing lots of posts about their friends or, what’s even worst, about the companies in which they have shares. Is it enough with a disclosure? I am not sure. The question is: would they have written that if they had not a stake in the company?