--- title: "When Blogs Go Commercial" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/18/when-blogs-go-commercial.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/18/when-blogs-go-commercial.html" published: "2003-05-18T03:58:00" updated: "2003-05-18T03:58:00" tags: ["Blogging", "Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Hmm.. Reading through Chris Pirillo's Brain-Trust initiative I must say - This is a pretty smart idea! However, one thing I don't understand: Here's one of the testimonials from that page: \"Just wanted to let you know…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # When Blogs Go Commercial By Roy Osherove May 18, 2003 In [Blogging](https://osherove.com/blog/category/blogging), [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published May 18, 2003; technical details may be outdated. Hmm.. Reading through Chris Pirillo's [Brain-Trust initiative](http://www.pirillo.com/)  I must say - This is a pretty smart idea! However, one thing I don't understand:  Here's one of the testimonials from that page: _"Just wanted to let you know that you have brought OnlineHomeBase more users than any other media report about the service. 14% of my frequent users cite \[you\] as the place where they heard about OHB. The New York Times is a close second with 13.6% of frequent users citing it. So, you're more influential than the New York Times!" ~_ [_Marc Fest_](http://www.marcfest.com/)_, QuickBrowse creator_ Does this mean that you can pay chris to blog about you? It seems to me this hurts the credibility of his blog(If my assumption is correct). I'm the last person to judge, but I'd hate to see a great personal blog become a commercial-fest disguised as 'personal musings'. It could be as annoying as the "Articles" you see in the newspaper that talk about how great a new product is , but if you look closely you'll see it says "Ad" written in small letters at the top. This is more of a general issue - Personal blogs become so popular that they can become commercial-ridden animals. Should we require these blogs to note which is an ad for something and which is not? What would the ethics of this be? **Update:** [Marc fest](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/18/www.marcfest.com) just contacted me and wrote the following: “_Just for the record, I never paid Chris anything. When I sent him that email I didn't even know that he was going to use it as a testimonial. I sent it to him as a private note because I thought it was curious and noteworthy that a write-up on his site, Lockergnome.com, would bring me more signups than an article in the New York Times._“ _“...Oh, and now I see where some confusion may have come from. Because he quotes me in the Braintrust context, it may seem that I paid Chris to be part of his Braintrust. In fact, I never have subscribed to it and never have partaken in any of its discussions. But I understand how you came to your conclusions...”_ ## More in Blogging [All posts in Blogging](https://osherove.com/blog/category/blogging) - May 30, 2003 ### [About "Personal" Blogging](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/30/about-quotpersonalquot-blogging.html) - May 27, 2003 ### [BlogWear](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/27/blogwear.html) - May 11, 2003 ### [Mind Rates](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/11/mind-rates.html) - May 9, 2003 ### [Enlightenment](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/5/9/enlightenment.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/