On ReadWriteWeb's Elitist Twitter-snobbery

From the typically sensible ReadWriteWeb comes How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying. RWW’s arms are aflutter over Magpie, a service that lets advertisers buy twitters from ordinary Twitter users. Sounds like a truly diabolical voluntary service, huh?

AFAICT, here are the primary dings against Magpie and its advertisers:

• It’s still about a decade too soon to start reviving bling bling.
• Seeing ads from friends would be kind of annoying, but you could make fun of them for it, so maybe this is a win-win.
• The thing where you type in your Twitter name to see how much $ you could make doesn’t work on any of our computers.

But these are not the beefs which RWW smells cooking. No. It’s unclear exactly what the problem is, but it seems to be something about the sanctity and purity of Twitter being corrupted by global military-industrial conglomerates like StubHub.com. We may have not noticed, but there’s been cheese and spam on Twitter since about day two… just because everyday tweetists want a crack at a (likely) tiny cut is nothing to get worked up about.

RWW goes so far as to slam a specific user named @highandnoble, suggesting said person is not quite so. All for her tweet about liking Skype. Remind me never to suggest in public that I like Skype.

Check the semantics… these Twitter users aren’t being paid, they’re being “paid off.” Note to self: selling ads = Mafia work. If selling tweets means selling souls, does that mean unpublished tweets are in limbo? Is writing an @tweet akin to missionary work? Retweeting must equal demonic possession or vampirism or something. This blog post raises many intense twittological issues. Anyway…

So we’re shockedx2 about microbloggers selling microblog posts. But what to make of this? Yep, that right there is ReadWriteWeb selling blog posts. Sure, we can say, oh, well, they have all sorts of journalistic spoiler alerts there that warn us we’re being advertised to, and Magpie doesn’t do that. We can say that. We can say lots of things.

Pay no heed to the many “Sponsors” in ReadWriteWeb’s right sidebar. Nevermind that their ad section is about thrice as big as the one on @highandnoble’s website.

Takeaway: selling ad space is perfectly acceptable… but only if you’re already a big, big blog.