Scoble says bloggers shouldn’t be getting paid to blog. Cough, I swear Microsoft was paying him to video blog this entire year. I may be mistaken. Someone might want to correct me. What’s the difference? No seriously if Scoble can come up with a decent reason to differentiate the two I will listen.”

First of all, I didn’t say that you shouldn’t be getting paid to blog. I said that if you are you should disclose that fact. Yes, I did say that I wouldn’t sell my blog on a post-by-post basis, but didn’t get to the point for making that rule for everyone. I just said that if I WERE going to sell my posts that I would disclose that and make it clear for my readers (and the same goes for where I work — everyone knew Channel 9 was paid for by Microsoft).

Everyone knew I worked for Microsoft and so everything I wrote over the past three years should be looked at through that lens.

What I hate are bloggers who are being compensated but aren’t telling their readers about their conflicts of interest.

There’s a huge difference there and I think it says a LOT about David that he can’t see the difference.

It’s also interesting to note that for the past three years my posts where I said something nice about our competitors or other companies that I was listened to a lot more than when I said something nice about Microsoft. Why was that? Because my readers were factoring into their reading how I was being compensated.

Same thing will happen now when I say something nice about PodTech. You all know that I’m getting my salary there and will be far more likely to say “shill” when I do that about PodTech.

More about this in my exit interview.