How does it feel to be one of the 28,000 or so members of the site performancing.com that got sold to the controversial payperpost.com?

I’m not crazy about the performancing deal, which doesn’t include the ad network or Firefox add-on, but that’s life when you join a site that someday could be acquired by a different entity. Nick Wilson is calling this “good news” which I guess proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Same kind of thing happens in the stock market all the time. I bought into ASK Jeeves stock and ended up with Expedia stock in a merger and spinoff. I don’t use travel sites any more than I will likely be using payperpost (PPP). A quick perusal of performancing.com doesn’t show me any easy, automated way to cancel my account there. Will have to wait and see what happens before deciding to email and ask to be manually removed. It might turn out that PPP isn’t as bad as I’ve been thinking. I do feel like I’m being backed into registering for that site though and will be part of their marketing “success” statistics. Just let the record reflect that it wasn’t an opt-in situation. I wonder how long it will be before we see them with over 50,000 bloggers and yet not disclose how many came over in the performancing acquisition?

In the comments area recently VC Dan, a PPP investor, tried to interest me in the PPP service but I remain disturbed that they had to be forced into requiring disclosures that should have been required for all bloggers from the beginning.

To reiterate, I don’t have any problem with bloggers being paid for posts. In a sense I’m being paid for every post here by the advertisements on the same page. I do appreciate and practice clear identification of sponsored posts. Bolded text at the start of a post works or using a different color and/or category for paid for posts.

Nope, I didn’t get offered a Microsoft laptop either
While on the subject of paying for coverage, give Microsoft credit for one thing: they know how to get people to talk about them both good and (mostly) bad. They handpick (?) bloggers to send Acer Ferrari laptops loaded with Vista as review loaner copies. Some of the bloggers think they are gifts and complain when Microsoft points out they want them back. And then there are all the bloggers who didn’t get them and writing about not getting them (and giving Microsoft more free press). Some seem to be hurt like Dave Winer, some are envious, some think it’s an awesome idea and others don’t care one way or the other.

Yesterday a friend asked me if I received an offer to get one of these laptops and the answer is no. After some thinking about what I would have done if they had offered me one, I came up with the video at the top of this post.

If you don’t want to wade through five minutes of my mind clicking and whirring — hey, it can get messy in there sometimes — then the short answer is Microsoft did the right thing not offering me one. I would politely have declined on this particular occasion. I know, I know, easy to say since I wasn’t offered one, right?

Doesn’t mean I would decline any offer from Microsoft like this in the future as most of our family already accepts software in exchange for beta testing at the Redmond campus in person. I’d rather give them direct feedback on things like this laptop with Vista deal. I prefer to review products and services I might actually buy and/or sign up for on this blog. I will be buying Vista, of course, but I have no interest in buying a very expensive laptop from any manufacturer, including Acer. Call me a cheapskate but the last expensive computer I’ll probably ever buy (never say never!) was the M1400 Tablet PC which at the end of the day has cost me well over $3,000 USD and it still needs repair.

Question for readers with blogs. If you were or had been offered the Microsoft laptop with Vista would you have accepted it and written the review on your blog? Would you have expected to be able to keep the laptop in exchange for the review?

That doesn’t seem like an equitable review payment to me. No review, even an extremely detailed one, is worth thousands of dollars. I can understand why some are using the ‘bribe’ word and it’s wise for Microsoft to want these laptops back, even if they get flamed. What they should have done is given away a free license of Vista Ultimate in exchange for the review. That is more reasonable payment and they still could have offered the loaner laptops to the tech bloggers who only owned Mac.

However I don’t understand any tech blogger that does — or purports to offer — balanced OS reviews not already owning computers with Windows, Mac and Linux. All Operating Systems I’ve ever used have their strengths and weaknesses and it’s difficult to review without at least some comparative analysis.

• Tablet PCs to be 25% cheaper in next marketing push
• The end of an underperformancing PayPerPost deal
• Pirates offering Vista and Office for less than $2 USD on launch day
• High profile blogging opportunities
• Blogging today on the Vista machine
• The FTC and somebody please give me something positive to write about Sony