[I’m posting this reluctantly. Ultimately I decided I don’t want the WSJ article to be googled without a response.]

The Wall Street Journal today ran an article by Rebecca Buckman that raises an interesting question but fails to generate an interesting answer.

Disclosure: The article talks about Fon. I’m on its board of advisors. It mentions me. More important, the article impugns the integrity of some of the most ethical and good-hearted people I know.

The interesting question Rebecca raises is whether “influential” (her word, not mine) people on the Web can advise a company and still be honest in their blogging. The subtext is: Bloggers need a code of ethics, just as journalists do. (She asked me this in her interview last night.) She failed to find any cases of bloggers not disclosing their business relationships, however, making the article pretty thin.

Here’s the lead:

When Spanish Internet start-up FON Technology SL tried to generate some buzz this past weekend about new funding it had snared from Google Inc. and eBay Inc.’s Skype Technologies, it pitched stories to traditional media outlets.

But the tiny company also got publicity from another source: influential commentators on the Internet who write blogs — including some who may be compensated in the future for advising FON about its business.

You can almost hear the musical sting: Da da da Dum! But now try replacing the second paragraph with this one:

But the tiny company also got publicity from another source: Influential commentators on the Internet who write blogs — each of whom acknowledged in their posts that they are on Fon’s board of advisors, and most of whom also reported on what they saw as the company’s weaknesses.

Since all the Fon advisors disclosed their relationship, the closest she gets to evidence of her thesis that bloggers are not being transparent is this:

The possible conflicts associated with bloggers may be more nuanced than outright pay- for-commentary scandals, such as the Bush administration’s payments to conservative columnist and radio host Armstrong Williams, disclosed last year, to promote its “No Child Left Behind” policy. Similarly, a high-profile former aide to presidential candidate Howard Dean alleged last year that Mr. Dean’s campaign hired two political bloggers as consultants in the hopes they would say positive things about the candidate.

The reference to the Armstrong Willliams case attempts to say that the the blogosphere mirrors the mainstream when it comes to scandals. But the blogging cases she’s referring to are not simply more “nuanced.” They’re very different. Armstrong Williams was paid to say good things and didn’t disclose the fact. The Fon advisors haven’t been paid, aren’t being compensated to say good things about Fon, have said bad things about Fon, and have disclosed their relationship with Fon.

In the second half of that paragraph she gets to her one piece of evidence of corruption in the blogosphere. She’s referring to last year’s dust-up about Kos. Even that is highly ambiguous: Kos had a notice up on his site stating that he was consulting to the Dean campaign about technology, although questions remain about the Dean campaign’s intent. Is this the best evidence Rebecca can find that bloggers aren’t disclosing business relationships?

In the middle of the article, she makes her claim explicit:

That can be a murky issue in today’s clubby blogosphere, where many people including venture capitalists, lawyers and journalists write about Web issues and companies — and often, each other — with little editing. The rebound in Silicon Valley’s economy, coupled with the popularity of cheap, easy-to-use blogging tools, means there are more aspiring commentators than ever opining about start-ups and tech trends on the Web. And increasingly, it is difficult to discern their allegiances.

Good topic for an article. There’s lots to discuss there. I find the question of the “clubby atmosphere” to be especially compelling. The problem is that her article actually provides evidence that her last sentence is wrong. Judging from the fact that the Fon advisors all acknowledged their relationship and that she can find no instance of a blogger who hasn’t, beyond a dubious case from a political campaign two years ago, her conclusion should be that the Web has ushered in an era of greater disclosure and transparency than ever before.

Rebecca singles out one advisor for special attention: Wendy Seltzer, someone for whom I have the deepest respect and admiration. And love. Wendy spent years as an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) fighting for all our rights online. This year she left to become a law professor and do research on these very same issues. Wendy is as smart as they come and could be making a pile of money. But apparently that’s not what motivates her. When last Sunday Martin Varsavsky blogged that Google and Skype had invested in Fon, Wendy did the normal blog thing of note, emote and point,: She noted she was an advisor, explained what Fon does, and expressed her enthusiasm. She also frankly mentioned one of Fon’s limitations and steered users away from downloading the software. (I think every advisor blogged about qualms and limitations.)

Wendy says in her second sentence that she is on the board of advisors and it is true that she doesn’t then say the words Rebecca longs to hear: “Boards of advisors are typically compensated.” The suggestion that Wendy was trying to mislead her readers is absurd; if that were her aim, she would not have mentioned that she is an advisor. Yet the failure of some advisors explicitly to say “And we may be compensated” is the basis of Rebecca’s article. (David Isenberg expresses this well in a post this morning.)

How else can we explain the fact (which Rebecca notes in her article) that there isn’t even yet a proposal on the table for compensating the advisors? May I suggest the only plausible answer is also the true one: We joined the US advisory board because we believe that Fon just might — a bare possibility now amplified by Fon’s new partners — become a positive disruptive force, bringing wifi to places that business-as-usual would leave behind.

Yes, there are stories to be written about the “murkiness” and “nuance” of the relationships of bloggers to their readers and to companies who pay those bloggers. But, Rebecca could not have picked a worse example than the Fon advisory board: We all were transparent about our relationship and not only is there no current compensation package for the advisors, we still haven’t even discussed it with Martin.

This might have been an interesting article. Instead, it imputes misconduct where there has been none and hypothesizes a trend using examples to the contrary. [Tags: fon rebecca_buckman wsj disclosure ethics media]

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