A lot of people seem to be in a huff over the Dr. Pepper thing, and since I had written most of something substantive on the boingboing discussion, I thought I’d post some of it here too.

[todo: tool to automatically link various web community profiles / postings into site]

Any, following jjg’s links, it looks like people are getting riled up over nothing.

Personally, I don’t think the Project Blogger thing will work, but even if it does, who cares? Good for them, whatever. It’s a whole different “blogging” universe. And unlike link spamming, it’s not going to affect us.

Why? For the same reason that it’s not a problem in real life. Because the whole point of blogging is forming decentralized trust network which approximate real trust networks. Granted, distributed (individualized!) reputation/indexing tools are still being formalized and developed (re: why did Google buy blogger), but it’s really just a formalization of what we’ve been doing from the get-go.

Whether people shill online maps exactly as whether people shill in real life or not. Obviously you have the choice of hanging around Amway affiliates or not (hmm, unless they’re family, I suppose). But hey, if it’s socially accepted in the crowd you hang around, and it’s useful, go for it. Vice versa, if your mores or self-dignity makes you averse to shilling, then you won’t, and you need never associate or even know that such a thing happens.

BTW, a quick search on indexes show that these sites are very low on indexes (if they exist at all!), so even in current tools they wouldn’t really affect the ecosystem much. And once the next generation of distributed tools are deployed shills won’t affect you at all (unless you really do trust them, which is your problem).