louisgray.com - Latest Comments in louisgray.com: If You Look Hard Enough, Conflicts of Interest Are Everywhere

Re: louisgray.com: If You Look Hard Enough, Conflicts of Interest Are Everywhere

bob pasker — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:01:43 -0000

the problem is not just when bloggers cover companies they're invested in, but also when they don't blog about important companies that compete with their investments.

for example, the widely read and justifiably admired O'Reilly Radar talks about Wesabe all the time in both feature posts, "finance2.0" articles, and incidentally (but doesn't always disclose ORA's involvement). yet Radar only ever tangentially mentions its #1 competitor Mint.com, and then only in poor comparison to Wesabe (http://blogs.oreilly.com/cg...

(note I'm an investor in Mint)

Re: louisgray.com: If You Look Hard Enough, Conflicts of Interest Are Everywhere

Romain — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:05:02 -0000

It's part of the reason blogs are interesting: we do not share information but opinion and views. If you're starting leaving that field and turning into a journalist (by will or if it's just happening), yes that's an issue to personally overcome. But if mentioned in a disclaimer, it seems ok to me people I'm reading are connected with others, since the reason why I read blogs are because they give me a human filter on things, then questioning me about the topics that have been covered.

Re: louisgray.com: If You Look Hard Enough, Conflicts of Interest Are Everywhere

Eric Rice — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:09:42 -0000

It's that last part that's the moving target. The social conflict of interest is almost untraceable (although with social media, we can scrape and mine all day long and map out possible projections of relationships), and that can easily affect reporting. We don't know who likes whom, who has a crush on whom, etc. Did we ever learn to be objective? Should we be? I won't even link to a great video on Vimeo because of my attitude against Vimeon right now, I'll totally come clean. Doesn't make it right, just makes it a curious reality that's far more ugly than the economic conflicts.