Dan does make a rebuttal on his own website (which Georgia links to): he claims (his italics):

I did not disclose a tie to the business in question in my comments because I did not have any tie (now here’s the sticky part) at the time.

I said earlier:

I don’t think anyone’s doing anything wrong here

– I retract this statement. While Dan did use his real email address; I’m disappointed that he didn’t make his affiliation known. I find it’s a little rich to claim that at the time (12.00am GMT, 7.00pm CST) he had no tie to the business, but surprisingly, just TWO working hours later (at 5.00pm GMT; 11.00am CST), does. If you’re negotiating with a company to do their PR – sorry, ‘reputation management’ – then it’s a barefaced lie to claim you are wholly unconnected.

However, Dan bothered to read my posting, and also bothered to reply to the points raised in it. I see no problem with the much copy’n'pasted “pears” thing: it is relevant to the post. In short, Dan did a much better job than Noka did: although, I ought to stress, the fact that Noka posted here shows that they’ve also a pretty good concept of PRing. Sorry, ‘reputation management’. Whatever.

Dan has done a good job. He’s even asking for advice in his posting. He’s mine. If you’re in negotiation with Noka (and, given the story broke on December 9, you probably have been for a while), then my advice to you would be not to post until you’ve signed your PR – sorry, sorry, ‘reputation management’ – contract. Then, this whole thing won’t get blown open for entirely the wrong reasons: which is exactly what’s happening now.

Noka is doing what any decent company should do: monitor what’s being said about it in blogs, and responding – even if in this case it’s copy/pasting a standard reply. I’m already pretty impressed at what Noka are doing: and, given I’m using Noka’s current predicment as an example for us in the media, it’s timely: because we should *all* be checking what’s in blogs about us.

Dave appears to be taking umbrage at my illustrative image. For what it’s worth, after I admired Ben Hammersley doing similar, I add a Creative Commons image to all my posts these days – normally one of mine, though this one isn’t – to illustrate a story and add a little bit of colour to otherwise flat and white pages. In the copy, I’m pretty clear to say that I don’t think anyone’s doing anything wrong here. I still believe that: in retrospect, perhaps the image choice doesn’t give that impression.

Secondly, he’s quite right that the original poster might have other motives for saying what he did: but that’s no different to any ‘proper’ journalist, or any other human being. From Fox News always toeing the Bush line (because they’ve been told to), to financial journalists bigging-up shares that they happen to own as well, to freebie laptops being sent by Microsoft to prominent bloggers, the job of any reader is to be aware that things may not always be what they seem. Where I speak about companies (which I don’t do very often), I always try to make clear any financial relationship I have with them. Perhaps, like lifehacker does, I might also declare any freebies I get (as part of my job or my blogging life).

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