From my column in today’s Guardian:

A group of prominent technology bloggers last month found themselves in hot water after they agreed to lend their words and names to Microsoft’s “People Ready” marketing campaign. The bloggers, all associated with the Federated Media advertising network, wrote brief statements describing how their own businesses became “people ready.” The statements appeared in Microsoft ads on their blogs and were also collected on a site promoting the software company. In Silicon Valley, shilling for Microsoft falls somewhere between worshipping Satan and torturing small animals on the scale of human depravity, so the bloggers came in for some heavy criticism …

Read.