John C. Dvorak in his column this week describes the frustrations Microsoft had when it gave some laptops to friendly bloggers. Dvorak extends comments from that to predict that manipulating bloggers just does not work. He is, of course, talking about what occurs when smart mobs of bloggers interact. Dvorak concludes:

This new reality will take corporations and politicians some time to digest. While many bloggers seem eagerly corruptible — almost inviting it — it’s not going to make any difference because there will be 10 to 100 bloggers pointing the finger at them and another 1,000 analyzing the finger-pointing.

The net result is going to be beyond disclosure and into the realm of philosophical discussion. It will be quite entertaining at times. I’m sure of it.

This situation has to be incredibly baffling to the politicos who need to use the bloggers the way they use Big Media, but there are no skilled players in the PR world who have any idea about how to do this.

The Microsoft experts are a prime example. In fact, I’m not sure it can be done, since the mechanism of public blogging is almost incorruptible by design.

But even if the system can be cracked, we probably won’t notice it.

Thanks to my brother Bill.

John C. Dvorak in his column this week describes the frustrations Microsoft had when it gave some laptops to friendly bloggers. Dvorak extends comments from that to predict that manipulating bloggers just does not work. He is, of course, talking about what occurs when smart mobs of bloggers interact. Dvorak concludes:
This new reality will take [...]