Monetizing the implicit social capital that high Google rank represents seems to be a constant theme in the blogosophere these days. Yesterday, I participated in a debate (via Flashmeeting) moderated by Alex Williams, and involving Marc Canter, Jason Calcanis, Stephen J. King (CEO of Marqui) and me: the topic was Marqui's controversial marketing program to pay bloggers to blog about Marqui and its products.

Jason and I have stated endlessly that this is an immoral and ultimately ineffective way to market. The bloggers involved are strip mining their credibility for the sake of near term cash. Marqui may have gained some press from this, but it is a flash-in-the-pan, a one time finesse: now that its been done, no one else will get all the publicity that Marqui has from this campaign, and even Marquis will find that the program -- if extended into the long term -- simply won't work.

Mark and Stephen argue that they were completely open and transparent: bloggers clearly state they are being paid, and since transparency is a key element of trust, surely bloggers in the program will retain their credibility. Marc in particular makes the point that the Internet is open to all, the blogosphere is not ruled by us, or anyone. He and Marqui are free to create whatever sorts of marketing approaches they want to.

I agree that transparency is a key element in trust: but it is not sufficent alone. And it is this very transparency that seems to create the ambiguity about Marquiism. If the bloggers were taking the payola and not disclosing it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But the liar who tells you that he is a liar is not trustworthy. So I don't buy that argument.

I also disagree with Marc about the freedoms afforded us in the Blogosphere. It is a shared space, a commons. Just because we share the common doesn't mean you can overgraze it with a too-large herd of sheep. We must agree on some conventions of conduct, otherwise no one will be able to trust anyone. And this model of advertsing subverts the trust network that underlies the blogosphere; ultimately, it will fail.

Marc has made the case that its a social experiment, and it seems to have worked relative to Marqui's goals: to make a big splash for small money. But the experiment has not been conducted scientifically, and no one has extrapolated the curve. What if some group of bloggers gained so many sponsors through Marqui-like programs that all of their blog entries were bought and paid for? How long would they have readers? How many links would they generate? How quickly would their social capital zero out? It's just another form of social spam, where the bloggers are polluting the ongoing conversation, and making it less valuable.

Added to this ongoing debate (we have been arguing since November) is the new, shiny Wordpress affair, where it has come to light that that blogging technology company has allowed a third party to leverage Wordpress' high Google rank to game the search results:

Waxy.org

[from Search Engine Spam]

The Problem. Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here's a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)

Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8/10, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes Wordpress very attractive to advertisers.

I stumbled on this issue from a support topic, which was immediately closed without response by an unknown moderator. (After I pointed it out, Matt reopened the thread to add a final comment.)

So, last week, I instant-messaged Matt to ask him some of these questions. He was very helpful, giving me the full story.

The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he's paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. "The /articles thing isn't something I want to do long term," he said, "but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I'm willing to let it run for a little while."

He added that if the user community didn't like it, he'd end the program. "Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don't want it. At the same time, if you think people don't care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation."

Questions. This poses some interesting questions. First, do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they're making money off the project? Matt isn't disclosing anything about this activity to the community. I don't think anyone would be upset about Matt trying to support Wordpress with outside sources of revenue, but as an open-source project, they should be held to a higher level of transparency. Without the users and developers all working for free, it wouldn't exist.

Second, is it ethical for open-source projects to make money gaming search engines? Unlike a blog about asbestos news, the Wordpress website has nothing to do with asbestos. It capitalizes off the goodwill of the Wordpress community, which links to the Wordpress website because they support the project -- not because they support search engine spam. But as long as there was transparency about their plans, I think this is less of an issue.

This superficially seems a question of transparency, but its not. The Wordpress guys were co-conspirators in a blatant attempt to subvert Google search (using "cloaking" of embedded, hidden links) as a means to underwrite their noble open source project. But of course they would never have disclosed this, since it is explicitly against Google policies, and is obviously immoral, as well. Saying that they needed the money to continue their project is weak. Everyone needs money, but most people don't steal it, although a lot of crooks justify their crimes that way.

So here we have the Wordpress company trying to exploit their social ranking in the blogosphere for cash, and in the end, harming themselves, their users, and all of us, too.

[Update: Kottke chimes in.

Jonas Luster also has something to say about Wordpress.]