Today, the Times runs a trend(ing) piece in the business section on how Twitter users are making serious cash Tweeting ads. Like, serious cash. How much?

Meet John Chow, a guy who makes money telling people how to make money online with his blog. Basically, imagine an infomercial about making infomercials. That's this guy, who's described as a "blogger and Internet entrepreneur." Watch, he makes money:

Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M's with customized faces, messages and colors...In October, Mr. Chow's income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. "I get paid for pushing a button," he said.

$200 bucks. For telling people about M&Ms. Since the Times doesn't, let's take a look at what that Tweet looked like:

He's got the designation of it being an ad in two characters, four if you count the parenthesis. He puts the designation of it being an ad after he places the link, so visually, your awareness doesn't come into play until you've been given the chance to get to/click on whatever's being sold. And four characters out of 88 comes to about 4.54% of the message. It looks subversive to me, and I know it's an ad, but then again, I'm not dumb enough to follow this guy in the first place.

Yet advertorial content is a time-honored tradition in all kinds of publishing formats! Including this one, where we place "sponsored ads" everywhere. But these look like out-and-out endorsements, followed by the designation of it being an ad. And if you attach them to hashtags and @feeds, you can more or less just harass and molest the flow of information coming in to Twitter. Just like when you could see HOT XX NEKKD AMATEURS being attached to Twitter messages that were coming out of Iran after their elections a few months back, by automatic spam bots. Brilliant.

So: what's the defense for completely subverting and messing with the user experience on Twitter? Enjoy this:

"We don't want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network," said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. "All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us."

Kind of sounds like the way vampires work, right? Once you're done with getting your blood sucked, you become one of them because you need more blood. The reason people left MySpace en masse (besides the fact that Facebook offered a cleaner interface and unanimously better user experience) was because of the gross, nonstop barrage of advertising, which Facebook has thankfully kept to a tolerable minimum. What's to stop your Twitter feed from becoming just one, long, advertisement if the people and trending topics you follow are being turned into ad-vampires left and right? And do people even really care that much?

One problem is that many Internet users eschew the idea of these ads, saying they commercialize authentic dialogue and undermine people's credibility. "It interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience," said Robert Scoble, a technology blogger with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, who says he "unfollows" people on Twitter who send him ads.

Exactly. So who's to blame for all of this, really? When Twitter goes to shit, and like a bad strain of drugs, everything you touch comes from the same gross source lacing it with their nasty advertorial additives? This assclown, snake oil salesman Mr. Ted "The Murphman" Murphy, he of Pay Per Post, a company basically everyone in Silicon Valley regards as straight-up evil.

They're not wrong. Pay Per Post was having users sell other users on products with no disclosure that they were ads. Whoops! The Times article catches up with Murphy, who's now doing Izea. Which is how Julia Allison ended up shilling for Sea World. But Murphy's reformed! He's better now! He knows he made a mistake!

Ted Murphy, the C.E.O. of Izea, now a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially "made a big mistake" by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea's ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers like "#ad" or "#sponsor."

Right. Except, whoops, not all of them:

The Times piece wraps up like so, as they chat with people running Likes.com, which, I don't even care to know what it is, really. All of these people are gross and lecherous. Here:

"We are trying to limit it, to prevent people from losing their following," said Bindu Reddy, a former Google product manager who started the company with her husband, Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google engineer. "We know people are queasy about this."

Right! But probably not as much as Twitter is, or should be. It doesn't appear that they're doing anything to even take a cut of the product being moved under their hood. Amazing that the most money being made on Twitter isn't by Twitter. Their product goes down in value to them because it's becoming an ad network.

But who's even dumb enough to follow Julia Allison and John Chow? Won't they catch on to the con being run on them? Well: the same people who watch bad TV, for one thing. Philo Farnsworth probably thought his invention was going to make the world a way better place, too.

Meanwhile, spambots and assclowns like Ted Murphy's zombie army who're getting small bucks will attach themselves to hashtags and your @feed like leeches. Big brands won't care whether this hurts what people think of their product—however much we want it to, or however marginally it will—because this creates awareness. And to think, it's all because of a guy who likes like Ted Murphy. Look again. Right?

Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy. Unless we can get everyone to do this:

The problem for Facebook is that the company wants it both ways. When Facebook launched the new ad products, Forrester Research "Web strategist" Jeremiah Owyang began telling anybody who will listen that Social Ads will work because to a user they look like product endorsements from their friends. You don't have to wonder where Owyang got the "endorsement" idea. Facebook briefed him on the new products prior to launch.

But don't expect this doublespeak to put off Madison Avenue. Remember, this is where Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man were born. A little invasion of user privacy shouldn't be much of a moral obstacle.

As McGovern points out, however, it could well be a legal one. New York's law specifically requires written permission. In California, Facebook could face a $750 fine for each violation. Elsewhere, general laws about privacy could put Facebook in jeopardy — but Facebook users would have to prove damages to their careers as paid endorsers. With the growth of blog payola, though, that shouldn't be hard for anyone to establish. Finally, a business model for PayPerPost!

The entire mismanaged process can be viewed in Pay Per Post's discussion boards. Pay Per Post failed to include the bumper in the original call for posts. When the company realized its error, Pay Per Post continued to allow posts to be created without it, hoping to email the bumper after the fact.

At TiVo's request, Pay Per Post's "Director of Customer Love" Karen Allen sent emails asking posters to remove all videos, but the email didn't explain why, how , or when. Despite the takedown requests, Pay Per Post continued to list the "opportunity" in its directory of advertisements. Said one user:

Why is that post STILL available then? It's looking at me and WINKING! Saying ... take me! Feign ignorance! Get the money!

There was another opp that was supposed to be removed and I had taken it, but didn't realize that until I got the payout with an apology weeks later. Weird.

But really, the mismanagement of the TiVo campaign is beside the point. Certainly, Pay Per Post's antics didn't help matters. But more to the point, why would TiVo even have to pay bloggers to express faux affection for its video-recording devices? While TiVo's gadgets remain superior in their user interface, cable and satellite-TV providers are renting similar devices for much less. Having gone from life-changing to run-of-the-mill, TiVo no longer evokes genuine passion. The fact that it's now paying for fake testimonials from bloggers merely reinforces that it's getting no real love.

TiVo, you see, has tapped Pay Per Post, the controversial startup that pays bloggers to shill for advertisers' products, to help boost a YouTube contest accompanying the campaign, The contest purportedly called on TiVo users to post video testimonials to TiVo. The problem is that their testimonials are fake, generated by TiVo's cash, not customers' passion. The move was revealed when Sarah Hendrix opted to disclose she was being paid through Pay Per Post for her video. TiVo, we thought, already had a substantial community of fanatically loyal users. One would think the contest's prize, a free TiVo HD and lifetime subscription, would be motivation enough. No matter what you think of Pay Per Post as an advertising platform, the fact that TiVo is employing them to gin up fake interest speaks loudly to the fall of the TiVo brand.

Hansell reports:

Valentine Zammit, Accoona's chief executive, said that company had nothing to do with the posts. He added that Accoona's employees, directors and consultants aren't supposed to be touting its stock while the company is trying to sell shares to the public.

Armand Rousso, one of our co-founders together with CDIC, and one of our significant stockholders and an option holder, is not and never has been employed by us or any of our subsidiaries, and has not been a director or officer of us or any of our subsidiaries since October 5, 2004.

Mr. Rousso has been connected with us only by virtue of ... being an officer, director, employee and the sole stockholder of S.P.B.D. Consulting Corp. ("SPBD"). SPBD provides consulting services to various companies in which Mr. Rousso is an investor, including us...

Unfortunately, despite blog-media's near-sexual fixation on transparency, disclosure is not a means toward absolution for ridiculous acts. Disclosure is actually a test of your audience's tolerance for chicanery. Most embarrassing is the naive assumption that simply disclosing the payoff somehow made it kosher. Fortunately, the mechanics of disclosure operated properly in this case, as Scoble was roundly abused for his paid performance; he has since issued a corrective update. Neither he nor Podtech will take money beyond expenses for the speech, and such is now Podtech's "policy" for such engagements. Future shillwork to be disclosed as it happens.

I was cruising youTube looking for clips of Jason Calacanis' keynote speech today at the Blog Business Summit. Some of the blogs covering the talk had mentioned Jason was filmed and hoped it would be posted online in the near future. I didn't find JC at the BBS, I found something much better, 1938 Media going off on Netscape's Jason Calacanis, Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis collectively call them both a-holes for going after PayPerPost. I don't know who 1938 Media is, but he's my new hero.

WARNING, VIDEO CONTAINS UNCOUTH LANGUAGE!

Jason And Jeff Are Jerks [youTube]