I’m indebted to the estimable Constantin Basturea for doing the little bit of Googling and extra research I should have done myself, and helping to reveal the full perfidy of a pitch I’ve already taken one swipe at elsewhere.

The background: the other day my friend Frank Paynter drew my attention to a singularly clueless post at Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn blog-style publishing vehicle.

I leaned in hard on what I read as a particularly brain-dead piece of blogorrhea, and fisked the living daylights out of the post over at my other blog, here. If you want the full context, start with reading that piece, then come back here.

I tend to keep topics that aren’t directly related to the worlds of PR or marketing off this blog, preferring to post them at my personal site. As it turns out, this particular issue has now revealed itself to be very clearly a PR-related one, so I’ve chosen to move the discussion back here to Flackster.

In the AlwaysOn piece that inspired my invective, one jesse tayler (sic) wrote a confusing and inconclusive bit of puffery – “Why smart companies don’t use corporate weblogs” – trumpeting the virtues of something he described as “blogworking” over the failings of “traditional weblog publishing”.

I ripped into his rhetoric for a range of reasons; the principal point of push-back being the fact that nowhere in his ode to “blogworking” did the author take the time to explain what, exactly, blogworking is and how it differs from plain old vanilla blogging.

Thanks to a note from Constantin in yesterday morning’s inbox, all has been revealed – and the truth is even more clueless and odious than I’d suspected.

I have to confess, first off, that my original criticism might reasonably be considered to have been misdirected. You see: I was completely confused as to the nature of this “blogworking” thing, and thought that I was haranguing a befuddled trope. Blogworking, it turns out, is not just some nebulous buzzword coined by the author to describe a chasm-crossing new means of looking at the world of corporate blogging.

It’s an actual product name.

Worse: it’s the name of the software product developed by Netmodular, the company of which Jesse Tayler is the CEO.

Even worse: Blogworking is the name of the blog product platform on which the AlwaysOn site runs.

OK. Pause for a second. Why am I so outraged by this simple string of facts?

Two reasons:

Firstly, the AlwaysOn piece in which Jesse extols the mysterious game-changing power of Blogworking is presented as editorial.

Nowhere in Mr. Tayler’s original post, or in any of his earlier notes in praise of Blogworking at the AlwaysOn site, is it made clear that he’s promoting his own company’s product. At no point in this post does he disclose the links between his own company and the AlwaysOn blog service on which his self-promotional postings appear.

You’d expect Tony Perkins, the entrepreneur behind the AlwaysOn network, and certainly no stranger to the publishing business (having founded the original Red Herring magazine), would apply a little clearer editorial oversight here.

The very least one could reasonably expect would be some kind of simple boilerplate disclosure embedded in site entries made by partners, advertisers, suppliers, or other paid business associates.

But, egregious as it is, lack of transparency is not what irks me most in this particular episode.

No; the second and, to me, most disappointing thing about this thinly-veiled pitch is the fact that it’s just so woefully bloody inept.

If you’re going to shill for a product, you could at least make an effort to illuminate the fact that what you’re talking about actually is a product.

I’ve asked myself if perhaps I’m most annoyed about my own failure to understand the intention of the original post. But no – if I go back and re-read Jesse’s piece, knowing full well that he’s promoting his own product, it’s still not entirely clear to me that he’s attempting to describe an actual software tool.

It’s partisan advertising copy poorly disguised as editorial commentary, and it’s not even a successful or effective advert. That’s just depressing.

I’m afraid it doesn’t get much better from this point. In the comments over at my other blog there was a note posted this morning by one Marc Lefton, saying:

“He's not talking about blogs in the traditional sense, rather he's talking about blogworking which combines social networking and blogging in a powerful way. Unfortunately your train of thought is so...last year, that you can't seem to comprehend this new medium, and tear apart this article from the point of view of blogging, which is incorrect.”

The author defends Jesse Tayler’s original treatise by re-stating the central tenet “blogworking...combines social networking and blogging in a powerful way”, without adding further clarity to the contention, and accusing me of failing to comprehend the difference. This last point I’ll willingly concede, but what we have here, IMHO, is a failure to comprehend directly caused by a failure to communicate. I think I can be forgiven for not comprehending the difference between "blogworking", the product, and "blogging", the practice. The inconsistent capitalization of "blogworking" makes it unclear whether it's supposed to be read as a proper noun.

In his comment, Mr. Lefton is good enough to include a link to his own online venture, adholes.com – an advertising industry schmoozing and social networking site powered by, guess what: Netmodular’s Blogworking software.

It seems there’s a further connection between the two gents. At the bottom of the FAQ page on the Adholes site, visitors with suggestions for improving the service are told: “You can bother Jesse Tayler and Marc Lefton. But since we own our very own social networking site and, you, well don't, chances are we already thought of it since we're just so much smarter than you. Just kidding.”

It’s not 100% clear what the nature of the relationship is, but I think it’s fair to assume that Marc Lefton’s comment on my blog is not entirely driven from an independent and altruistic perspective.

Let’s join those dots one more time.

The CEO (Jesse Tayler) of a company (Netmodular) that develops blogging software (Blogworking) writes a less than entirely coherent pitch for his own product.

He posts this pitch on an independently-owned, semi-commercial blog site (AlwaysOn) that just happens to run on the software platform developed by his company.

Neither the author nor the site’s owners make any effort to disclose the partisan nature of the pitch.

After I attack the covert and, in my opinion, clumsily argued pitch at my blog, a commenter (Marc Lefton) leaps to the original author (Jesse Tayler)’s defence.

Thirty seconds of research reveal that the selfless defender of Mr. Tayler’s reputation is also directly connected to both Netmodular and to Jesse Tayler himself. A fairly important point Mr. Lefton neglects to mention.

This is exactly the kind of thing that allows detractors to call the integrity and editorial standards of bloggers into question. As Rick Bruner put it last year, in a short piece about Mazda's ill-advised faux blog:

"Marketers, please, please get the point: blogs are about building trust, not spinning it."

'Nuff said.