This is going to drive the wedge further between bloggers and those who think not everything about blogs, bloggers, and blogging is right. Leading advertising magazine, Advertising Age, has alleged that its online poll about blog-reading at work was hijacked by bloggers directed to its site by blogging site Gawker.com.
A report on AdAge.com, the online version of Advertising Age, said on Monday, "The tally of this week's Ad Age online poll indicates that 85 per cent of the voters are in favour of employees' unrestrained reading of blogs on their employer's time. But wait, that may not be the full story. In a nutshell, here's what happened to our poll this week: We were Gawkered."
The report said that shortly before the weekly survey about blog-reading at work was to close on November 3, Gawker.com plastered the top six inches of its home page with a headline and garphic warning: "A Disaster Awaits at AdAge.com." That included a screen grab of the voting page with its question: "Should employers allow their staff to read blogs in the workplace?"
The poll was a follow up to a recent report by Advertising Age editor-at-large Bradley Johnson, who wrote that about 35 million workers � or one in four people in the US labour force � spend an average of 3.5 hours a week reading blogs on the job. The report said that time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. "Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break."
The Gawker posting exhorted, "You've got little more than two hours, kids. Go vote, vote, vote, vote before companies take Krucoffing to the next level -- you know, because they all listen to what unscientific surveys tell them to do -- and make decisions that would hurt us (traffic! ads! income!) and, even more, you (must actually do work!)." "Krucoffing" referred to Andrew Krucoff, the freelance research analyst at Conde Nast who was terminated in October this year for leaking an internal company document to Gawker.com.
The AdAge.com report says, "The response of the bloggian hordes to Gawker's call was as swift as it was impressive. Before the Gawker post, the vote tally was running 58 per cent against employees reading of non-work-related blogs during working hours. But within minutes after the post, that began to change. By the time the poll closed 120 minutes later, the tally was 85 per cent in favour of allowing unlimited blog reading by employees."
After AdAge.com posted this on its site on Wednesday, Gawker's response was swift and in its characteristic language: "Don't Fuck With Our Blogs". Gawker told its readers, "We pointed you to a looming disaster at AdAge.com on Thursday, an online poll that potentially could have suggested that reading blogs on company time is a bad idea. Clearly it's not, and we needed to make sure no one was misinformed. So we asked for your help, and you – God love ya – delivered." It ended with a sinister warning: " And we'll do it again if we have to, dammit. Allons enfants de la patrie, and so forth."
The Gawker group, apparently, took it (the initial AdAge.com report) to heart. Johnson's report had made mention of Gawker: "While blogs are becoming an accepted part of the media sphere, and are increasingly being harnessed by marketers � American Express last week paid a handful of bloggers to discuss small business, following other marketers like General Motors Corp. and Microsoft Corp. into the blogosphere � they are proving to be competition for traditional media messages and are sapping employees' time. Case in point: Gawker Media, blog home of Gawker (media), Wonkette (politics) and Fleshbot (porn). Said Sales Director Christopher Batty: 'The Gawker audience is very at-work; it's an at-work, leisure audience -- a.k.a., people screwing off on the job.'"
Gawker, which calls itself "the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip", picked up the gauntlet and took the battle right into AdAge cyber territory.
