PayPerPost's Latest Gimmick – SocialSpark

PayPerpost, which has renamed it’s parent company IZEA, says they’ll be launching a new social network in January 2008 called SocialSpark.

Bloggers and advertisers (the company says they have over 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers) will create profiles. Users visiting the site will then “browse the public profiles of advertisers and bloggers along with their associated sponsorship and blog related data.”

”It’s the first social network that is designed from the ground up to be advertiser-centric, while preserving the free, managed flow of user information common within other networks” said CEO Ted Murphy.

The translation, as far as I can tell, is that SocialSpark is a place for advertisers to interact with bloggers who are willing to take pay per post type advertising and run with it. Get to know them, see how big their audience is, whatever. There’s absolutely nothing distasteful about it as an idea. But to the extent it furthers the pollution of the blogosphere by encouraging more paid shilling, it makes us all worse off.