John Battelle apologizes for the “blogstorm” that was created from the discussion around whether Federated Media was paid by Microsoft to post positive reviews of their products.

Personally, I am on the fence about how bad it is to have a paid review. The issue really gets muddied when there is no indication that the post was paid for. Its similar to paid search ads. As long as they are marked as paid, there should be no issue. Scoble does a much better job than me discussing this issue.

Sometimes, I think we all get a little self-righteous, especially about the web. Why does the Internet need to be commerce free? There is no other medium is that commerce free. Infomericals, paid product placement in movies, etc. At some point, there has to be consensus that everything has a price.