In his recent post Joel Spolsky writes about whether bloggers should accept gifts from vendors. Here's my two cents on the subject.
Every blogger wants to have large readership of people who trust him or her. If a blogger writes that a product XYZ is good, readers believe that it’s an honest opinion of the blogger at the moment.
Up till today, I have not received and gifts from any vendors. You know why? Because, no one has offered me anything substantial yet. Actually, this is not exactly right. I do receive free books from publishers, and if I like the books, I publish reviews, if I do not - I keep my mouth shut. I've also received two free IDEs licenses: IntelliJIDEA and FlexBuilder. I really liked the first one (and praised it online), but the second one needs improvements, and I wrote about it without thinking twice.
If someone will send me free stuff in the future, most likely I will accept it. But I can promise that I won’t publish a good review unless I like the product.
So I do not think it’s either good or bad to accept free laptop samples, but if you decide to accept it, do not feel any obligations and write about them what you think.
tags: joel spolsky
links: digg this del.icio.us technorati
