Much Ado About Carlo

There's this big discussion going on in the Philippine blogging scene about a young kid named Carlo and his blog. A lot of bloggers have been making a call for a review in blogging ethics and child exploitation.

I am not going to link to his site because i will only make him famous...err...more famous that is.

For everyone concerned, it is a marketing site. It will not take a 5 year old to know that he does not write content for it. Come on, we all knew this from the start.

Second, I can't see the reason why people have to go out of their way to investigate and check on the authenticity of the kid. Why subject the kid to this harshness.

It is really plain and simple, his dad had a major marketing idea and put it into action. It is marketing for all we know and according to PT Barnum, there's a sucker born every minute. The mere fact that you went to his site and visited means that you got fooled to go in and read his blog.

This is actually no different from the freakshows in carnivals which exhibits so-called mermaids and frogmen, you know they're not real but sometimes you foolishly pay for admission and do sneak a peek eventually.

Why else would he call his blog Making money with a 13 year old. That 13 year old tag is the catch phase. Would you have visited if his blog was titled Make Money with Carl, definitely not, you would, by a certain degree of natural reaction avoid it like the plague.

Let's talk about ethics, and pardon me for the pun, yep, there are certain norms that we follow in blogging, but hey, what ethics? And as far as i am concerned, i have not heard of any government arm being created to look into blogs and the content they hold. So the whole idea of a blogger exerting the effort of meeting up with the author and his dad to ask some nosy (i say nosy, because it is being nosy) queries as to who does the writing and stuff is just plain overdoing it.

We have got blogs on almost any subject under the sun written by any candid individual, so why can't this father and son team have their own cake and eat it.

Sassy Lawyer in a reaction on this subject actually says; "What community? (to the people who are looking into this issue)

"Now, I ask: Which community? What is “acceptable”? The truth is, bloggers and other web site publishers willing to adhere to strict ethical standards constitute a minority. Surf the web. I do it everyday and guess what? The assholes far outnumber the good guys. Splogs, rip-offs, “manual aggregators” living off other bloggers’ content, parked domains and so-so blogs without substantial content put up for no other reason than to steal keywords and page ranks from legitimate sites, AND TO SERVE GOOGLE ADS, are all part of the norm."

And pray tell those who have been waiting to hear from reactions from the father and son team, let me tell you this, they will not answer you because it is not their obligation to.

They are actually laughing this whole thing off to the bank, because the more you talk about them , the more of a byword they become, the more famous they get, and the more people will want to come see the site etc. etc.

Let them be, leave them alone and just mind your own business, because his business, as you may have not noticed , is thriving.