Meanwhile, in Fake News

UPDATE: Before reading the original post, this update via Brad Flora -- kingpin of the budding WindyCitizen media empire -- who mans up and takes the hit for what amounted to a screw-up.

Because Brad is that kind of guy.

Here are Brad's comments, elevated to the top per Anonymous' wise suggestion :

Dan Hynes was not spamming the WC. I was. Allow me to explain.

Dan Hynes people are in fact advertising on Windy Citizen this week and the next. Their ad spot in the sidebar shows the latest twitter update from @DanHynes in real-time. We're offering this real-time advertising because I think it's a lot more interesting to our community than traditional banner advertising. Few people are innovating in this space because it's so easy to just plug a banner ad into your ad service and watch the pennies trickle in. Unfortunately, if that's all you do, you'll never make more than pennies. We're trying to do something new here that will bring in enough revenue to power an honest-to-goodness business. Feedback like this post, Driftglass, is great to see and very useful. Thank you.

And so on that note, I apologize for not explaining the origins of those three links from the DanHynes account in a blog post on Thursday. With the Olympics it seemed sensible to wait until Monday to announce all of this. In retrospect, this was a mistake.

Those 3 items were not posted directly by the campaign but by a system I set up that pulls in their latest blog updates. Just as there are services that allow people to post automatically to Twitter from an RSS feed, I'm developing a way that lets sponsors syndicate a limited number of entries from their blog automatically to Windy Citizen. Unlike the Twitter-to-RSS services out there, ours would be a paid service and/or limited to Windy Citizen sponsors.

Pulling in these three Dan Hynes posts was part of this program I was planning to announce tomorrow. Again, in retrospect, I should have announced it the minute I flipped the "on" switch. I apologize for the confusion.

And I also should have included the "Syndicated" marker on those posts as soon as I flipped the "on" switch. While non-sponsored posts simply indicate the time when they were posted, posts pulled in automatically starting this second will bear a "syndicated" tag in their timestamp. This also was meant to go live when I flipped the switch, but did not happen. Omission on my part, not the campaign's.

If there are more questions and comments, I'm all ears. This was meant to go live at once. Driftglass, thanks for taking note and calling this to my attention.

ORIGINAL POST: Dan Hynes wants your money.

Regular readers know that your humble correspondent thinks favorably of the WindyCitizen experiment -- a citizen-vote-driven Chicago news site -- and that I post Chicago-based stories there on a regular basis.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered during my latest sojourn to the WindyCitizen that the sidebar ad for Dan Hynes



has now been joined by two WindyCitizen "stories" posted by danhynes.com that are nothing but begging letters from Hynes' campaign fundraisers

and one reprint of some Hynes policy boilerplate...that directs you to the Hynes campaign site...where you can cough up some more dough for his run for governor.

Dan, buddy, a word of advice. Of course anyone is free to post to WindyCitizen. That's sorta the point. But please tell your SEO consultants and online messaging gurus to stick to packing your site with saucy, traffic-snagging tags and Twittering breathless messages of your awesomeness in 140 characters or less.

Because shoveling your fundraising crap across the editorial line from "paid ad" to "story" doesn't make you look gubernatorial.

It makes you look like the worst kind of blogwhore.