John Timmer of Ars Technica weighs in on the Pepsigate stuff - maybe a little late, but Scienceblogs people like the attention so it's all good. Other large networks (us, Discover, NN) get a few words but this is basically a way for him to discuss it and then advertise the people who formed the new Scientopia blog.
ScienceBlogs decided to host blogs run by the press offices of some major research institutions, like Brookhaven National Labs. Although the material from Brookhaven and the others is generally excellent, the decision suggested that Seed had a somewhat loose attitude towards the separation of promotional and news material in comparison with many traditional media outlets. Things got looser still when ScienceBlogs started a food and nutrition blog run by Pepsi, but failed to provide any indication of the commercial interests behind it.
It started two years before that, 2010 is just when they pulled out all the stops. Shell had run a blogvertorial, Dow, Loreal, Schering-Plough, etc., but since no one (there, anyway) noticed. Originally we had used Scientific Blogging for this part of the Science 2.0 network but a few months back I said we have to get blogging out of our name because when this blew up we didn't want to be splattered with their pig blood. So we did.
