Coke has paid for six college students to go to the Olympic Games and blog about it. Interesting idea. Advertisers and marketers realize that the days of being able to push mindshare with a big media buy are coming to a close, and it's interesting to watch as they experiment with new tactics for getting us to consume.

I found this kind of troubling though:

The students have agreed to keep their posts positive, according to a Coke spokesman.

So it's not really a big deal in this context, but this conflicts with one of the core values of what I think makes blogging work: transparency and honesty. I think what makes people interested in tuning in to a blog is that the voice is human; there's a level of reality to it. You run the risk of loosing that when you have a contractual mandate to "keep it upbeat."

There's a tension in there, because you can certainly be a good blogger and still present a point of view. However, much like being a good PR flack, to do this well you have to internalize the values that you're trying to represent. This can be a very persuative (even propagandistic) medium, but doing that really means retaining your humanity and writing skills while still toeing the party line. Tough to do.

Online communication can serve as the interstitial tissue of a new global civil society, and having institutions (businesses, the academy) get behind it will help grow and mature the marketplace. That's all good. But don't confuse corporate-sponsored pep-posts with the revolution. Not that you would. But still.