FoggyNoggin Software, makers of Cool Mac Apps

Today, I noticed this:

Get your product reviewed on TAB (The Apple Blog)

Normally, that wouldn’t be worth noting, except that as you read the article, The Apple Blog is actually asking product developers to buy a review. The price: $200.

Yes, for $200, you can get your product reviewed on The Apple Blog. I find this truly offensive. Paying for a review is essentially paying for advertising. Yet TAB, in what is very obviously a money grab, has decided that it’s going to disguise those ads as editorial content.

Now, Josh says that for the $200 he’ll review the product, and, in all fairness, he says that the review may not be positive. But that sounds like a huge conflict of interest to me, and one that I don’t think The Apple Blog can easily bypass. Does the word “Payola” sound familiar?

Any review on TAB can and should be called into question. You simply don’t know the motivation for good reviews. Is the review positive because it’s a good product? Or is it positive because TAB wants to continue collecting those juicy $200 review fees?

In my opinion, The Apple Blog has an obligation to its readers to denote which “reviews” are real and which have been paid for. Anything less is a complete lack of honesty and a huge disrepect for its readership.

Update: Gruber agrees.

Update 2: Looks like Josh has appended his original post saying that all “paid reviews” will be marked as such. Still, I think there’s a big conflict of interest and I don’t trust this. The best thing for TAB to do would be to swallow their pride and kill the ridiculous program outright.

Update 3: TAB issues an apology and abandons the idea.