"Pay them - then they tell you what they like..."

I don't know about the rest of you but this recent comment gave me the spooks:

"There are 59 million blogs out there, so we know people want to publish," Rosenblatt says. "You give them the tools, you give them an audience, and you pay them; then they tell you what they like - and you follow them to the verticals where they gravitate."
See the full story here!

Its strange and somewhat scary - we are becoming so conditioned to having our movements on the web and elsewhere watched, catalogued, analysed, debated, commercialised... at every turn that it doesn't worry us anymore.

One commentator notes:

The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree. It's a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages.

What's even scarier is that with all the buy-outs and consolidations the power to watch, pigeon-hole and attempt to mold public habits, perceptions, mores... is increasingly being centred in the hands of an ever smaller and select group of incredibly powerful and wealthy people.

That is scary.