As I write this, Dr Pepper’s Raging Cow blog marketing project is number one with a bullet on Blogdex, so chances are you’ve already read about it somewhere.

If not, excellent background can be found here, where Filchyboy/Chronotope masterfully deconstructs the entire campaign, including an interview with Todd Copilevitz, the marketer who created the campaign. (Small-world aside: 10 years ago Copilevitz and I were both working at The Dallas Morning News. We knew each other, but not well.)

It seems to me that it’s not really the use of the blog format for marketing that’s upsetting everyone. The real sin of the Raging Cow blog is that they’re buying link influence (even though the price – t-shirts and other merchandise – is relatively small).

The collective personality of the blogosphere lends itself to bottom-up marketing - when bloggers start a conversation about a product because they like it, and that conversation leads to more publicity and higher sales for a product. Top-down marketing, when corporations orchestrate a conversation in the blogosphere about their product, is no real conversation at all. Hence, for many bloggers, that's evil. Bottom-up = good. Top-down = bad.

What I find most fascinating is that the rage over Raging Cow has resulted in at least one (that I know of) creative solution. Some bloggers do want to be able to make money from blogging at some point. Some want to be able to refer to products in their blogs if they like them – even if they received the product for free. So Tristan Louis has introduced The Full Disclosure XML tag, which would allow a blogger to add necessary disclosure information about product placements.

Louis has added his idea to LazyWeb, which you may know (although I didn’t, before this!) as a site where people post problems on everything from tile matching to audio RSS readers, and other people come along and post possible solutions.

Any other ideas coming out of this raging controversy? Tell me.