Time for my weekly plug for my sponsors Marqui. I've been following what the other paid bloggers are doing and a lot of them are writing up the stories that are being "fed" to us. That's a sensible tactic, so I feel a bit guilty for not going with the flow and doing the same. But I'm one of those strange people who does not like social pressure to do things, even when it's in my best interests. Note that it is only a 'social' pressure, because we're not contractually obligated to write about the stories being fed to us.

I appreciate Marqui's openness and their generous sponsorship arrangement, but so far I have no firm feelings either way about the Marqui product. I said at the start that I'd analyze the product, but for a number of reasons I haven't fully test-drived it yet. One is that there are too many technical details missing - particularly regarding how to implement it and how things connect together. Sure I could take the demo for a spin, but what I really want to do is have a nosy under the hood. Maybe one of their techies will open up that hood in their new blog. Another reason is that I don't want to just list features and regurgitate case studies - I want to have an 'angle' that will interest my readers. 

OK those are all just excuses for my laziness... Marqui does seem like a decent enough product and its target audience of marketing people is looking for an easy-to-use and multi-channel communications product, which Marqui advertises itself as. But as my previous post indicates, I get emotionally attached to (and therefore write about) innovative Web 2.0 products and services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Feedburner, PubSub, etc. Marqui isn't one of those kinds of products - deliberately so, because it's not aimed at geeks like me. It's aimed at marketing people, who just want an easy way to issue press releases on the Web. 

Now then - coming up there is potentially a topic for me to get my teeth into. There's a Web 2.0 angle on the agenda in the Marqui program. So when that gets injected into the mix by the Marqui story-feeders, maybe I will finally get my A into G. I know Marc Canter is probably waiting for me to write up something about Web 2.0 (because I didn't rate a mention in Marc's review so far of the paid bloggers). So Marc, I promise you that I will write a kick-ass post soon :-)

Disclosure: I mentioned and linked to Marqui as part of my sponsorship arrangement with them. See here for details.