As a followup to our post yesterday on the PayPerPost buying Performancing story – it seems that I was right in saying that the sale (or intended sale as it’s still yet to be finalized) was only for part of Performancing. Nick explains it in his post Performancing and PayPerPost which outlines that it is only their metrics and classifieds (exhange) that they’ve sold and that they are hanging onto (and will be re-branding) their firefox plugin and partners program. More details are also available at PPP’s press release. There’s no word on the purchase price.

update: what does concern me a little is that as a blogger who is a user of Performancing’s metrics program that all the details of my blog now are going to be transferred to PPP. While this is a fairly normal and standard operating procedure with any sale I can’t say that I’m overly happy with a company like PPP who in my opinion have caused so much controversy and who have been accused of some less than transparent and ethical behavior having access to my blog’s statistics.

While the metrics package is a useful one I think it might be time for me to find another one.

While i spent the day in the sun at the cricket watching Australia totally decimate England a storm has been brewing in the blogosphere over Microsoft giving away Ferrari Acer laptops loaded with Vista to bloggers to review – and if they want, to keep.

Interestingly – I received an email from Microsoft a week or two back asking me if I’d be interested in participating.

This was the approach:

I’d love to send you a loaded Ferrari 1000 courtesy of Windows Vista and AMD. Are you interested?

This would be a review machine, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS. Full disclosure, while I hope you will tell others about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can keep it. Just let me know your opinion on Windows Vista and what you plan to do with it when the time comes.

I was a little surprised by the email but my immediate thought was:

• as a Mac user I was immediately skeptical about anything with Microsoft in/on it. I was however curious about Vista as I’ve heard so much about it. As a Mac user I’d have no way to review it however without a PC.
• the thought of a free laptop was a little tempting
• the idea of giving it away appealed more than keeping it – I know of a few charity groups that could definitely use it and/or the idea of giving it as a prize to a reader was tempting
• I was a little intrigued about this approach and wondered what would happen in the wider blogosphere when the story broke, bloggers getting laptops worth thousands of dollars to keep if they wanted just to review their operating system. My initial reaction was that this would not be greeted with unamimous support and that the combination of it being Microsoft doing the giveaways and that bloggers were able to not disclose if they wised would be controversial

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