The Performancing Buyout, a moment of silence, please...

This item really didn't make the headlines except for a few blogs but since it impacted me slightly I felt compelled to touch on it.

PayPerPost recently bought out parts of the blogging tools site Performancing.

For the unfamiliar, PayPerPost has caused a buzz in the blogosphere with their business model of paying bloggers to write and post about advertisers' products. That's fine and dandy enough for me--as long as the bloggers are up-front about this arrangement and aren't stealthily-made posts. One of the refreshing elements of being a blog-reader is finding more "raw" personal accounts and experiences. Otherwise, if I want a "review" I'll look to consumer-based site I trust. But that's just me.

I came across Performancing a long time ago (OK, just a year ago) when they were offering a Firefox extension for bloggers that could plug into many popular blogging sites. It worked great, could incorporate a spell-checker. and turned my blogging experience into a breeze, easily doubling my posting output.

Then they did one-better and began to offer their Metrics website statistical system for free. This was back when I couldn't get a Google Analytics account and the wait-list looked like it would never be opened to the public again.

I used it for a long time until my Google Analytics invite finally came (hurray!) and I switched. I never felt I was getting an accurate read on the page-view stats with Metrics, but it was better than most other free alternatives at the time and was helpful for a new blogger.

I would from time to time try other blogging tools, but only later would come Microsoft's blogging tool Windows Live Writer (Beta) that led me to finally abandon the Performancing extension for Firefox for good.

According to news reports (PayPerPost Acquires Parts of Performancing) it looks like they will only be picking up the parts related to the Metrics system as well as access to the registered users and the data they generate--not a bad pickup by PayPerPost.

Happily, they won't be collecting the Performancing blogging tool--now re-named and re-spun as ScribeFire.

Good luck guys...

--Claus

01/05/07--UPDATE: Never mind, the deal is off.