Not creep as in person who is a jerk. Creep as in how bloggers are approached time and again to become not-quite-neutral platforms for brands for which advertising already runs on the site.

Check out the firsthand account at SmartMobs.

Because we can't trust the newspapers to cover all the facets of a story, or act like something less than a government mouthpiece, we have bloggers in Hong Kong who cheekily recall their memories of the Hong Kong dollar to US dollar peg on the same day that the Hong Kong Chief Executive let it be known that it was a careful decision made by strong beliefs in superstition.

Brought to you today by Simon World.

This is from a meeting today with SCMP.com publisher Chris Axberg. The coming blog content will be free and driven by editorial staff. Should be in a few weeks. I'm not linking to the site, because, well, you can't read it anyway.

Sorry, I had to say it.

Actually, overall, my meeting with Chris Axberg and assistant director of the SCMP.com site Dave Savelson was pretty positive and educational.

Here are some thoughts that I've taken away from the meeting, and they are by no means definitive thoughts, because Axberg and Savelson gave me a lot to process.

1. Perhaps the walled garden approach works in Hong Kong? Advertising is susceptible to swings, peaks and troughs, more so than in other markets, and to be completely dependent on that market for driving the newspaper would be like depending on gas to always run vehicles. One day, there may not be very much gas around. Now, that's not to say that there will be a complete lack of advertising during a rough year, but the SCMP.com is a relatively big staff. That costs money. Subs alone can't cover that. It can't cover it for any site.

2. SCMP.com loses less than 1% of their subscribers a month, and their re-subscription figure is 70% per month. That's for 22,000 something users.

That's it. The rest you're going to have to read in the magazine.

I noticed in today's blog feeds that SCMP seems to have posted a classified ad for a Group IT Deployment Consultant only four days before it went live on the new site.

I like to leaf through Spike's blog about his sundry and tawdry affairs in Hong Kong, not because I am at all interested in his personal life, but because occasionally the man doth present entertaining tech gadget stories with which I can find sympathy.
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