Can you actually look at the links before throwing a big spam blanket over anything that's not a link to the WSJ or NYT? The comment from Natalie Massenet was made to a fashion blogger, and despite coverage on one of the NYT's blogs that particular quote was only reported on by other bloggers who were in attendance at the conference. The quote was confirmed by multiple people, and has never been disputed or challenged in any way by any media outlet. And as far as the article goes, it gives a verifiable number to what previously had no qualification to support the connection between fashion blogs and affiliate monetization. The link to the Forever 21 blog was to support the updated statement about Rumi Neely's increasing influence. One of those signs being that she appeared in a very prominent campaign for the store. If the store is reporting it on their blog, how is that unreliable? It's not an opinion that she appeared in the campaign, it's a fact. In that case wouldn't an official confirmation from the company be reliable? I've tried to establish why the blogs I updated and added are influential, and that got attacked because you didn't consider the people who noted it "respectable." The only thing that I see when adding or updating the page is to make sure the content is verifiable. I haven't added anything that can't be verified, and nothing that could be considered promoting one blog over another. I've tried to add the original source of information that has been confirmed by multiple outlets over time and the fact that some of those are blogs (on an article about blogs) doesn't take away from their reliability or accuracy as a source.  

 I'm spending a lot of time trying to make this article better, because when I was looking for information for my paper, nearly everything here was out of date. I'm sure that I've spent more time researching this subject than you have, and it's not fair that you undo all of my changes and call them spam just because you don't have the same interest or knowledge of the subject. If someone included a science blog article on an article about science blogs, I wouldn't take it down or mark it as spam just because it's a source I hadn't heard of. It's one thing if the information isn't verifiable, but everything I add is automatically pulled down and called spam or unreliable when it's not. It doesn't help the quality of this article, and plenty of others, that source snobbery is employed. There are plenty of small sources who have more knowledge of a specific topic than their mainstream counterparts. If this were an article about the Iraq war, then yes, the NYT will probably have better information than a blog. But on an article about fashion blogs? Why is it so hard to believe that other blogs might have better information than the NYT? 

 Do you realize that everything in this article, about a constantly changing subject, is years old? Just because the NYT doesn't talk about the same things anymore, doesn't mean nothing's happening in the space. And plenty has happened since 2006 and 2007 when many of these things were written.