Telephony editor-at-large Carol Wilson produced a couple of "JNews" podcasts that are, judging by the content, commercials for Juniper Networks. One of the podcast descriptions even identifies Wilson as a "Juniper Networks correspondent." Meanwhile, the later of the two podcasts also IDs her as Telephony's editor-at-large.

Was she being paid by a company she covers while posing as the editor of a popular (yaaawn!) trade pub?

Not exactly. Wilson says these JNews things were done while she was a freelancer and, technically, between journalism gigs. But why'd they ID her as a Telephony-at-large editor during the podcast? She says the last JNews update began before, but wrapped up after, she joined Telephony. That's why she used the title and that's why she didn't invoice Juniper for her work on that podcast.

Another fun tip came from Valleywag, which first alerted everyone that some big-time bloggers appeared to be on the take.

What happened, according to Om Malik's apology/account, was that ad network Federated Media's clients were invited to "have a conversation" with Microsoft. That conversation made its way into an ad campaign, according to Malik: "Microsoft asked us to join a conversation, and we did. I wasn’t paid to participate in the conversation, but Microsoft ran an ad-campaign that paid us on the basis of CPM."

For fun (and apparently, not profit), here are the conversations captured by Microsoft, and the comments on this page appear in various banner ads that run throughout Federated Media's network of Websites.