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Dvorak doesn't understand that people don't assign credibility to people based on whether they're a "professional critic", they actually read what the person writes and understands who they are and asesses the credibility themselves.

If there's a common source of information people that's assumed to be objective they will tend not to be critical themselves however which is why its necessary to have ethics guidelines at newspapers. But the fact that bloggers aren't being portrayed to the public as having a special objectivity, as what happens with newspaper reporters, is what makes ethical guidelines unimportant.

The fact that Scoble was paid by Microsoft bothered nobody that wasn't a crank, because it gave him more unusual access to Microsoft projects. Everybody who read him knew that he was paid by Microsoft, though. And everyone took this in account when assessing what he wrote. Although some of it wasn't representing the corporate line, so people didn't think he was a shill.

Saying you can't trust Microsoft employees to talk about their products is like saying you can't trust government officials to talk about their proposals. Although you may have some placed skepticism and you want a journalist to expose something that isn't honest; they need to have a place to speak for themselves. That everything isn't filtered through journalists isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Especially when those people that are made out to be journalists are people like Dvorak.

The insulting part of his commentary is not his concern about these changes in our culture due to the Internet, but his derisive comments towards particular people. You can be critical of the new web culture, without slimy comments about Robert Scoble and other web bloggers. They aren't doing anything wrong.