He actually refers to me as a “marketing pioneer” in an interview with yours truly that he posted this morning.

Wait … now that I think about it … I AM a pioneer, dammit. I want Shel Israel money! Note to clients: I will be raising my rates by 50 percent starting Monday.

Unless you’re not willing to pay that. Then I’d settle for 25 percent … or, you know, it doesn’t have to be that much.

Actually, nevermind. We can keep it at the same rate. No hard feelings, OK? I’m sorry I lost my head there for a minute.

Anyhoo, I mostly prattle on about myself as bloggers tend to do, since we are all so important in the grand scheme of our multi-billion-year-old planet. But I did try to make it a little more interesting by throwing in one bomb at the end, when Geoff asked me my forecast for the future of the blogosphere:

Frankly, I think it’s going to get ugly as corporations continue to exert their influence over it; the process has only just begun.

When you think about it, Web 2.0 started the way Web 1.0 started. That is, you had a bunch of techies and academics and anti-corporate types running everything and thinking they could make the rules for everybody else. But guess what? They can’t. We live in a deregulated market economy — and ultimately, where there is money to be made, the market will make the rules.

I’m not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing; I’m just saying it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable in the same way that cable news stations will cover Anna Nicole Smith 24/7, no matter what’s going on in Africa. All this social media stuff is going mainstream; it’s all going to be owned and operated by companies that are trying to wring every dollar they can out of it.

So the geeks who think they rule the world right now are going to get a reality check from big business. The lucky few will get a cashier’s check as well.

If anyone doesn’t agree with me on that statement, you’re either a programmer, a college professor, a “blog consultant”, an anarchist — or Jimmy Wales.