Sorry -- something compelled me to read that back to you. Thanks for lightening up the thread. More seriously:

Let's be fair and differentiate a little. Gary Leff and Ben Schlappig earned their readerships first and foremost by sharing their expertise on redeeming FF miles. Gary's probably the expert on availability and his VFTW blog is still the first place I'll go to search if I'm trying to get an overview of how best to go about finding seats on routes and/or airlines I'm not familiar with. Ben and Gary's blogs have both suffered from high credit card noise in recent months and it remains to be seen how long that works for them. For now, it means some of us only stop by their blogs once every week or two just in case we've missed something, whereas a year ago VFTW was one of the first pages I opened each day.

With that said, are either of them somehow hurting ("ruining") FT? I don't see it. The same goes for Rick Ingersoll and Ric Garrido. Rick's niche has been somewhat under attack but he's still the guy who knows most about credit card churning -- and I can confirm that he's put his readers in touch with offers that have brought him zero referral commission when these have been better than the best affiliate links he's had. Ric's Loyalty Travel(l)er blog is also in a category of its own, and often offers highly valuable and unique analysis, as Raffles pointed ouch much earlier in this thread. Brett, Jared and Seth also -- usually -- only write when they've got something worth saying.

Are there any other blogs worth mentioning, minority interests (sorry, Kevincm! ) aside? Probably none that will be around for very long. The worst 'offenders' (in the sense of upsetting a few people in this thread by spoon-feeding and sharing 'secrets') are, by happy coincidence, also poorly written and error prone -- their authors will either move on or, just possibly, become real experts and earn a long term readership. In neither case does their existence damage FT, annoying as they can be.