Technology blogs have been buzzing over reports that an employee at Belkin, an electronics gadget and accessories company, solicited people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to write positive reviews about the company's products, and mark negative reviews as "unhelpful," in exchange for payment.

Today, Belkin's president, Mark Reynoso, said he was "extremely sorry" for the incident.

Here's an excerpt from his letter:

So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.

Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.

Reynoso said Belkin had acted to remove the postings from Mechanical Turk and is "working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed." He added that "our retail partners had no knowledge of, or participation in, these postings."

I asked Amazon for comment but haven't heard back yet. Mechanical Turk bills itself as an "online market place for work," where people and companies can pay others to complete tasks ranging from simple (like tagging photos) to technically complex (like writing software code).

One of the obvious questions arising from the flap over Belkin is whether this kind of thing -- paying for positive product reviews -- has happened before on Mechanical Turk and whether Amazon has or should have any policing role over task requests.

The reports about Belkin and Mechanical Turk first emerged on the blog The Daily Background.