By Ryan G. Murphy, Digital Media Editor

A quick search of #ad on Twitter returns an array of Tweets pushing tech products, holiday gifts, watches, movie tickets, and TV shows. A search five minutes later produces a fresh list of products with a similar marketing spin.

“Check out the top 10 technology products to help your business! http://bit.ly/6KqrlZ #ad,” read one Tweet from EPCapital earlier this week.

Tweets like these – and other more cryptic marketing messages – are becoming increasingly popular on Twitter as celebrity Tweeters, popular bloggers and the average-Joe Internet user attempt to cash in on a relatively new advertising platform that puts one’s Tweets up for sale.

As Brad Stone put it in a New York Times piece, “it is perhaps the last frontier in advertising — getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers. The idea, according to the entrepreneurs who are developing such services for Twitter and other Web networks, is that people trust recommendations from those they know and respect, while they increasingly ignore nearly ever other kind of ad message in print, on television and online.”

This could be dangerous for those of us in media. If this form of advertising catches on and delivers a positive return for vendors, they may consider reallocating ad money they originally budgeted for TV and online to Twitter.

That could leave us in a very difficult spot. If we jump onboard and begin to sell our Tweets, we may be giving our followers the impression that we, as news organizations, endorse a particular product or cause. Twitter is designed to be a direct conversation with our audience. If we start hawking products in our Tweets, we jeopardize diluting the impact of the actual news we tweet. We start to commercialize our conversations.

As we know, it’s sometimes difficult to establish an authentic dialogue with our news audiences online. Introducing direct ads to the mix potentially skews our credibility and may give our audience the impression that we can be bought.

It doesn’t seem likely that “Twitter-tizing” will entirely replace online and TV ad models but it’s worrisome to think that our current revenue sources could become more limited. I’m interested to see if vendors reach out beyond individual twitter users to traditional media organizations. I’m more interested to see if anyone on our site decides to take the bait.