On one side, I don't think a blogger has an implicit vote of poverty and a mandate to share their knowledge and expertise for free, if they see a business opportunity they should pursue it as the rest of us can do it, I?m sure that many business deals are presented to them once that they become popular bloggers.
On the other side, it?s a really bad idea to repurpose a blog as a .com website, a brand new website should be created totally separated from the blog, using the same name for the new .com website it?s a branding problem, a market positioning mistake, a blog is a blog forever, a good example of this is: Toyota and Lexus, and the market is perfectly ok with this, no confusion.
I still think that things can be reverted and leave IHB alone, many well established companies make mistakes and once they find out the problem they say: We screwed up, sorry, we took valuable feedback and now we changed course to this.