Michael O’Connor Clarke does a great job of fisking a particularly clueless article about blogging from Jesse Tayler on AlwaysOn, thus saving me the effort. Thanks Michael!
Category Archives: Fuckwittery
And they call this ‘knowledge’?
Some choice snippets from Wharton article Blogs, Everyone? Weblogs Are Here to Stay, but Where Are They Headed? which will allow you to decide if you really want to spend precious minutes of your life reading it, minutes that I have already sacrificed on your behalf:
online diaries
amateur content
It’s not clear how it will turn out
create buzz through blogs
written, not by trained journalists, but by regular citizens
to drive people to our sites
lots of drivel, some useful items and plenty of opinions
blogs are mostly associated with politics
readers will just flock to sites they agree with
a technology may be created to rate credible bloggers
blogger pecking order based on readers’ opinion
Are bloggers journalists?
usurped by a bunch of amateurs
chasing tips, rumors
Can blogging pay the bills?
charge for their output
blogging overexposure is on the horizon
You are going to see blogging move to video and instant messaging
OK, not all of it is utterly clueless, but it could easily have been a lot more informed. Easily. An awful lot more informed. Just doing some basic reading would have helped.
*mutters: I will resist the urge to fisk. I will resist the urge to fisk…*
Linkylove or blog fuckwittery?
How many apples of rotten experience does it take to sour a whole barrel?
That’s a question that Adagio Teas should be asking themselves right about now. They recently made an offer on their website that if you link to them you get a reward ‘commensurate with your webpage’s Google PageRank’, and sure enough, if you search Technorati you’ll find a good number of blog posts from people who’ve been happy to take some tea off Adagio’s hands for the sake of a link. Nice bit of PR, you might think? Well, yes, until you get to Jay Allen’s experience, and then it all starts to sour.
Jay sent in a link to a blog post that he had written about Adagio Teas, but because Adagio were looking at Google’s PageRank to determine which of three rewards linkers should get – 0-2 get a tea sample; 3/4 get a sampler set, 5+ get an ingenuiTEA Set – and because the PageRank of a single post is not the same as the blog it’s posted on, Jay got only a tea sampler when he should have got the tea set.
Now that’s not, really, a big deal. What brings this whole story into the blog fuckwittery camp is the response of Adagio’s customer service representative, Ilya Kreymerman, who managed to show a complete lack of comprehension about how blogs work, i.e. that a post can be on the front page of a blog and in the archives at the same time. He then went on to be sarcastic and rude in Jay’s comments.
How, precisely is this supposed to help the situation? And how close are Adagio going to get to stuffing up a nice bit of PR with some ill-conceived ‘banter’ that does nothing but make them look like a bunch of nitpicking, tight-wad chancers?
This is something that has bugged me about alleged customer service representatives since pretty much the dawn of time. Listen, Mr/Ms Customer Service Person, your job is to say ‘I’m sorry. How can we make this better?’, not ‘This is all your fault, you’re an idiot, you should have done/not done this.’ Is that really so hard to comprehend?
Disgruntled bloggers are a vociferous bunch, and any company who thinks about using blogs to manufacture good PR have to remember that it can be easily undone. Piss off just a few popular bloggers and you’ll be really wishing you hadn’t.
UPDATE: Adagio Teas’ Ilya Kreymerman emailed me after reading this, and offered to send me tea because even though I hadn’t applied for their link scheme, I’d still linked to them. I accepted their offer, and true to their word they sent me one of their ingenuiTEA Sets and some tea. So, whilst I still think the tone of Ilya’s posts on Jay’s blogs were somewhat ill-considered, I will freely say that their wee tea set is pretty darn ingenious and cool. Unfortunately I never drink tea, but my parents say that the leaves Adagio sent are a good step up from “the usual stuff we drink”.
So, a good save from Kreymerman, or have I been swayed by a freebie? Bit of both, I’d say, but you can make your own mind up.
Contradiction in terms
“Rip & Burn – the music magazine for the download generation”
Isn’t that an oxymoron? I particularly like their “Free tunes! Downloads… coming soon”. But wahey, they’ve got a blog! With no permalinks, no trackbacks, no blogroll, virtually no content and possibly the crappest navigation I’ve seen in ages.
Come on, where’s the podcasting? Where are the enclosures? The mash-ups? The free Creative Commons content? Honestly, this blog is so pathetic, I can’t even be bothered to explain why.
Still, I suppose it’s what one should expect from Haymarket Consumer, a company which thinks that the hip young kids who rip, mix and burn are going to be out at the news stands thinking ‘My, I just can’t wait to spend some of my hard-earned cash on a magazine covering stuff I can get for free online’.
Great thinking, guys. Keep it up.
Bad Language: Associated Press’ fake blog
I saw on the feeds last week that Associated Press, old chestnut of the news wire, has started a blog called Bad Language. Flagged it ready to follow up but, whilst it’s easy enough to find syndicated versions of Bad Language posts, I’m having difficulty finding the blog itself. It’s one thing to read about it, but I really want to inspect the horse’s mouth for myself. Does it have fillings? Hallitosis? Gingivitis?
According to Yahoo, in Bad Language‘s first post, Derrik J Lang, Associated Press Writer wrote:
Yeah, we know we’re like two years too late to straddle the blog bandwagon. But we’re backed by the largest and oldest news organization in the world. So, you know, we’ve got nothing to prove. Really. All you should expect from Bad Language is sarcasm-coated news and commentary about all things pop culture.
But where? No link.
MSN Entertainment syndicate another post, but insofar as I can see (and I can’t see all of it because MSN’s site doesn’t play well with Firefox) there’s no link back to the AP blog. The Miami Herald ran the story, but ditto. Editor and Publisher, ditto again.
Ok, cut to the chase, go straight to the AP website, but whilst I’ve found the horse, there’s no sign of the mouth – no link to the blog on the front page. Nothing on the site map either. Nothing on their What’s New page. Nothing on the Press Releases page.
What about Technorati? A quick keyword search turns up a lot of commentary but no links to Bad Language itself. I’m starting to wonder if this blog actually exists. Then a breakthrough from Common Sense Journalism:
And just to show how hip AP is, the Yahoo story does not have a link to this new blog. Yeah, that’s hip: let’s put out a blog that’s not easy to find among the 5 million or so that now exist.
(AP is following its old model, apparently, of making it accessible only through member newspaper sites. Here’s today’s entry (sub req after you’ve clicked once) at the Miami Herald about the “Playboy: The Mansion” video game. The writing is pretty much old AP with a (not much) breezier spin.
(Visit Bug Me Not to get a login if you need to.)
So Bad Language isn’t, in fact, a blog at all. It’s another wire, written as if it was a blog and unavailable to the general public except through the sites of those purveyors of news who have the cash to pay up for it. Bad Language is a phantom, a pretence, a fake.
I really don’t understand what AP think they are doing. You can’t become a part of the blogosphere simply by calling a wire a blog. It doesn’t work like that. Blogs syndication means that anyone can pick up an RSS feed and read it at their leisure, it’s not the same as old-fashioned news syndication where anyone who wants to reproduce your articles has to pay through the nose for it.
Blogs are discrete entities with a single, stable URI for the main page and permalinks for individual entries. They have trackbacks and comments and archives and categories. You can search Technorati for their cosmos or Truth Laid Bare for their position in the ecosystem. But Bad Language exists only in distributed form, scattered across the web on a number of news sites. It is not a blog, not by any stretch of the imagination.
AP have obviously and spectacularly failed to understand what ‘syndication’ means in the blog sense or what a blog actually is. And what’s worse, the entries I’ve read so far are just not very good. Whilst it’s true that I have read drivel less interesting in my years as a blogger, this poor copy of Wonkette is written by someone who is supposedly a professional writer and it really should be better.
AP have a long, long way to go before they can claim membership of the blogosphere. Firstly, they need a blog. Secondly, they need a blogger who can write interesting and compelling posts. Thirdly, they need to engage with the blogosphere directly, on a first person basis, not try to latch on to the buzz through the intermediaries of news sites like Yahoo.
Question is, do they have the backbone to break their old media habits and truly embrace blogging?
Another one bites the dust
Another blogger fired for blogging – this time Mark Jen got the sack from Google after just a few weeks for blogging about how he didn’t like his remuneration package, amongst other things.
What surprises me about this is that I thought Google were savvy enough to have a clear blog policy and that they would have ensured that all employees understood it. They are a truly geek-laden company, after all, and geek-laden companies should be amongst the first to realise that employees will blog. Maybe not all of them, maybe not all the time, but they will have people blogging and some will be blogging about their work and about the company.
For Google, that should have been a no-brainer, particularly in the light of the fact that they own Blogger. How on earth the concept of blogging guidelines could possibly have escaped them, I just do not know.
Neville Hobson has some good commentary, as does Scoble.
First UK blogger fired for blogging
In the first case of its kind in the UK, blogger Joe Gordon from Edinburgh has been sacked by his employer Waterstone’s for a few mildly negative comments he made about his job on his satirical blog, The Woolamaloo Gazette. Joe was warned shortly before Christmas that he was going to be subject to a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct for bringing Waterstone’s into disrepute, but due to the festive season the hearing did not take place until 5th January. The hearing found that he had ‘violated the rules’ and he was summarily dismissed.
In dismissing Joe, though, Waterstone’s has prompted a massive backlash and huge amounts of very negative publicity – the story has been covered by BoingBoing, The Guardian, The Scotsman, The Bookseller, and The Register. Matthew Whitaker, who is a fellow blogger and a friend of Joe’s, is keeping a round up of all the press this story receives, and there have been a huge number of supportive comments on Joe’s own blog with many people writing to the company to complain or promising to boycott Waterstone’s completely.
As a bookseller with 11 years experience at Waterstone’s, and as someone responsible for organising many of the book signings that have taken place in the Edinburgh branch, Joe has the support not only of the blogosphere but also of authors such as Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, and Richard Morgan.
All in all, this has turned into a major PR gaffe for the company – the blog-savvy media here have all been aware of the possibility of someone getting sacked for blogging because it’s happened several times in America, and they’ve been just gagging for a story like this to unfold here. I predict that it will be picked up now by the wider media, that Joe will get a whole lot of useful legal advice and support, and that Waterstone’s will end up with a large serving of egg on their face. Which will stick.
In the US, employment law exists but is weak – if you challenge your former employer’s decision to dismiss you, you are very likely to wind up on the heap marked ‘unemployable’ even if you win, but the situation in the UK is very different. Tribunals and unfair dismissal cases are taken more seriously, not just by the unions but by people in general. When someone gets fired unfairly, we tend to come down on the side of the employee. We like our underdogs.
My hopes for Joe, on a personal level, is that he gets the support and advice he requires to successfully challenge Waterstone’s and that he gets recompense for his dismissal which, on the face of it, looks very unfair. I also hope that he gets a far better job than the one that he was fired from. But looking at this more broadly, this case brings to light the fact that there has been in general a lack of thought about the issue of bloggers mentioning their work on their blogs and what that means. We need now to have some calm, sensible discussions about the repercussions of what has happened.
More to come when I’ve had a think about it.
Blogs are evil. Really evil. Really, really evil.
We know this to be true because Dublin-based Research and Markets says so. Michael O’Connor Clarke has already begun the initial fisking of Research and Markets: Companies Need to Raise Employee Awareness Regarding Blogging and Associated Threat, but I can’t stop myself from weighing in on the subject. In fact, I have started a whole new category just for this post: Blog Fuckwittery.
Anyone involved in introducing new technologies to business is aware of the fear that mere newness can create. Even if the thing you’re dealing with is not new, the fact that it may look new or have a new name causes a certain risk-averse portion of the corporate population to come out in boils and see visions of their firstborn being eaten alive by Beelzebub with a warm Chianti and French fries.
This report is the very essence of that fear of the unknown. Over on Flackster, Michael deftly deconstructs the abstract, so I shan’t repeat his words here, apart from these ones:
“Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, Remote Access Trojans, hackers, organized crime, terrorists, and others continue to make the Internet a dangerous place due to fraud, extortion, denials of service, identity theft, espionage, and other crimes. Now, blogging is emerging as a threat to the Internet user community.”
Blogs are like terrorists? Like viruses? Sorry. My flabber is too gasted to permit any kind of rational response here.
Quite. My personal flabber feels currently like it’s been taken out back and beaten senseless with a cricket bat.
The table of contents hints further at the evil that blogs do:
– Introduction
– Notice to Clients
– Blog Policies & Procedures Needed
– What is a Blog?
– Who Uses Blogs?
– Why Do Employees Use Blogs?
– Why Companies are Vulnerable to Blogging
– When Do Employees Use Blogs?
– Is Blog Use A Risky Behavior for the Enterprise?
– Home, Office Blog Linkage
– Internet Crime Overview: These Entities Can Scan
– Blogs, in Addition to the Crimes Noted
– Three Acceptable Use Policy Variants for Blogging and Bloggers
– Blog Acceptable Use Policy: ZERO TOLERANCE
– Blog Acceptable Use Policy: LIMITED USE
– Blog Acceptable Use Policy: PERMISSIONED USE
Note the use of inflammatory language, such as ‘vulnerable’, ‘risky’, ‘crime’, ‘entities’, and ‘zero tolerance’. This is using the language of the terror alert in reference to blogs in order to whip up anti-blog sentiment and trade off businesses’ fear of being somehow abused by bloggers, a fear which is quite frankly ludicrous.
There is undoubtedly a lot of sense in having a blog policy for your employees so that everyone knows where they stand, but if your employees have signed an NDA, yet you don’t trust them not to disclose your secrets, then one has to wonder why you are employing them in the first place. If they haven’t signed an NDA, maybe you should think hard about what you’re actually afraid of.
Opening a dialogue with staff who blog is easy, need not be confrontational, and should result in an acceptable use policy that both parties can live with. Yet if we take this report at face value – and until I actually get a copy of it, that’s all I can do – it seems to imply that blogs are all evil, evil things which will induce crime and corporate vandalism and spying and, oh fuck, entities! Which scan! Ffs.
Oh, I’m trying so hard not to get all ad hominem here, but the people that wrote this obviously have their head stuck up their own colon so far that their eyes are brown. I suspect that these people have no real understanding of blogging or the blogosphere at all. They conflate potential problems with blogs* and problems with emails (viruses, worms, Trojan horses etc.), phishing sites (fraud, identity theft) and hackers (denial of service attacks). I’m still not sure where the organised crime, terrorists or extortion come into it, but they are nice scary words which look good on the page.
The thing is, if there is anything nasty going on with blogs, it has nothing to do with viruses, worms, Trojans, phishing, fraud, identity theft, DoS attacks, blah blah blah, and much more to do with bloggers saying things that companies wish they hadn’t.
And porn. Strange how they haven’t mentioned porn.
Blogs are not a threat to business. Stupidity is a threat to business. Ergo, this report is a threat to business.
I can’t wait to read it, to see how they justify all this fuckwittery.
*I sincerely doubt that blogging is an important tool for corporate spies what with the traceable and non-ephemeral nature of blogs, but if there are any espionage experts who can disabuse me of this notion, please do fess up. I’d like to know: Blogspot or Typepad?