The power of blogging, and the pressure it creates...
Category Blogging
This last week has been interesting in the Domino blogging community to see how the power of blogging can influence and affect corporate entities. The prime example, of course, is the Ed Brill blog entry about the Radicati report that created a major furor over the ethics of analyst reports (and analysts themselves). The report was already on shaky ground anyway in that it looked like a Microsoft puff piece. But when certain Radicati employee(s) started posting with aliases on Ed's blog to "argue", any last shred of respect for the firm that might have remained simply disappeared. With a simple blog entry, a company's credibility was trashed. Prior to blogs, the job of opposition viewpoints was relegated to the media. And there's only so much of that to go around.
Point 2 (on a much smaller scale) was with SearchDomino. They ran a feature on the best of the Domino blogs and listed their choices. All safe and sound, except that they lifted the blog roll list from my site. Now I'd like to think that my choice of blog reading *does* reflect the best of the bunch. :-) But still, there was no acknowledgement that 95% of the entries there were a direct copy/paste from the blog. This has a much happier ending, however. The situation was blogged about, and the editor responded and corrected the oversight. So, rather than refuse to openly discuss issues (as in the Radicati situation), SearchDomino did the right thing and corrected the story. Everyone's happy...
And of course, there's my favorite. Spam Sentinel, Mayflower Software, and InsideDomino. The happy incestuous troika of product, corporation, and media in which the ownership of the media (Mayflower) is not acknowledged. This leads to InsideDomino awarding product/event awards to their own product and touting it as an extensively researched outcome. Yeah, right. Add on the fact that InsideDomino took content from Bruce Elgort's site, ran it without permission, and then refused to answer any questions or comments about it. I've blogged about this often, and I get more and more Google hits on the product. Is this really what the company wants the public to see?
I don't think it's possible to write off bad publicity as "just one blog" any more... One blog writes something. Another blog picks it up. Pretty soon it's indexed and possibly picked up by a reporter. It jumps into mainstream media and takes on a life of its own.
The power of blogging... It's rewriting the rules of media exposure and corporate power.
This last week has been interesting in the Domino blogging community to see how the power of blogging can influence and affect corporate entities. The prime example, of course, is the Ed Brill blog entry about the Radicati report that created a major furor over the ethics of analyst reports (and analysts themselves). The report was already on shaky ground anyway in that it looked like a Microsoft puff piece. But when certain Radicati employee(s) started posting with aliases on Ed's blog to "argue", any last shred of respect for the firm that might have remained simply disappeared. With a simple blog entry, a company's credibility was trashed. Prior to blogs, the job of opposition viewpoints was relegated to the media. And there's only so much of that to go around.
Point 2 (on a much smaller scale) was with SearchDomino. They ran a feature on the best of the Domino blogs and listed their choices. All safe and sound, except that they lifted the blog roll list from my site. Now I'd like to think that my choice of blog reading *does* reflect the best of the bunch. :-) But still, there was no acknowledgement that 95% of the entries there were a direct copy/paste from the blog. This has a much happier ending, however. The situation was blogged about, and the editor responded and corrected the oversight. So, rather than refuse to openly discuss issues (as in the Radicati situation), SearchDomino did the right thing and corrected the story. Everyone's happy...
And of course, there's my favorite. Spam Sentinel, Mayflower Software, and InsideDomino. The happy incestuous troika of product, corporation, and media in which the ownership of the media (Mayflower) is not acknowledged. This leads to InsideDomino awarding product/event awards to their own product and touting it as an extensively researched outcome. Yeah, right. Add on the fact that InsideDomino took content from Bruce Elgort's site, ran it without permission, and then refused to answer any questions or comments about it. I've blogged about this often, and I get more and more Google hits on the product. Is this really what the company wants the public to see?
I don't think it's possible to write off bad publicity as "just one blog" any more... One blog writes something. Another blog picks it up. Pretty soon it's indexed and possibly picked up by a reporter. It jumps into mainstream media and takes on a life of its own.
The power of blogging... It's rewriting the rules of media exposure and corporate power.
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Comments
Posted by Duffbert At 19:21:13 On 31/07/2004 | - Website - |
-rich
Posted by Richard Schwartz At 19:07:37 On 31/07/2004 | - Website - |