The Day "the Conversation" Died

Bloggers Unite!

So the world is taking blogging serious. Cool I guess. Maybe, I would rather be taken as a clown if this is what you get for sharing your opinion. I mean thought leadership. You see bloggers are getting sued. It tends to happen in a "down" market.

The short of it is that a blogger is getting sued by a builder because the blogger called the builder a bad name. Well, kinda. He said the builder is bankrupt or going bankrupt, or filed bk. I'm not sure. Because, I am not sure who to believe. You see I have read about this on a ton of other blogs, but not on the perps blog. (I say perp with all due respect to our brother blogger)

Obviously, I think you would have to shirk this off as frivolous. But a defense still costs money. This isn't the first time this has happened. You see SEO blog dude Aaron Wall got sued when a commenter, commented on Aaron's blog. And apparently the subject of the commentary took exception to the tone. One can argue that in the end the super energized publicity helped Aaron's business.

Multiple Blogonality Syndrome

My first thoughts on this one was echoed by the story Hell Hath no Fury Like a Blogger Sued. Anyone with more than one email address can logically deduce that the net is easily anonymous. And add in some 2.0 and it is easy to fight back.

In fact, a whole new subset of SEO is emerging called Reputation Management As Sellsius asks ,instead of controlling the news by simply asking for a retraction or correction, this builder used old methodologies to squash it.

The New Media, a Rainmakers Goldmine

If you have not figured it out yet, the Net is the last of untapped litigious goldmines. And the opportunity is ripe. However, if exploited by the "digital ambulance chasers", it could unravel the thing we call Web.

Search engines spider and copy & publish your website, without invitation. The rule is you have to tell them not to copy and hold it. In the offline world this is akin to having to put a do not trespass sign on your front door. Now the relationship is a give and take and we all love Googlebot when it visits our web pages. And thats why it works.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. Yet most people even educators treat it as such. There is no accredited or governing body that manages the truthfulness of this information. Thus, it is bound to be flawed.

In a Sports Illustrated article of last year Rick Reilly- (p 142 3.26.2007)
illustrated the absurdity of fake identities.

"Celebrities are poked on FaceBook, or MySpace Friend Requests, and if you don't have a MySpace someone will make sure you do! ..Tiger Woods has 391 MySpace profiles. ...thats what he does with his time between tournaments."

"Potentially more damaging is the phony input into Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that users can edit.Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is irate over Wikipedia posts containing false information in his biography; it said that he drank a fifth of booze while also taking Vicodin and that he beat members of his family."

Multiple user interfaces have sprung up everywhere across the net. Linked In, Active Rain, and even newspapers like The OC Register now offer blogs.

Stop Wars by Being Good Netizens

But the netizenry get along. Somehow it all just works out. But if you would look at the above examples you will see much of it is intra dependent on one another. And much of it is user generated output (Web 2.0) . Linked-In does not publish. Its users do.

In the case of the builder who is suing the blogger certainly a netizen would have asked the builder to retract or give the builder a chance for a rebuttal. In the New Media this just fuels the fire and the publicity spread across the web.

The Death of a Movement

If you have ready any of my posts you certainly may get the impression that I am everything anti 2.0. Actually I am just sick of the hype around 2.0 as it is nothing but more functional websites that perhaps can offer more meaning to the user experience.

If every time someone has to worry about a disclaimer, or disclosure to CYA (if you do not know this acronym then sit on your hands) then certainly this will kill anyone's desire to allow for the free flow of information.

I first found this story at Phoenix real estate guy, and I jokingly commented with a disclosure of opinion just about every four lines. If the lawyers start dictating web writing. You can call the web all but DEAD.

As netizens I think we tend to let bygones be bygones. However, as most Realtors know when they fill out those 30 pages of disclosures, it just ain't so in the unwired world.

It would be disastrous if this legal thinking was to infiltrate the web. I certainly do not think the web should get a moral pass. But I do think it is a great example of self regulation.

The netizenry tends to regulate itself quite well. And when someone falls out of line, the conversation of the masses tend to flog the perpetrators. Sometimes righteously and sometimes unrighteously.

Now some will say that there is a level of journalistic integrity that should govern publisher behavior. To call blogging the new journalism is to not quite get blogging. At best it is an editorial view. It is rife with opinion which is why people read them. Even the bigger bloggers like say Copy Blogger who offers a series of how to posts, is in effect offering opinions.

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