Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

You don’t build communities overnight. They have to be seeded, nurtured, and with some attention and interaction they may grow. Same with integrity. You don’t get it by slapping a badge on your website and say “Look at me, look at me! I’m just riddled with integrity now”. You earn it and much like a nickname, you don’t conjure it up yourself. The privilege has to be given to you from some third party. 

I went down a slippery slope last week thinking that the Blog With Integrity site meant something. It does. It means you went to the site, grabbed their code to put on your website, and maybe made a half-hearted attempt at following the guidelines they put together but that’s it. As they say on their website there’s no cost or complicated application process, just display the badge (and optionally sign a pledge page, which carries about the same merit as any Internet petition).

Recently when the people behind the site were asked about what their stance was regarding a certain blogging incident that had the twitter-verse (as well as many news sites) up in arms, they fled to the dark regions of the Internet like brave Sir Robin and came out with this non-response-response:

Over the weekend, a blogger wrote a negative post about her experiences with the TSA during an airport security screening. The TSA refuted her claims in a post that included video of the incident. The inevitable blogstorm ensued.

The blogger displays the Blog with Integrity badge on her blog, and we have been asked in email, in posts and on Twitter about the matter. Some have called for us to ask her to remove the badge. Others merely wonder what we will do.

Here is our position:

Disputes and disagreements are between the parties involved. There are two sides to every story. It’s only fair to let a story play out before anyone makes up their mind.

Blog with Integrity is a voluntary community effort. Not a regulatory body. We don’t make decisions about your integrity. You do. Your readers do. The badge is a symbol of a blogger’s personal commitment to the principles of the pledge; only he or she can decide whether or not to display it.

In this case, we hope that everyone who has blogged, commented or tweeted about the incident will take the opportunity to re-examine his or her own words, and act accordingly.

Remember the final line of the pledge: “I own my words. Even if I occasionally have to eat them.”

Bollocks. Either the group, the followers, and slapping a badge of honor on your site means something or it doesn’t. Stop lolly-gagging around the bases, grow some balls, put some teeth behind the group and start acting like adults. Adults can have opinions and it’s those differing opinions that make communities what they are today and make them interesting to participate in and observe.

Some people will choose to ignore the badge if you don’t believe in it, but then where’s the credibility that you think is behind that 160 pixel square image? Don’t believe in the badge, but it believes in you kind of crap? Credibility, like integrity, is something to be earned. Any kind of blog-bling needs to be something that stems from a process of recognition and acknowledgment rather than copy-n-paste skills of a blogger. I generally give credibility to those that I know and follow, or at least have heard of and can find evidence of said credibility. How do you measure credibility from someone you don’t know?

As a blogger I write with passion and I need to remember and remind myself something above all. Be humble. I remember those words weaved in the Wilbur’s barn by a spider named Charlotte so many years ago, and I try to practice the humble principle every day. It’s okay to be wrong. In fact, it’s a good thing and we need to temper our ego-centric selves with it once in awhile. The more you write the more people read and the more numbers you see in your membership. At some point this wave crests and you say to yourself “I’m important and must have something good to say, otherwise why would anyone listen to it?”. The mere factoid that you have a million people listening to you simply means that somewhere out there a million people *think* you have something interesting to say. Where did you make the leap from someone thinking you have something interesting to say to concrete evidence that you do? It’s the McDonald’s mentality for blogger and something that will get you in a lot of hot water really fast. Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s good.

I highly doubt anyone wants to read something that’s entirely *right*. If you’re never wrong, why would anyone listen to more than 140 characters from you? What’s the point of writing 1,000 words in a lengthy drawn out essay (like this one) if you’re really the authoritative source on things. Be humble and expect to be wrong on more than one occasion. Like I said, I think this is an important part of the blogger makeup. You also need to admit when you’re wrong. I can be pretty opinionated at times and I’m sure that opinion (which sometimes comes out as “facts”) is exactly that, wrong. However I’m fully willing to stand up in front of the 10,000 people that read my blog (or 10 in my case) and say “I WAS WRONG” and explain here’s why. I think it makes us *more* human in the long run. When faced with undeniable evidence that you’re wrong, don’t hide behind a flashy dance of smoke and mirrors and indirection trying to distract the reader with techno-babble and bullshit. Stand up and tell it all, which might mean people drop off and some of your *favorite* fans might vanish from your electronic existence. So be it.

How many people have you added to your Facebook account as a “friend” just because they know someone you do (or several people) even though you’ve never heard of the person. I’ve stopped this insanity just to try to get my friend count up so I can kill more werewolves or knock over that big heist in a game where I need 100+ friends to participate. What is the measure of a friend? On Facebook apparently it’s someone you add to an ever growing list, even though you don’t know the person at all. Even when people “friend me” I have to question what is it they’re trying to do? Is this the digital equivalent of the local bar where someone buys you a drink in order to get to know you? Then where is the followup. These so called “friends” want me to add them, but then all I get is extra noise in my feed from them mowing the lawn and buying a new dress. It’s excessive bytes to my already growing stream and not even as good as friends with benefits.

Twitter is no different and I keep trying to prune my herd down to something manageable. Do I *really* know 1000+ people. In twitter land you follow people to keep on top of what they have to say, indicating that you’re actually interested in what they have to say but it’s a one-way street. Sometimes it’s reciprocal but most times you’re listening to a dead phone with nobody on the other end to hear your message. As with Facebook I’m trying to keep my friends down to a dull roar (I think I’m only following a few hundred which I think is manageable). However I have close to 1000 followers, people that think I have something interesting to say. Where is the exchange of pleasantries like the smokey-filled bar with Twitter? Where do I get to vote who can hear me. Sure, I can systematically go in and block people, but that takes time and effort and in this digital age of Internet time we can’t stop and prune our address books on a regular basis. Do you really think Wil Wheton is going to go through his 1.4 million followers and pick the ones he knows and trusts (BTW, he only follows 126 people out of 1.4 million followers, a pretty good ratio IMHO).

Darwin called it natural selection. The concept of fitness is central to natural selection. Modern evolutionary theory defines fitness not by how long an organism lives, but by how successful it is at reproducing. So it seems social networking has taken this concept head on and refuses to buck the trend. The bigger the number of followers you have, the more people you have subscribed to your RSS feed, the higher Google Page Rank your site can fetch. All meaningless numbers that apparently are line items to help you survive.

Rather than quality, we’ve chosen quantity as a measure of success. With that measure comes those things we deem important like integrity and credibility yet we forget the meaning behind them and blindly follow the masses. We need to stop this mindless lemming mentality and stand up for what we truly believe to be right that’s tempered with what is true. We need to stop being self-centered, self-serving sheep with no individuality. We need to stop knee-jerk reacting to what we hear in a twittter-stream and be responsible journalists by reporting the researched facts that have a basis in reality.

Above all, we need to stand up to and take responsibility in a neighborhood watch-like manner on the Internet. When we see something wrong, we right it, we don’t blatantly spread ever post that some idiot with a blog writes without really knowing what we’re talking about and what the consequences of our actions are, directly or indirectly. If we choose to be different we are sometimes ostracized. We have sunken to the digital equivalent of the Salem witch hunts, or more appropriately the witch trials of Monty Python and the Holy Grail where a credible source is measured against the weight of a duck and shuffled away without a thought, while some moistened bint lobbs a blog post or a tweet that everyone proclaims as gospel.

Like I said, communities grow as do friendships, integrity and credibility. Like a garden if something is rotten you cut it off so it doesn’t infest and take out your entire pumpkin patch. If it grows back then perhaps it’s a little stronger than before and we should consider letting it back in to flourish. However in the meantime stop catering to the masses and making excuses for those that should know better.