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October 29, 2005

Don't knock 'em, join 'em

This is not a review of the original smear work -- because I'm too lazy to find my login, and BugMeNot.com doesn't do it for me here -- but a sort of grin and shake of the head at the virulent BoingBoing response.

Apparently a journalist named Daniel Lyons's piece called Attack of the Blogs got published at Forbes.com. Surprise, surprise, on the hard-to-completely-censure WWW some folks are saying things about companies, and not all of it is hagiographic. Furthermore, it's not all from the lunatic fringe which comprises about 98% of the Web:

Some companies now use blogs as a weapon, unleashing swarms of critics on their rivals. "I'd say 50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors," says Bruce Fischman, a lawyer in Miami for targets of online abuse.

Nicely placed free ad, Bruce. (You now owe me part of 1/1660 of $0, which is what my blog is worth.) I agree that you should position it that way, because if it's just customers idly dissing companies who potentially accidentally gave them bad goods or services, there're no deep pockets to sue.

Stepping back, why does this sort of stuff get Slashdotted, BoingBoing'd, etc.? Who cares? I mean, journalists evidently do, because if blogging gets more interesting than journalism, it's going to be hard to keep getting those same writing jobs. Think reality TV, cheaper for the same audience. We'll all have Google ads down the sides.

Companies perhaps care a little bit, because whereas they can count on journalists to censor themselves effectively, bloggers have less to lose (unless they misstep and say something nasty about their own bosses).

So there's potentially some reason for companies to want to keep the gossip under control, especially given how flaky investors can be. Perhaps Sun actually did do the right thing, by encouraging it's own employees to blog about work. Employee bloggers will be sure to censure themselves. Once in a while someone forgets, but it's usually pretty mild, like not being in a complete mind meld with whatever tack management just took while you had your head down, working. Most of the time it's free advertising and page rank. Once you let people go internally like that, you also have a potential army of bloggers saying good things for each malcontent out there. A no brainer.

Posted by Mark at October 29, 2005 02:36 PM

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