As Ah-nold ridiculed the sadistic and yet cowardly stalker Dynamo in The Running Man: Lightbulb, lightbulb!

Now please don’t strain yourself trying to draw what this actually has to do with the 2,300+ words that follow, because I promise to explain before it’s over the relevance. I know, boo, hiss. Never tell, show. Show. Show.

Toby asks:

What are a blogger’s obligations when posting anything that might impact the reputation of a company? I would very much like to know your thoughts.

99% of the time I don’t consider what impact something published here will have on a company. Why? Because at the time I wrote these posts they were comprised of my honest feelings, reactions and thoughts and adding in what the company might think or how it might look to them is akin to editorial contamination, not editorial enhancement. When I write in first draft, totally raw and freeform, I am not looking for shackles and chains.

Sorry, that just leads to writer’s block.

I’m not a professional journalist although I am a professional writer. I’m not expecting press credentials or special treatment because of this website and am not always interested in researching every subject, person and situation I write about in extensive detail. Maybe that will shock some readers who expect me to get it right on the first time, every time, but sorry, this is what it is and I am what I am. No point in false bravado.

If this was a newspaper or some other major professional organization I probably would feel differently towards some of the published material. Thank goodness this isn’t because I think a lot of that professionalism ends up sucking the life out of the text. And it certainly takes considerably longer to craft some heavily researched piece versus making a blog post.

This isn’t saying untruths and completely uncredible information should ever be published. No way. It is saying that some degree of fact checking and correction can occur in a blog format after the fact.

I get confused by some bloggers who have chosen to move more and more towards traditional journalism and mainstream press and demand that those of us who don’t want to go that way are doing a disservice to the ‘blogosphere’ in general. That we are somehow shallow, unimportant, unprofessional and undeserving of their holier-than-thou position in the world.

For those elitists that think that way, screw you. Stop trying to make the rest of us out here who are very happy doing what we’re doing to be like CNN. I’m not CNN, don’t try to be, don’t want to be and don’t need to be. Take a look at my picture on the homepage of this blog. Do I look at all like Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer?

One of the major reasons I enjoy writing in the blog format is because I like being able to publish primarily in the first draft. I encourage other writers to do the same. It’s important to sharpen the blade to prevent the rust from coming. Blogging can be great practice for more professional forms of writing. This isn’t a dig BTW against blogs or saying that blogging can’t consist of professional writing, it’s a matter of fact that most blog posts are not run through a traditional publishing cycle. Not condemnation, just the facts, m’aam, as Joe Friday would say.

Sure, sometimes I’ll follow a story and dig pretty deep, do much more polishing than normal, but then instead of writing and exploring and yes, even being corrected and learning from readers, I may end up never having shared that very valuable information with the company. The experience and information may stay locked away in my brain and unavailable for Googling by the masses. A shame perhaps for somebody else who might absorb the already exhausted time for a similar endeavor.

My first reaction and impression.

You see, after a few more drafts, the blog post loses its sense of immediacy and freshness. Yes, the diction can be improved. The flow can be better. Less words. Better writing can definitely be produced with more time and effort, most certainly.

But that’s the other beauty of the blog format. That I can change what I wrote before and update and make it better by adding a newer blog entry. I won’t change past blog entries without striking the text like this and/or adding an update explaining exactly what was changed. I will fix broken sentences, add missing words or correct misspellings so long as the meaning of the text is not changed. And if any of those corrections are the result of reader commentary I do try my best to always give appropriate credit.

Responsible Blogging 101
This is what I’d call Responsible Blogging 101. Whether or not that’s an original term — it’s probably not — I’ll leave up to others to research (see what I’m saying here?). You should not try to change the past directly, but you can change it indirectly by updating and clarifying your points in brand new posts and linking back to the archived posts. Yes, you can change your mind. Yes, you can disagree with something you wrote three years ago, one year ago, one month ago, heck, even one hour ago. Those who delete old posts, change text without updates or explanation, well, they aren’t practicing Responsible Blogging 101. I also think this severely damages a writer’s credibility when they change anything other than correcting misspellings or missing words and incomplete sentences.

And those

See the sentence above. That’s an intentional broken sentence. Here is what I meant to say:

And those wondering what I meant to say here’s an example.

Yeah, I’ve done the broken sentence thing. Yes, I’ve had misspellings. Could/should I have used a spellchecker? Of course. Do I always? No. Why not? This is often first draft material.

The positive side of first draft material
In the publishing world, particularly with agent to writer relationships, that’s where first drafts are seen and read. In fact, until the web came along and the diary format — later to be popularized as blogging — rarely was first draft material published. This first draft material has given businesses a unique and exciting opportunity to get a very raw and unpolished reaction from both existing and prospective customers. No amount of market studies and polling will produce this type of feedback.

How great is that?

Let’s use Toby Bloomberg and I as an example. I didn’t know who Toby was when I wrote that the Hot Topics Blog Event wasn’t worth $645/$695 USD in December 2004. Toby was chairing that event.

I went through specific points about why that event wasn’t worth the price of admission to me before the event took place. Toby responded by saying they didn’t expect to receive this type of feedback before the event, recognizing that this type of feedback was indeed valuable. We would eventually share a dialogue and she invited me to the event which unfortunately my schedule would no longer allow me to attend.

The point is: I was thinking about attending. I was a prospective attendee and therefore a prospective customer. And I explained a point of view that is rarely published anywhere, much less for the internet at large to receive.

Now some might say this was rude and I should have emailed the response directly to Toby. Why would I publicize this specific information? Blah, blah, blah. Well, because the event was being publicized, it was being promoted to me … in public. Why should I take concerns about an event where anyone in public could attend privately? That’s not something I was asked or required to keep in confidence.

The converse of that is Search Champs where I signed an NDA specifically prohibiting me from talking about certain things I saw at Microsoft. I have held my promise there and kept that stuff private until given permission otherwise.

The long and short of it is unless I enter an agreement with you to keep something private — and some things like employer-employee business, email, IM and IRC private chats are implied agreements of privacy — then it is not private. It’s bloggable. It could become first draft material. It could ping the masses. Deal with it.

In fact, I think it’s important in the current day if you don’t want something blogged to make sure that’s well known. For example, at the recent Gnomedex Chris Pirillo announced that the Leung family didn’t want pictures taken of their children. I would add that pictures of any minors without permission is another implied agreement. I don’t want you taking pictures of my kids and blogging them without our permission. We use fictional names for our children when blogging as it is. It’s not because we want to lie to or mislead the public, but because when they become adults we feel that they should decide what they do and don’t want Googled.

No ulterior motives
My motivation for writing that post about the event Toby chaired back in 2004 wasn’t to fish for a free ticket to the event or to offend the speakers and schedule, although I’m sure a few might have been or were agitated by some stranger seemingly taking potshots at them. I know from the comment that at least the search engine folks had their feather’s ruffled. Hey, if you are going to talk to be about SEO, then you damn well better be able to show me I can learn something from your website first.

Rather, I was trying to point out all the things I consider when deciding whether to part with our hard earned money. What will the conference do for our small business? What value will be returned? Something? Nothing?

If you are speaking at an event, ask yourself what you are doing for the people in the audience? Are you making good use of their time or just being a shill for some book or selfish cause? Nobody in the audience is interested in selfish endeavors and yet conference after conference, speaker after speaker, the audience gets bombarded by the same spiel. The metal is showing in those tires.

Now of course there are exceptions and those are the conferences — or at least parts of conferences — that sing.

No BS first reactions
As somebody who not only reviews sites/services, but also builds them I realize some of the best feedback any developer/webmaster can ever receive is the kind that results from no BS first reactions and impressions. If the person reviewing the product/service is a friend, family member or somebody that doesn’t want to hurt your feelings the chances are pretty good their input will be less valuable than the person who doesn’t share that same emotional connection.

I currently give feedback and review websites, products and services here at absolutely no charge. Sure, I could charge companies for this feedback in the form of even more detailed critical analysis and maybe I should charge the ones who whine and cry instead of actually fix the problems. Fortunately the rate of those who whine vs. those who fix is very low; more companies take action instead of complain about how or what was said about them.

Consulting, maybe
I have thought about offering some consulting services and maybe someday I will. Recently a long time contract job ended so I have a little more time now than I did before and am currently weighing what the best use of that time would be. If I do this, I would likely do it in a way that didn’t promise or guarantee any sort of coverage here. If I feel some real passion toward something, it has a great chance of making it here in some form or another. That’s how I can remain pure to what I’m writing about. Keep it real.

Back to Toby’s question about blogger obligations to protect and/or consider a company’s reputation?
It’s with eveyrthing said above that I believe bloggers, if they are being completely honest (and they should be), should not be taking a company’s reputation into account with what they write. Though my title says bloggers have no obligations and I mean that, the reality is that there are cases where bloggers should exercise some common sense in what they publish.

That’s why 99% of the time I don’t think about it before publishing. The remaining 1% of time I do think about how something might be taken out of context, wrong or as completely unproductive and it is almost always after I’ve written something and am about to publish. Call this editorial seepage. Yet another reason why I don’t publish everything I write here.

It should be noted, however, that the vast majority of what remains unpublished still could be published. I think I have a pretty decent sense for when something crosses the line and becomes a legal concern and just edit that stuff out while still in first draft mode.

Common sense is the #1 blogger obligation
Obligated? No. Use common sense? Yes.

I think this applies to many blogging-related topics really. There is no obligation for bloggers not to talk about an employee-employment relationship (unless that’s spelled out in an agreement), but as I’ve written about before and again today, I would strongly advise against doing so. I also wouldn’t write about stuff that is very personal or private. It won’t be private or personal the minute the pings go out and you can’t take it back. There are too many caches out there, so be very, very certain before hitting the submit button that you really, really want to own those words for the rest of your life. Potentially, anyway.

Cut to the lightbulb picture at the top of this post, scurrilously liberated from this totally unrelated past post, hopefully to help illuminate your common sense instincts before publishing anything on the web, whether it be comment, blog post, article or other.

Common sense remains a blogger’s most trusted skill. Some will use it, other’s won’t. As writers who use the blog format — notice I didn’t just limit myself to being labeled a ‘blogger’ — we are not obligated to protect Microsoft, Apple, Google or any other company’s reputation, they are obligated to produce websites, products and services that will enhance our lives and solidify their reputation in our eyes.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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