Blog Relations

The Easter Scandal in British politics proves once again that Government does not, and cannot understand what blogs are about. One of Gordon Brown’s closest advisers planned to plant unfounded rumours about opposition politicians and their wives in a phony blog run by a crony. Big mistake.

Three reminders about blogs.

1. Big institutions cannot find the authentic voice needed to run a successful blog. The fake blog (RedRag) would not have rung true.
2. You can’t just start a blog and expect that people will take any notice of you. It takes time, hard work, networking, and consistency for a blogger to build up a following. There was never any chance that a new fabricated blog would burst onto the scene and make waves. It would have gone unnoticed because it hadn’t taken time to grow roots and branches into the blogging scene.
3. The blogosphere is one giant lie-detector. Information in blogs that count is peer reviewed by the rest of the blogosphere. Lies and fabrications always out. It’s a myth that blogs are a good place to spread unfounded rumours. Get an unfounded rumour on the BBC (as New Labour used to do in its youth) and it becomes The Truth. To get a story established in the blogosphere, it has to stand up to vigorous cross-examination and testing.

A lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding what blogs are about – and they always will. I don’t think that governments or large companies are ever really going to “get it”.

The conclusive proof – for me – that Feedburner’s customer service has gone downhill since it joined the Google behemoth in May 2007.

When Feedburner (which does everything for your RSS feed) was still independent, I could post a question on its support formum and receive an answer within half an hour. Even if it was only : “we’re on the case” it gave you the feeling of a great company that cared about its users. The real answer would follow swiftly.

I have a problem that’s bugging the hell out of me. 24 hours after posting the question:

Zilch.

I join Scoble in my pleasure at reading that Apple has been forced to pay $700,000 to bloggers to fund their legal defence fees. It’s nice to see a bully get a bloody nose.

Edelman has been smart and admitted that it’s paying for two more Wal-Mart Propaganda blogs.

Here at Exbiblio I read a motto on one engineer’s wall, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off”. This is so true of transparent blogging.

Well done Edelman for facing up to this particular writing on the wall. That’s knocked a few years off your sentence in the Bloggers’ Re-education Camp.