Marketwatch's Bambi Francisco asks for advice on managing interaction toward a positive end:
"One [visitor] recently told me to keep my personal ideologies to myself. That was odd. It's my blog, after all. What did I learn? I learned that the audience wants to be heard, wants to control, wants to have some sort of authority and influence, even if it means kicking a blogger off their own blog. The panel discussion didn't really help me to figure out how to control this mob, though. How do you manage, organize and measure what is relevant?"
Comments
I can relate
We had a little eruption of anti-citizen journalism from a local blogger and his readers yesterday. He didn't like my suggestion that if he didn't think there was enough local music coverage on our site, he could submit some items to "Your Words." He really attacked the whole "journalism as a conversation" idea. Apparently, we in big media doing blogging and bring citizen reports and seeking conversation are just A) ripping off the little people; B) too lame to come up with our own stories; C) desperate to save our failing business by ripping off bloggers. Or something like that. The whole argument isn't entirely coherent. But it's the first time I've run into this sentiment against MSM using blogs and reader contributions. Instead of seeing it as a community service, as a way to expand the conversation and inform the community better, some people apparently see it as a big crime.
consider the source of the comments first
I'm not a big-media blogger, but when I wrote an entry critical of the Washington Post's inclusion of Jane Hamsher on its panel on ethics and interactivity, which then got linked by Glenn Reynolds, boy! did I get an eyeful! you can see for yourself here...the thing is, though, when I took a second look at all the comments, the majority of them were *not* from other bloggers (even if they had Blogger I.Ds) Rather, many of the comments were from anonymous non-bloggers and reminded me more of the folks who troll forums than from bloggers who read and respond to others' blogs.
It was also very odd how so many admonished me to apologize to a big media personage and didn't cut me any slack on the "my blog-my opionin" front. Apparently, if you don't tow the "party line" on certain issues, you're going to hear it...
Yet the anonymous non-blogger comment hogging-blog hijacking is something I've seen happen on highly popular blogs like Daily Kos--and just might have something to do with the decisions of some high-profile blogs like Boing Boing to discontinue comments.
My point is that big media should put in a little more effort to try to find out if the people who are leaving comments are actually bloggers or if they're just forum trolls, rather than painting all responders to their blogs as "bloggers." There is, though, another two-way street issue in that people are only now thru mediums such as blogging, learning to dialogue with big media. Think about it: up until recently all we had was screaming at the tv. Is it any wonder, then, that some people might not recoginze how to communicate effectively and might still want to scream at the tv by leaving inappropriate comments? It will, then, take time for both big media and the people to learn how to communicate with one another.