I’m not going to fan the flames that followed a recent post from Google’s Adam Bosworth, mostly because I thought the reactions that it spawned were wildly overblown, but hunt around and you’ll find the entries in question. Confirming either the growing significance of blogs or the lengths to which the media will go to plumb for Google vs Microsoft friction, the Wall Street Journal even picked up on it.
Flames, of course, are nothing new to the online world – any long time user of newgroups, IRC, forums, or even email has likely encountered if not been a subject of similar invectives.
But the fallout from this type of exchange I think could be more significant. Just as Alex mentions that his father’s blog may be retired because of this exchange, Werner Vogels cites it as a prime example of behavior that acts as a drag against his posting.
The problem in some respects derives from precisely what I find attractive about blogs – namely that they’re an often fascinating blend of work experiences and personal opinions. There’s a fine line between our opinions and those of our employers at times, and this is all the more delicate when you work for a firm with its share of enemies. And therein lies the problem.
Adam and other corporate bloggers like Scoble who’ve suffered a similar fate are big boys, and can no doubt shrug off the personal attacks quite easily. But when critics use your entries against you as a means to criticize your employer, hijacking content you produced, I’d imagine that’s a bit more difficult to swallow.
But while they’re certainly part of the problem, in this case, I also think that blogs are part of the solution. One of the qualities of blogs occasionally lamented now (and wait until more of us have been doing this for a while) – their persistence – has asbestos like potential in a flame war. It would be difficult for anyone to contend that Adam is a free loader, or one who’s content to leave the heavy lifting to others. His blog, you see, would argue the opposite. Whether or not the work he does is shared back with the community is a legitimate question, but so’s this one: what has Google ever asked from its users?
I hope that Adam and Werner and anyone else who have had the flames spill over into their work life doesn’t let that obscure the potential for good blogs have. If people begin deciding that blogging represents a risk to their career and their employer, we’ll all be the poorer. It’d be a shame to lose some of our more interesting voices simply because a few folks are incapable of civilized discourse.
