BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM |
CORRECTING MISTAKES IN YOUR BLOG ENTRIES |
Finding a balance of competition and cooperation Showing the big picture by embedding links in your entries Making prudent decisions in workplace blogging Using RSS to your advantage while keeping readers happy.The customs that govern its expression as a publishing genre are still forming and evolving. This chapter considers several items of accepted behavior that you should know about, even if you decide to bend these nascent rules.
Some blogosphere “don’ts” have legal implications and can lead to serious liability. People have lost their jobs by blogging with poor judgment. But most of this chapter’s advice is intended to spare you from the angry repercussions of other bloggers, and readers, that can befall the careless or unaware blogger. There is more to responsible blogging than just virtual safety. The blogosphere is, at the core, a cooperative network, if an informally connected one. The most important customs regulating behavior in the blogosphere are designed to honor the whole over the parts, diminishing competition in favor of cooperation. It is the fastidiously responsible and somewhat selfless blogs that (when they present great content) gain prominence and even fame. There is also the future of blogging to consider. Nobody really knows what will become of this new genre and what role it will eventually play in the growing infrastructure of digital culture.
It is up to individual bloggers to maintain high standards of honesty, truth, credit, originality, and opinion. Like most new technologies, blogging has a mixed reputation. Standards of citizenship, whether they are called rules or customs, aim to further legitimize blogging as it matures.
The words honesty and authenticity are often applied to Weblogs — by bloggers. Honest blog writing is universally cited as a requirement of the genre.This ideal appears on nearly all how-to lists compiled by bloggers. I doubt that the public at large considers blogs any more or less honest than other types of Web sites. But because so many prominent blogs straddle the line between objective news and personal opinion, all bloggers demand attempted truthfulness at all times. Speed and accuracy: A difficult match The emphasis on truth applies mainly to topical blogs, of course, not the personal diaries. If you post about what you had for breakfast, chances are good nobody will care if you lie about your cereal. Topical blogs typically follow a link-and-comment format in which a news story (or other blog entry) is cited with commentary. The commentary, or a summary of the linked article, might introduce facts to the reader, and that is where mistakes can happen. Naturally, mistakes do happen and are perfectly well accepted as long as they are acknowledged.
The lightning reaction speed of the blogosphere creates errors. Topical blogs are often on the cutting edge of news discovery, reporting, and commentary.The quest for recognition and status can lead to carelessness — a fact known all too well by the mainstream media, especially on election night. In fact, acknowledging the inevitability of errors is a distinction of the blogosphere, which has evolved customs and standards for dealing with mistakes. Rules of correction Along with truth, transparency is held in high regard by bloggers. That means not only correcting mistakes but acknowledging them and, ideally, making the correction in a way that reveals a before-and-after trail. This style, in which an error is corrected but not eliminated from view, is considered far preferable to simply rewriting the post. You leave yourself open to special criticism if you receive a comment pointing out a mistake, and then erase the mistake with no acknowledgment. And if you also fail to respond to the comment, look out.