vendredi 2 janvier 2004
Think before you leap
I'll be honest. I'm one of those types of people who speak before they think it through. I've had tons of foot-in-my-mouth experiences in my life, coupled with numerous apologies for speaking rashly. Well, that seems to carry over into blogging for me as well. I made a comment on Irene's blog that in retrospect, sounds insensitive and frankly, rude, on a post about The Blogdom of God. This is what I wrote there:
"It seems like a self-promotional tool where people are in it only for the rankings. It is also contrived when people link to each other only for the sake of boosting their own blog, and not because of its content."
- "Helping God Out"
I had written this because of a post that I read on Bene Diction's blog where Bene talked about the previous rules of the Blogdom, which had included:
3. Link to at least 10 Blogs that could be definied as God Blogs, half of which are also members of the Blogdom of God Alliance.
4. To aim to link to an individual post from another God Blog on at least a weekly basis (daily would be nice, this condition is waived in certain circumstances)
- "Earthquake - Aggregator"
I felt that this (then) mandatory rule would lead to linking only for the sake of linking (which would in fact, garner higher rankings on search engines like Google). I did not want to be restricted in what I linked to, because I wanted the freedom to link to what I thought were blogs of quality content, and not just because they were part of the Alliance. This is what I thought was the contrived part.
I failed to check back on this post and see that an update had been added where these rules where removed for membership. So my comment was made out of context and was based on dated information.
Anyways, I did get a chance to go back to both blogs and read what Adrian wrote in response to the negative criticism he has received because of the blog. He was also gracious enough to email me and thank me for not attacking him in public on my blog. That shocked me, so I would like to apologize for anything I may have written which might have made Adrian look bad, because as he said, "he's not an ogre really!"
And after thinking about what he has written, I would be inclined to agree. We link to other people because we are challenged by what they've written or we want to give credit for a post they have typed. It really doesn't have anything to do with "self-promotion"; it just gets your voice out there, giving people the option of reading your blog if they choose to. And when people do link, it's more of an honour than anything. I mean, I was pleasantly surprised to find my previous post linked to on Adrian's blog himself.
Well, this has been one of my resolutions this year, to think before I say anything or in this case, type anything! But I know that I would never set out to make anyone look bad. If I ever do, it's usually because of an accident and I'll be the first to beg forgiveness. It's just not proper blogger etiquette or Christian love.
