Blaglash.com

Over the past few months of regular blogging, I have written many blogs about products, services, and people I think are truly great. In fact, that’s 90% of what I typically write about.

But the flip side of that coin is that, since I so value honesty, I’ve personally written several blogs that range from borderline negativity to borderline smeary.

The reason I will continue to write these negative blogs is twofold. First, it shows that I’m honest. If 100% of my blog posts were positive reviews of things, my blog would read as an advertisement. Second, and most important, writing a negative blog about a product, service, or person is an interesting experiment in how they react.

When I write a negatively-slanted blog, and my first comment is that person or a representative of the company and they are open-minded to my suggestions and more levelheaded than I am, I realize that all of this has a point.

In other words, people are listening, and the best businesses are the ones who roll up with their cavalry to extinguish the fire when it’s still a spark.

I really respect that.

Notice some of the employees of Sk*rt (now renamed to Kirtsy, which is easily the best submitted name and with a new verb “scoop” that is reminiscent of an answer to questions we have begged before here on Blaglash) commenting here both when our reviews of their site are positive and when they are negative. When a company keeps their ear to the street, you know that they care and it shows real promise.

How about Dogster? I’ve been pretty scathing about their business practices and online presence a few times now, but what has their response been? No comments, no acknowledgment of my concerns. Just an email from Twitter notifying me that their founder is now following me. Any company unwilling to jump into the conversation will be continually lashed, as they are giving me and every other blogger reason to concern.

What about the band Needle Up! who I was fairly brutal to? Today I woke to an email from their drummer, who seems sweet and sincere. From her email:

Hi Bryan,

I recently came across your google bomb of my band Needle Up!. I wanted to personally apologize if you got friend blasted from us. We were trying out a targeted messaging system to reach our fans since the “contact by region” for the event inviter has been broken for some time on MySpace. (You know, when you get an event invite from 30 states away, and you’re wondering why…)

So we were actually trying to be LESS spammy by using this program and I’m not sure how you ended up getting friend blasted by us other than either user error or program malfunction.

Either way, wasn’t our intention, and I also don’t recall getting a message from you, otherwise I would have responded to it if you were getting bombed with friends messages as I find that quite annoying as well, and never approve them myself.

Regardless, we have stopped using the program about a month ago due to all the bugs we were having with it.

Thanks,
Liz
drummer for Needle Up!

Would you look at that. My only resounding criticism against them was their unwillingness to jump into the conversation and have a human conversation with me. Either on Myspace or eventually here. By sending this email she’s done three things. First, she’s acknowledged a spark, Second, she’s put it out, and third, she’s made me look like an ass with too much time on my hands. Check mate for her and Needle Up!. Plus she’s a freelance developer and it turns out we have a lot in common. Can you imagine that? Our differences have brought us together.

But should I be the one to preach about blogger morality?

Certainly not.

Check out this blog post from a collaborative blog I occasionally post on.

What started out as a slightly funny but completely tasteless joke has now spawned tens of thousands of reads and over 50 comments.

Our joke about a celebrity’s death who we knew nothing about turned out to be the medium that actually broke the news to many of his fans.

And they deserve much more from us, their reporters, than what we’ve provided.

So for that, I apologize.

But the important thing is I’m continuing the conversation.