The last week has been an interesting one for trolling. First, there was O’Neill’s now-infamous screed decrying the lack of quality in the blogosphere. I’ll allow Mr. O’Neill to summarize his manifesto himself by quoting from his opening paragraph:
“That’s it, I must speak out. I can hold my peace no longer. After two months of maintaining a weblog … I am shocked by the Blogosphere’s often poor quality of writing and its celebration of pithy opinion over considered judgement.”
(No, really. He actually writes like that).
What some folks don’t know is that Mr. O’Neill distributed a link to his post via an email blast to an unknown number of bloggers; myself included. (The number is unknown as he BCCed everyone).
Now, given that it was about bad blogging, and that O’Neill’s message read simply “I thought you might be interested in this….”, there are several possible interpretations:
A) He thought the people he mailed it to are paragons of bloggerly virtue, and would nod their heads vigorously, murmuring “Yes, yes, Brendan! You’ve put your finger on it!” and then journey forth to spread the Blogger Quality Gospel.
B) He thought those on the list were the worst examples of offenses against quality blogging, and graciously decided to share his wisdom with them in the hopes that one day they may aspire to the heights which he has already reached.
C) He’s a big troll.
Remember: When in doubt with multiple choice tests, go with C.
But Mr. O’Neill wasn’t only major troll this week: Saturday brought to my inbox (and many others) a note from Benjamin Fischer, who had an Alterman-bashing post to share. Ben, in his enthusiasm, sent an email to about fifty bloggers — an unlike Mr. O’Neill, did not BCC them:
Come look at my blog.
Have an interesting post. http://benfischer.blogspot.com/2002_07_14_benfischer_archive.html#78955888.
This led to some ugliness, when Kevin O’Donovan decided to Reply All, blasting Ben for his message (with all the rest of us copied in):
Benjamin:
I hope you do, or will soon, realize that what you have just done is
tantamount to:
I’ve just posted some OMG HOT HOT HOT new fully nude pictures of myself!
Come look at www.imaspammingidiot.com.
As a result, I will never, ever, read your blog again, and I hope others
will folllow.
Sincerely,
Kevin O’Donovan
Thankfully, the Reply Alls died down swiftly after that. Ben, to his credit, apologized later on his blog for the broadcast email; Kevin did not.
Anyway, thinking back on these incidents, I decided to toss out a few questions for discussion here.
1) Of these three, who’s the biggest troll?
2) What rules do you generally follow when trying to draw attention to your posts? Do you ever email them to other bloggers?
3) How do you feel about receiving email from other bloggers? What kinds of messages are likely to get your interest, and what kinds are likely to cause you to hit delete?
Please note that I’m not searching for ‘consensus’ on some code of blogger conduct, here. (I’ll leave that to Mr. O’Neill). In my mind, there can be and should be no consensus on these matters: every blogger is a rule of law unto themselves; they should conduct their blog business precisely as they see fit, not according to any imposed norms of behavior from “The Community”.
But I am curious to see how wide the spectrum of those varied approaches stretches; hence, the questions. I wait in curiosity…
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technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.