The Les Blogs Name-Calling

This is starting to really circle wide. The Register is now reporting about it and I’d like to give a few words about what happened.

First of all, it is not so bad. Really. Mena did her talk and it was around a touchy subject. The thing is that sometimes discussions on blogs can get out of hand. Ben and Mena have now written more about it. The part which gets all the interest is the time Mena said Ben acted like an asshole the entire first day on the conference in the backchannel. Ben of course doesn’t think he was. He was harsh though but that might just be how he is.

The thing is that this is a problem of such conferences as well as the blogging world, or even the world, as a whole. We come together in such conferences believing we are all friends and in a sense we are. If you really think about it though, we are just a pretty big community of practice that gives us a common base to rest our relationships on. We are still very different and we do not really know each other. Calling each other friends might be going a bit overboard, even though it was a really friendly environment and everybody was connecting on a personal level and opening up. The problem is that this doesn’t yet enable us to know how we all talk and what the deeper meaning of our words is. We just have a good level of trust towards each other.

In the blogging world this is similar, because everybody can talk, and with the growth of the ecosystem, the diversity grows and suddenly the blogging world isn’t a community of practice in itself. It doesn’t have one base to rest its conversations upon. This makes the problem a bigger one because we will have a hard time to interpret what different people say in the right way. In your real inner friends circle, you filter out people that you do not really like, but within this circle of friends, people can be a lot harsher towards each other because we know that that one guy just talks like this. We can interpret his words in the right way. This cannot happen in the blogging world because as Cluetrain said, it’s about the conversation, but that conversation is not normalized. The diversity is immense. Hence we will have problems with finding out which people we like and which people we don’t like. We will have problems finding out which people talk in which ways when saying the same thing.

The only thing that I can think of to help in this system is to deeply integrate social networking. It’s the idea of a friend of a friend being my friend. To a large part that is true and it especially allows me to give the other person some slack. If a friend says that the other guy is good, then we should trust that to some extent.

This is what should have happened at Les Blogs. dotBen, how Ben called himself, wasn’t being rude in the chat, because it is the way he expresses himself. And we could have known that because he was at Les Blogs, he is a generally nice guy. The conference was getting big enough though that you couldn’t be sure of that, because there could be any number of people in there that were an asshole. Had he called himself with his full name in the back channel, this wouldn’t have happened most likely and that’s a big part of what Mena touched upon. We need to make sure that we know who is blogging what, and we need to make sure that we know that person’s connections. I could for example envision a system where when I look at a blog, and can see the route to that person in LinkedIn and OpenBC from me to them. This would allow me to treat them in the right way, to be sure that the common language from any of my communities of practices will be understood.

So thanks a lot for Mena to have the courage to bring it up, and sorry to have been there when she snapped a bit, which shouldn’t have happened but (!) which really brought the conversation to the right level. Thanks to Ben for standing up when he was asked to. I bow my head to both of you.

Technorati Tags: Ben, Blogging, Cluetrain, Communities of Practice, Conversations, Mena, lesblogs, Social Networking