CT Biz Blogs

For my final post in the 20 blog types marathon, I’d like to talk about blog etiquette and call for blog civility.

I firmly believe that weblogs represent a new opportunity for everyone — blog software has lowered the barrier for publishing on the web. It’s now so much easier than ever to add your voice to the distributed conversation.

But I’d like to remind everyone that once you publish your blog, you can’t take back what you’ve said. Cruel words, written in haste or anger, will be available for everyone to see. Even if you take back a post, chances are good that Google has cached it, or someone has seen it in their RSS feed reader and saved it before you could take it back.

It’s ok to be goofy, to make a mistakes, even to be boring from time to time. You can recover from that, should you care to (I’m all in favor of more goofiness). But cruelty lives on, even after apologies are made.

This goes for comments as well. I’ve been lucky so far, and I haven’t been slammed yet. But I’ve certainly read plenty of rude and uncalled-for comments in other blogs. As a blogger, you’ll need to learn not to take it personally and not to respond (or to respond instead to the ideas, not to the manner in which they were expressed). And as a commenter, if you’re angry or upset, write your words in a text editor like Notepad first, walk away, and then read them before you copy and submit.

That way, you’ll have added something worthwhile to the conversation.

Upate: This just in– here’s another blogger who’s got the right idea.