Bloggasm

Almost two years ago, frequent bloggasm reader Stephen Ward wrote a blog post about his terrible experience dealing with a company called Tiny Details. It wasn’t long before the post showed up on Google and ranked rather highly. Since posting it, he’s had a number of strangers show up in his comments thread thanking him for the post and saying it deterred them from doing business with the company.

Well, it took him long enough, but the president of the company finally did a Google search and found the post. Did he try to address the problems? Of course not, instead he emailed Stephen and threatened a libel lawsuit:

I am writing about the substantively incorrect postings that you have on your
website.

I am asking that you remove this point immediately. Your representation of
Tiny Details is inacurate and libelous.

I have forwarded this information to our company attorney, along with your
domain registration information.

Please govern yourself accordingly.

Kristopher Buchan
President
Tiny Details, LLC

And then after Stephen wrote a quick response asking the company owner to point out which statements were libelous, he responded with this:

Mr. Ward,

You will be hearing from our attorney.

What you have posted is indeed libel.

I am in the process of seeking your address through your domain registrating information. You will be hearing from us shortly.

Kristopher Buchan

Big no-no, Mr. Buchan. If you’ll look in the revised 21st century PR handbook, it says to never send angry emails to bloggers and expect them not to post them. Actions like that tend to come back and bite you in the ass.

I’ve been exhausted and haven’t had much free time lately, so instead of real content here are some media-related links.

1. Osama Bin Laden. Barack Obama. What’s the difference? They both look the same.

2. Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch. Did the reporter for this article ever stop and say, “Hey, maybe I should ask this guy to show some evidence that he will triple his book sales, rather than just reprinting his quotes without scrutiny.”

3. I’ve expressed doubt before that book blurbs from mid-list authors help sell books. So it goes without saying that blurbs between MFA buddy-system poets aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.

4. The New York Times wasn’t wrong for writing that article about McCain. We were wrong for misunderstanding it.

About a year ago I published an article titled “The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales.” I wasn’t the first person to offer this theory — early Creative Commons users have been praising the power of “free” for years.

Chris Anderson, editor for Wired and author of The Long Tail, has just published a new feature article that serves as a preview of the book with the same title: “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“

I tend to agree with this article, which dissects arguments made by newspaper owners that the internet really isn’t all the profitable yet. As the author points out, very few of these newspapers are trying engage and attract advertisers online in the same way that blogs are currently doing.

Take the company blogads for instance. It allows you to find a blog by niche, view its traffic number, and tells you outright what the ad rates are for a week, two weeks or even two months. A savvy person can log in, quickly place an ad, and never have to speak to an actual human being.

How many newspapers are monetizing their sites in such a way? Not many. Most advertisers have to hunt down an ad rep on the phone, find out some sliding scale of rates, and then fax over proofs of the ads. A much longer and less efficient process. It’s certainly a process that has its uses, but if you want to attract much smaller advertisers, it’s just not going to cut it.

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Related posts:
1. Advertising in ebooks
2. The extent of the damage to the newspaper industry

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. The American Journalism Review wonders how many journalists use Wikipedia as a source, and whether it’s becoming acceptable.

2. Poor people use Yahoo. Educated people use Google.

3. NYT Makes Comma Error Inside Semicolon Article. The irony!!

4. “Sometimes I read old articles from the National Review and I think, where did that spirit of frank, open racism go?”

5. The background story on how and why the New York Times published its silly hit piece on John McCain yesterday.

Are video sites creating an up-the-ante situation, where people are doing weirder and weirder things in order for their videos to go viral? Watch the video embedded below to find out:

From xkcd.

I don’t really engage in online arguments that much anymore, probably because I visit only a handful of political websites these days. But I honestly remember having conversations like this one with a girlfriend I had in college: