Tuesday I had lunch with the Burlington Free Press newsroom. Reporters, columnists, editors and bloggers sat around a large table and ate pizza while I ate my veggie-on-wheat sandwich and talked with them about blogging. It was a good talk. For the first time ever, I was asked to come and talk about new media to a group of people who actually knew what RSS was without me having to point them to Wikipedia (and justify using an untrustworthy source like Wikipedia at the same time). Nearly every hand went up when I asked how many of them read blogs daily. Fully half the hands went up when I asked how many of them maintain their own blogs. I began to wonder if what I had to say would be of any use to them at all.
I think it went well and we got into some interesting territory, particularly around commenting communities and moderation. The Free Press hosts
a whole slew of blogs and each has its own moderation policy, depending upon the will and whim of the given blogger. Most of the news stories in the online edition of the paper have commenting options as well. The question is, how do you allow for an open dialog with members of the community
and maintain a commenting culture that isn't overrun with anonymous trolls and abusive, lowest common denominator behavior?
I spent a little time on Monday night perusing the Freeps blogging scene and of the 19 different staff blogs (!) listed on the Free Press website, most had little in the way of an active commenting community. Interestingly, there were two blogs that stood out as good examples for my presentation -- one that appeared to have a healthy, active community of commenters, and one that seemed utterly broken in this respect.
The broken commenting community belongs to
VT Buzz, a political blog run by staff writers Terri Hallenbeck, Sam Hemmingway and Nancy Remsen. Take a look at some of the comments threads, and in particular, look at the "recent comments" block...
That many "anonymous" comments is a sure sign of drive-by commenting -- readers who click "post comment" as a kneejerk reaction to what they've read without a single moment's thought about what they're doing or a even a half second of hesitation. It's an utterly pre-critical action that lacks any sort of accountability or consequence for the poster.
I've written before about the relative irrelevance of anonymity online, but I realize now that I was really talking about the irrelevance of "real life" identities in an online forum. Who cares if vampire_slayer815 commenting at Whedonesque.com is a housewife from Duluth or an MD from Prague? All that matters is the reputaion that vampire_slayer815 has earned online in his/her commenting and blogging history. But the "anonymous" commenters at VT Buzz didn't even take the time to create web handles for themselves. They are truly "anonymous" (no web handle, no email address, no history of commenting that we can look at) and therefore, IMHO, eminently dismissable. They bring down the level of the discussion and make would-be thoughtful commenters turn away. It's not that having a web handle automatically turns trolls into good netizens (the few non-anonymous comments at VT Buzz weren't much better), but it at least shows that you aren't afraid of the continuity of your own words and that you took the time to actually participate and engage rather than to merely shoot spitballs from the bushes.
The Free Press blog that appears to have a healthy, active commenting community is the blog devoted to American Idol,
Idol Time, by Myra Flynn. It has a small but devoted community of commenters and reading the comments doesn't make you want to punch your monitor.
At the talk, I was advocating for a clear commenting policy -- in plain English, not in legalese, a registration requirement for commenting privileges, and active moderation by a human being who applies the rules fairly and is not afraid to send problem-users emails asking them to can the crap, engage in anti-troll techniques like
disemvoweling, and when necessary, delete comments and even user accounts. The Free Press has the potential to be a huge online gathering place for the community. I think it's incumbent upon them to maintain a space that's open and inviting, where users won't immediately get pelted by spitballs from the bushes.
In general, it was clear to me from our discussion that the folks around the table very much want a healthy, useful online community and I hope that some of the discussions we had will help to give them some ideas about how to engender such a thing.
In part 2, I'll reproduce the notes I made preparing for my talk to the Free Press, fleshed out a bit into complete English sentences. Stay tuned...
Tuesday marks the 2nd anniversary of the 2006 reunion of The Pants at Higher Ground. Yes, I'm still working on a film about the band. In fact, things have gone back into more of a production mode of late. Hoping to keep interest from waning completely in the project, I've edited together and released a video of Ariel, Dan and Tyler Bolles performing Wounded that we shot at Egan Media Productions last year for the film. The three siblings missed the reunion show in 2006 because they were at their grandmother's wake. They actually performed this song at the wake for their family. Enjoy...
