inCommunicado - eric eggertson

The virtual natives are restless.  I’m waiting to see if this is an uprising of citizens for better corporate behaviour, or an effort to squash expression of opinions that don’t please some Second Life pioneers.
Residents of a portion of Second Life have voted to ban companies and agencies from their portion of the virtual world […]

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Antonia Zerbisias doesn’t post to her popular blog about media, politics and culture for two months.
She drops in on Halloween, posts 17 words, and gets 157 comments. Those are dedicated readers.
With some blogs, half the fun is in the comments section. (Or in this case, all of the relentless personal attacks and mind-numbing semantic debates […]

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Note to every employee of every company I deal with:
My anger is not personal.  If I am pissed off, there’s usually a good reason, and often that reason relates to a product or service you’ve sold me.
I may be lying to you, for one reason or another.  I may misrepresent your company’s promises to me.  […]

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After taking some pretty intense criticism over her postings about the Middle East, and putting up with frequent nasty flame wars in the comments sections of her blog, Antonia Zerbisias put visitors on notice that their comments will be deleted and they will be banned if they get out of hand.
Then her dog died.  She […]

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Ragan Communications editor David Murray scoffs at my pledge this month to be a bit more understanding about the impact my writing might have on individuals. He wonders aloud (well, as aloud as clacking away at a keyboard gets) whether I ever pick up the phone and conduct an interview for this blog:

"With as little […]

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Ragan Communications blogger Steve Crescenzo watched a colleague get crapped upon by what he and
some others perceived to be a horde of rabid, hysterial bloggers.  He has learned several things from the episode:

Don’t insult people, if it makes you look like a pompous ass (I’m paraphrasing);
Don’t piss off insecure bloggers, or they’ll attack you;
A lot […]

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Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who has long boasted about his policy of not censoring comments on his blog, has decided to moderate comments.
About time.

Setting aside the legal implications of giving a wide audience to comments that often get out of hand and sometimes are just hate screeds against various targets, the personal wear-and-tear of reading […]

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I guess it was the dismissiveness of David Murray’s insult that pissed me off. The way he called communications consultant Allan Jenkins "a nobody in the communications business" in the closed milieu of his trade magazine editorial added to my ire.
If he’d just called Allan a rude, insensitive curmudgeon I wouldn’t have had an issue […]

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The appeal of snarky, bitchy blog posts is undeniable. And, quite frankly, reading blogs would be boring without some of the raw entertainment of celebrity-style journalism thrown in for good measure.
So I’m not entirely sure why I have such a negative reaction to the shoot-first-check-facts-later approach that has burbled into my RSS feed aggregator lately.
I […]

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I’ve been to several conferences where the speaker I was expecting to capture my imagination utterly failed. It happens to even the best speakers, and it happens a lot on panel discussions and with tag-team speakers who don’t have a well–polished performance prepared.
So it’s nice to see Shel Israel apologize to attendees of the Les […]

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