Robert Scoble graciously apologised for his weekend tirade at a media piece about the as yet unreleased Microsoft operating system Vista. Good for him. The sad part about it is that once again the ’should we/shouldn’t we’ blog debate kicks in, led this time by Nicholas Carr. Most of the time I find Nick to be entertaining and a breath of fresh air in this sometimes self obsessed (me too) medium. But this time, he is talking nonsense. His ‘7 Rules for Corporate Blogging’ kicks off with ‘Don’t do it.’ Ok – so we’re back to press release, media controlled information right? Wrong. I’m with Rick Segal who says:
Here’s a little side story. I was invited to Shel and Robert’s book signings by Robert’s lovely wife. At the signing in Redmond, what was most striking was not the number of Scoble groupies hovering around, rather the full time Microsoft employees wanting to get Robert and his Channel 9 crew into this or that product group. That translates into more data for you. More knowledge on what’s going on inside the company, more product people jumping in and blogging and speaking directly to customers/developers/you.
You can write it off to egos and other things but the net of it is, lots of people inside Microsoft are providing more data to you as a direct result of Scoble, rants included free.
If you believe that getting more information, especially from the horses mouth, so to speak, carries greater value than the potential damage done by the occasional tirade (even when an apology is made) then great. It’s part of the risk of being engaged with the blog community. I find this medium incredibly valuable for what I learn about issues I see as impacting the profession. Sometimes it isn’t as well mannered as some of us might like. Sometimes it downright inappropriate as a communications mechanism. But when people are expressing their honest opinions, then what do you expect? Whatever you do, don’t let this episode deter you. Passion counts. Killing off the bloggers won’t work.
UPDATE: Stowe Boyd has an extremely insightful piece on the general topic. Well worth a read.
Technorati Tags: accountability, Microsoft
