Dear Bloggers, Get Over Yourselves!

4) Bloggers must understand that Newton's Third Law can be applied in many ways.

Jeremy, there is no "the" blogging community.

Oh, the 'nofollow' attribute!

My thoughts on nofollow are here. I didn't cover 'special usage' of nofollow! ;)

JD

The first time I read about rel=nofollow, it occurred to me that the ultimate extension would be a weight= attribute, which can have a positive or negative value. A normal link would have weight=1.0 by default, rel=nofollow would be a synonym for weight=0.0, and when you link to something *really* dumb, you can specify weight=-1.0.

Then, of course, search engines could offer a reverse ranking option, so you could ask for the most negatively weight pages for a particular query, just for laughs.

Jeremy (L), I like the weight idea. its funny, someone else mentioned the idea to me today and pointed me at technorati, they've got a votelinks proposal.

I kinda like the weight idea though, gives it more granularity, but I wonder if I would just always weight 1.0 or -1.0.

That "International Bloggers’ Bill of Rights" is bloody stupid. It shows a distinct inability to understand most companies' have policies that actually apply to the employee, not the medium.

Well at least they didn't make fools out of themselves... Oh wait.

Monkeys, all of 'em

This is what happens when blogs break out of geek and into public - no bad thing in that but you've gotta expect a little lunacy to follow - i posted in the comments there a couple of weeks ago and told them all they looked very silly, they ignored me heh..

This whole thing about bloggers thinking that somehow they're exempt from the normal laws and nicities that the rest of society live by is quite beyond me. It goes much further than this bit of spotty teenage nonsense now, apparently your a journalist now if you can open an account at typepad... ha!

nobs

i want an international bill of rights for people who write with a pencil.

The signers look to me like more online journal writers than bloggers, if we can make this distinction ;)

No ones “freedom of speech” has been interrupted, what we have here is bloggers who are poor communicators.

The woman who wrote this “Bill of Rights” is not the one who publicized it and leveraged the links to attract page views.

http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/2005/01/late_breaking_n.html#comments

No ones “freedom of speech” has been interrupted, what we have here is bloggers who are poor communicators.

The woman who wrote this “Bill of Rights” is not the one who publicized it and leveraged the links to attract page views.

http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/2005/01/late_breaking_n.html#comments

No ones “freedom of speech” has been interrupted, what we have here is bloggers who are poor communicators.

The woman who wrote this “Bill of Rights” is not the one who publicized it and leveraged the links to attract page views.

http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/2005/01/late_breaking_n.html#comments

No ones “freedom of speech” has been interrupted, what we have here is bloggers who are poor communicators.

The woman who wrote this “Bill of Rights” is not the one who publicized it and leveraged the links to attract page views.

http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/2005/01/late_breaking_n.html#comments

No ones “freedom of speech” has been interrupted, what we have here is bloggers who are poor communicators.

The woman who wrote this “Bill of Rights” is not the one who publicized it and leveraged the links to attract page views.

http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/2005/01/late_breaking_n.html#comments

Why not go all the way, and get the Bloggers' Bill of Rights, Bloggers' Constitution (in RSS format, naturally), Bloggers' Army and Bloggers' Navy. We could pay Bloggers' Taxes to support all this and occasionally stomp down on Non-blogger countries that commit severe Bloggers' rights violations.

Thanks for chiming in on this Jeremy.

When I first read this "Bill of Rights" I though it was very stupid. Biggest thing missing: Where does this say that the employee will respect the company, and it's need for confidentiality, etc. Respect is a two-way street.

I know of no company that fired anyone for blogging. They got fired for violating company confidentiality, or saying someething that put the company in a bad light, none is this is about blogging, they would have been nailed no matter what the medium.

You can add weight to a link by making it bold. That seems to increase search rankings.

Quoth Ben Hammersley: some curious High School metric of look-at-that-person-but-don’t-pay-her-any-attention that the selective use of the rel="nofollow" attribute will produce

I hope this comes out right, since there's no preview button. Didn't you used to have one?

My only real question about the nofollow is that it's sort of a thing that says, "Okay, if you want to use the tag sparingly, what's the point in manually inserting the tag into certain links". In other words, Jeremy, if you have to manually edit a link (and I'm making a jump in logic based on your entry) why wouldn't you just remove the comment altogether, or at least the link? Where I see the nofollow tag benefitting is for bloggers who don't pay attention to their blog comments like a hawk...who may go several days without looking at their blogs or who may have comment notificatino emails (such as what Wordpress provides) turned off or going to an email address they rarely check.

I'd be interested in your comments on this as I am working out the concept of an entry on this to be published in the next few days after I collect more info...

Aaron

Greetings,
I'm with you entirely on this one, that's just nonsense.

Blogging is a new form of publication, and individuals are waking up to just how stupid they can be, and evidently now demanding the right to be stupid in public without repercussions.

I never talk about my job, even when I've left one, in anything but very general terms (i.e., I'm a programmer.). Jeremy, Scoble, and a few others, are lucky enough to have been explicitly granted the permission to do so, but they proved their ability to manage their words beforehand, and...well, not be particularly stupid in public.

This is just people wishing that there weren't consequences to speech. There are, and there always will be.

-- Morgan Schweers

In Germany we have non-disclosure agreements in contracts to tell employees what they can share and what not. I'm not allowed to talk about work in my blog (except in shiny metaphors nobody can track back of course). I wouldn't even want to ask for this right, I don't need it. When I want to take work samples to the outside I ask for permission first (it has been granted in two of my old companies several times -- e.g. one company allowed me to take an internal tool to the "public domain" level by putting it on my web site.) Well, this Blogger Bill of Rights sounds a bit pompous. "Blogging policies," "Freedom to Blog," and "Blogophobic companies." Then again it would seem freedom of speech covers blogs so we don't need specific new laws... besides, the blogging community will *always* punish a company's image when a blogger's fired. Now gimme some juice for my comment link! Muhahahhahaha... I stole it, I stole it, and won't give it back... Prrrreeccciouss PageRank...

"Get over yourselves!" seems a reasonable summary.

But there is a rather worrying under-trend, similar to the notion of "free speech zones". This stuff is already covered by basic human rights, we should be holding out for them, not patching around their removal.

Before posting on your blog put it to the "teflon hair" test: if you wouldn't say it on the local TV news then don't say it at all. You WILL be fired.

I left this post at the "International Bloggers' Bill of Rights" site, likely my POV will be removed as I don't agree with them.
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IF you are blogging from work - you miss the point - the network and all it's components belongs to your employer and they have total control over it. You are engaging in a personal pursuit on company time - the same as making personal phone calls. Likely you've seen and ignored the messages posted on their network regarding this or perhaps even signed an acknowlegment of company policies during the hiring process. Since many employers also monitor activity and content, why would you bother to complain about your job via blogging from work? It reminds me of the cartoon of the mouse flipping off the hawk - titled "the last great act of defiance".

I agree, many employers suck eggs and are not fun places to work at. In which case, a change of companies is in order, one with a managerial sense more in line with your own values.

I am certainly not against fun and believe that work should be as enjoyable as possible. However, it's not play since you have get paid for it and the company has certain expectations of you that you have contracted to fulfill.

Was your employer unfair to terminate you? Perhaps. Whining and crying publicly for getting caught certainly doesn't help your cause from my point of view. Life isn't fair and you simply have to deal with what is.

There simply is no free speech on a company /corporately owned network. That is the reality.