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TechCrunch UK And Blogging

December 17th, 2006

I have no big opinion one way or the other about this whole TechCrunch UK (a technology blog) situation. To sum up, you’re better off reading this article and this one at twopointtouch. But there are some lessons to be learned about opinion writing on the internet.

As I understand it, TechCrunch UK blogger Sam Sethi wrote a post about Le Web 3 (a French internet conference) saying that he was less than impressed by a few things, after which a moderate flame war ensued, leading Mike Arrington to basically remove Sam Sethi, delete a subsequent post by Sam that crossed the ethical line, and put TechCrunch UK on hold. Here’s Mike Arrington’s take on the whole thing (and another, updated take), and now it looks like Mike Butcher, an editor of TechCrunch UK is resigning, too.

I would like to read the offending post written by Sam Sethi myself, but it was deleted from the TechCrunch UK site.

Since the offending post has been removed, I feel like I’m only getting part of the story. Because I can’t actually read the post and decide for myself if Sethi was out of line – I’m more skeptical about the stories from all the people involved.

For me, this raises the issue of blogs and comments. Some people might think that the best solution to a flame war is to disallow comments, forbid the blogger to react to or post in the comments, or simply delete any controversial writing.

Except in the cases of obviously inflammatory, slanderous writing, or spam, I don’t think any of these are the best approach. After all, what is the point of a blog if there can’t be an open debate about what’s written on it? This would be no different than the newspaper sites I get frustrated with. Ultimately, to deny the opinions of the writers and readers would make for boring reading, and is against the whole “open conversation” thing many social sites are striving for.

And another thought: any blogger (or anyone who writes on the internet) should be very careful about what you write, and even what people might infer from it. As J Leroy advises, don’t blog angry. Many a time I have written a really annoyed and sarcastic email, blog post, or comment, but just before hitting “publish,” I’ve realized I was just ranting – and rethought what I was about to make public on the web.

And as a final, added note, I’m sure Valleywag will have something snarky to say about this, soon.

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  • Well, I think that Mike Butcher wrote a very important things on a comment:

    THINK before you write anything online, because it will be there forever, in one form or another

    and it is true. Not only you should be responsible for what you write, but you should also be aware that whatever you write, even you delete it after few minutes, would probably be logged on the search engine servers, through the RSS feeds and whatsoever!!

    I've read Sethi's post (the one that was deleted) but unfortunately Google Cache is no longer active... I will try to get it. I had read the incriminated post, and it was nothing so bad, but of course I read it from my own perspective!

    Cheers
    Carlo
  • Yes... it's true. Sometimes it's easy to forget our blog posts and comments will be there forever, because we're used to deleting information or we're just posting while we're at home at a computer in privacy of our homes.

    I would like to see Seth's post (as I mentioned above). Maybe some blogger will find it and post an excerpt.

    I also think this is a sign that TechCrunch is moving beyond its blogging roots and facing the more traditional problems of a news organization. It's not clear to anybody what form blogs will eventually take but the journey will be interesting!
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