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Was a line crossed?
By Wolfie | April 28, 2008
And if there was, who’s line was it anyway? (see what I did there? No? Oh well). Let me see if I can explain what I’m talking about.
Avid readers of The New Wolfs Howl (I know there are a couple) may notice that there’s a post missing from the site at the moment; check your feed reader and you should be able to work out which one I’m talking about. It’s a post that I wrote about a new website that is related to the industry I work in. We’ve been having some dealings with them at work, and after various correspondence that’s gone back and forwards between the two organisations, I wrote my post about how I didn’t think that what they were saying to businesses tallied with what they were saying to their website users.
Now, there’s something I would like to make clear at this point. The post I wrote on this subject (indeed, all of the posts that I write, whatever the subject) was my own point of view and, as such, cannot be said to be the opinion of the company I work for, nor endorsed by them. But, the content of this particular post was informed by the correspondence I’d had at work.
Today, the PR company behind the website concerned emailed me at work, asking for the post to be taken down because by putting it up I had breached (for want of a better phrase) professional etiquette, in addition to making factually incorrect statements. We’ll come back to that second bit in a moment, but let’s take the issue of professional etiquette first.
I think it’s an important question for bloggers and I know that there have been some famous cases in the not too distant past where people have been removed from their jobs for what they’ve written on their blogs. I intended to write a post about what I perceived to be a conflict between the private face and the public face of a particular website. As a consumer, I would normally only see the public face but as someone who works in the industry, I got to see the private face and to me they didn’t gel. So I wrote about it - from a consumer point of view - to make other people aware. Perhaps I didn’t write in a particularly complementary way, perhaps I should have written to the website company first, perhaps I should have got the OK from my employer first. Whatever I should have done, I went ahead and wrote the post.
What’s interesting to me now is whether, by asking me to take down the post, the website has censored this blog - or whether I crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed and they have every right to request it be taken down. I’d be really interested in hearing your opinion.
Of course, by asking for it to be taken down they get no opportunity to correct the factual errors that I may have made. It also gives them no opportunity to respond publicly to the opinions that I put forward (yes, they’ve done so privately but surely better for them to do it publicly through the comments?). For any facts that I got wrong, I apologise (but the information I had available at the time indicated that my facts were correct) but please don’t ask me to apologise for my opinion.
Categories: Blogging |
Tags: Censorship?, Conflict of interest, Crossing the line
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[...] Was a line crossed? [...]
7:07 pm :: April 30th, 2008:: Nice idea | The New Wolfs Howl had this to say:
[...] Was a line crossed? [...]
12:03 am :: May 3rd, 2008