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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Two wrongs don’t make a right
Hat tip to C.C. Chapman, who already blogged this and tipped his hat to Jeremy Pepper, who tweeted it.
Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson—author of “The Long Tail”—has posted an item to his blog that makes an excellent (although not a new) point, then ruins it with a vindictive, mean-spirited, and ultimately childish action. (I subscribe to Anderson’s feed, so I would have seen the post sooner or later, but this just shows that CAPOW email can reach me faster than RSS.)
Anderson’s constructive point: There are a lot of lazy PR people out there who don’t know how to pitch a blogger, so they send clueless emails and generic press releases that have nothing to do with the blogger’s focus.
The over-the-top bit: Anderson listed the email addresses of all the people who have sent such pitches.
Anderson’s complaint is a legitimate one:
I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public). Everything else gets banned on first abuse.
This approach is far better than Tom Coates’; Coates—about whom I wrote back in August—doesn’t care if you took the time to find out what he’s interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that. He hates any outreach and believes it’s completely inappropriate to view a blogger as a potential ally in a communication effort.
I also feel Anderson’s pain. Just today (and it’s only 1 p.m.), I’ve received half a dozen press releases about things I couldn’t care less.
So articulating his disdain for inappropriate pitches and his decision to ban the email addresses of those who send them is aces with me.
But publishing the email addresses? Even The Bad Pitch Blog—dedicated to such abuses—has a three-strike policy before outing the offenders, and even then it’s a company name, not an email address. While the people who sent these inappropriate pitches may be bad at their jobs, or clueless about the social media space, you have to wonder if they deserve the shitload of spam that’s about to come their way as their addresses get scraped from Anderson’s very public blog. (They’ll get real spam—mortages, organ enhancement, poker, the whole enchilada.) After all, while they may have been lazy or clueless, these people didn’t do anything overtly malicious; their goal was not to make Anderson’s life miserable. Anderson’s action is expressly malicious (and, as executive editor of a premier technology-focused publication, he can’t claim he didn’t know those addresses wouldn’t be scraped.)
Weren’t banning those addresses enough and explaining his policy enough? Would Anderson support the death penalty for parking violators, too?