E-Business Forum Moderator Woe
June 26, 2007 at 4:55 pm
The Enterprise Ireland e-business list moderator is a bit too opinionated for my liking. He (and I’m making an assumption here – all we really know is that it’s called PA) regularly ignores valid posts from the community about things he doesn’t agree with. Most recent case was when someone posed the question about what kind of laptop they should buy. I posted about macs and how great I find them. One of my comments wasn’t posted.
But the latest thing where I feel that PA has overstepped the mark is in relation to a post last week by someone from a Government department looking to source a Web 2.0 consultant. The usual nay-sayers came on strong such as this:
I fear by using all the buzz words (web 2.0) that you actually bring someone
who will lose you in jargon as opposed to someone who actually understand
business. Ajax can cause real accessibility issues. Bring business
requirements first and technology second.
Then there’s an 8 paragraph piece by the moderator (is that allowed?) that is patronising to the original poster and includes such annoyances as:
There’s this thing that happens where organisations feel they must jump on
the bandwagon and Web 2.0 is a classic.
We do tend to forget many of the fundamentals when we get blinded by
buzzwords like Web 2.0.
And followed up by the ultimate paragraph in which PA shares his remarkable insight about blogs:
And blogs — well a corporate blog is essentially an extension of the PR
function. But it risks backfiring on the business if you allow subscribers
to the blog to freely comment.
I jumped in with a rather fantastic comment that also demonstrated extreme strength at containing my frustration – hey I’m the moderator of this blog, so I can be as gushy as I like. . . PA responded by taking my message to bits. That’s OK, I can handle it! But whatever strength his arguments had were lost by his reminder to all of us to think of Boo.com – that over-worked case study that has nothing to do with Web 2.0 and social networking and blogs and flickr feeds and all those good things.
More debate followed with the usual suspects being touted as experts in the field, until an anonymous poster asked are there any good examples of Web 2.0 sites? I glanced at this, but didn’t respond because like most people I had a lot of work to do. In fact, that’s why we never send corporate emails on a Monday because everyone is so consumed with being a good employee and wants to simply work! Then today, PA came back with this snide remark:
I just laughed… I thought there are lots of dynamic and interactive sites in Ireland. Then I realised that all the services that came to mind were by global players like eBay, Yahoo, Google, Flickr. They’re all doing interesting and really dynamic stuff with Ajax/Web applications and customer contributed content.
Thanks Enterprise Ireland Moderator for the vote of confidence in the industry you moderate a forum for.
There is one that looks like it could be interesting though – LouderVoice.com who are somewhere in county Cork.
Thanks PA, you’re obviously very well up with what’s happening. I promptly jumped back in with some sites: www.touristr.com,
www.spanglish.ie, www.loudervoice.com, www.roam4free.ie.
Why have someone so negative and with such a low regard for the Irish web industry have so much control over the conversation? In my opinion, the Moderator’s job is to check for spam and rude language and nothing else. Anyone share that feeling?
Comments (10 responses)
Hi Maryrose,
for the very reasons you’ve outlined, I don’t contribute or subscribe to any mailing lists (bar the design for all network which is worth checking out). For me, blogs like your own are far more relevant today than mailing lists.
Keep it up
Damn, forgot to get this in, Trocaire have quite their very own Web2.0/social media/user-gen application:
http://apps.trocaire.org/justworld/
Deadly, thanks Lar.
Try joining http://www.webnet.ie/open/index.html – it’s definitly not moderated, and more techy that businessey.
Hi Maryrose
I know this is a bit old, but interesting all the same. Are you sure that PA is the mod? I know that ENN is responsible for moderating the board. I thought that the mods would always post as [moderators note (or is it ‘editors note’?). I found that my comment on that thread disappeared into the ether…
EI are very, very cautious with that board – they are incredibly afraid of legal issues.
Well here is the link to the offending discussion:http://news.enterprise-ireland.com/read/messages?id=10747
PA isn’t the moderator, he (or she) is just another subscriber.
Michele
Now I feel so stoopid. Apologies to the EI moderator. Thank you Michele and Richard for pointing that out. But does anyone know who is PA anyway? What a negative attitude. Should be ashamed of him/herself. This raises the whole issue again of whether anonymous posting should be allowed or not on the EI forum. I’m in favour of it to encourage people to participate, ie. if they don’t feel comfortable enough in their opinions to put their names to them…but I’m not in favour of it for allowing negative non-constructive opinions like PA’s ones.
What do you think guys?
People are entitled to their opinion. If the list was unmoderated it would be a hell of a lot more interesting and would be self-moderated.
By the way, your comments box is tiny – you might want to make it a bit bigger, as I can’t see more than about two lines of what I’ve written
Michele
Yes, that’s the solution alright – unmoderated but not anonymous.
I will look at the size of this box because I certainly don’t want to give the impression that small size means I only want small comments. On my to-do list.
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