Small Crimes and Misdemeanors

Imagine what we miss if honest and innocent truths are buried!

I was so pleased when you invited me to come here to your open network blog Ray. You represent the aspect of the Internet that is genuinely professional and true.

I work for a multi-author Web 2.0 and technology blog called Profy. Ray and I are Linkedin professionals and I am very pleased to be in the same network with many honest professionals like him.

The subject of this little post deals with "the other side" of the network community. That would be the people who detract and sap Web 2.0 of its credibility and true potential. These people could be bloggers, CEO's, investors, geeks, manufacturers, SEO experts or the janitor at the high school for that matter. Negative elements exist in the digital world even more easily than our physical one.

A few days ago I interviewed a very nice CEO of a startup company for our blog at Profy. The interview ran long, as the man really took an inordinate amount of time answering my many questions. The web site was actually very good, and I was excited to have the rare opportunity to share with people some unique news, to be able to do good work for Profy and to give a startup its just due. This was particularly fulfilling considering how many "dogs" an author is exposed to.

In short, I was hopeful that my little story would follow its rather established course and be picked up by Digg and a few other communities so that everyone concerned might be exposed to the little news. But, unseen by me there were undercurrents running beneath what I believed was an otherwise substantial platform. The short of it is that the story was out about one hour before someone buried it for a still unknown reason. I never even considered the possibility that such a thing was possible, let alone so easy to accomplish! I tend to be a little naive to such machinations out of choice.

I am sure this is not an uncommon thing, and perhaps I over react to what might be considered trivial to many. The point I am making is that these "small crimes" are the things that have made out real world so intolerable much of the time. The endless maze of structures where accountability is simply the diversion of blame, and where trust is no more than a relative term.

I am not out to get the Digg community or to beat up on angst ridden teenage geeks for that matter. I simply think it is important for us to at least acknowledge that we have a problem on the web. Secondly, we must make other people aware of how credibility effects us all. Finally, we have to do something to correct the problem.

The damage done by whoever clicked the bury button (for whatever reason) on that CEO's interview was minuscule by numeric comparison to what you and I may be being deprived of by similar "misdemeanors". Personally, I know the speed with which programmers could put accountability elements in place. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about "web site credibility" is that most of them seem to care little as long as their traffic stays constant.

Someone told me I was "tilting at windmills" when I exhibited my discord over this matter. I really felt more for the web site owner than for myself, as more people like this fellow are needed in Web 2.0. I am not in favor of some ultra conservative police state for the Intenet, but I simply would like to be able to win over those windmills in a venue dominated by Don Quijote success stories.