I’m so pleased - an element of my acid test for the success and health of bbs.boingboing.net appears to have been passed with flying colours. Maybe.
The test was: Is the fence that must be jumped from boingboing to bbs a hurdle to PR and astroturfing teams? Would they care if negative publicity emerged over the fence? Negative commentary?
And this morning (UK) I may (and in the interests of both prudence and staying neatly on my side of the defamation fighting line) - I think I may have along with others pegged one. Time will tell.
This is very clever and interesting measure of success (not that I’d personally felt this was a very big problem here). Care to direct readers to the thread/comment in question?
Also, my friend can’t believed the awesome deals I found on UNIQUE NIKE LAPTOP!!!
It was nice to see the reflexive co-ordinated BB snark at work as well, it’s like a beautiful dance of white blood cells surrounding a yuck germ.
UNIQUE NIKE LAPTOP / Earn $2,000 a day by stuffing envelopes with tomato seed packets whilst naked in front of your webcam I can do it from home you can to ok thanks for sharing? Check-ish - There have been a couple of dodgy posts by dodgy users that qucikly got flagged. One particularly placed in a distressed user-thread subsequent to a friends’ death by suicide, which read along the lines “k, have a great day ,nice to know you!”, which was both indecent and subtle in that it made the pretense of being friendly and maybe trying to establish a presence rather than a one-off hit.
My thinking is, at an editorial level, people like to engage with the big names (Cory, Xeni, Maggie, David, Mark etc); but also that user-posts need to be more attractive and funny. Basically better. eg Brainspore’s wonderful unicorn picture in Xeni’s ‘Lying to 3 year olds’ thread attracted a lot of attention and interaction (clicking like, responding) spoke volumes.
But things seems to be going on. I’m feeling more stuff happening, a community evolving.
People might have a response filter as well - kind of, if it’s not a BB article but is user-created, it’s not really BB and that’s not why I’m here - although they would engage with exactly the same post were it embedded in the comments of a BB article, if you see what I mean.
So that editorial point - users need to think more editorially, to get their point over in a more attractive way, with attention hooks.
And it was important to see the PR defense teams at play because, if they didn’t come, they would have decided that BBS was a “safe harbour” for illicit comments about their stakeholders - as in, a bunch of crazies spouting off to eachother, rather than witty commentary that gets picked up and potentially seeds memes and influence - that spreads and impacts on their image.
So seeing Halliburton, or their reps, step in (gauchely, obviously!) is great. The negative commentary concerned them adequately. More please! It’s fun.
