Editing Posts

On Thursday, work held what it calls a Digitivity day, a day for employees, clients (and some press) to get them thinking about what they can do on the web and what the rest of the world is doing. I live blogged the day, with permission, and so have a pretty good record that can be sent round internally for those who missed the day. I think it was also filmed, but with different intake modes, sometimes text is better 😉

After the day I ended up editing 3 posts, for 3 different reasons.

• A type. I made a pretty bad typo in a post about online video that completely changed what a sentence was meant to say. Pretty sure I hit the wrong word on the spell checker. Luckily Joost, as a company that obviously watches what is being said about them, caught the mistake and we corrected it.
• I edited out some of the more annoying insults from Andrew Keen; I’m pretty sure he’s said worse on the record but I was just not comfortable with them in the post, even though they were pretty mild.
• I removed bits of information from a presentation about the mobile space and 2 d codes about the company that was doing the presentation. This I was asked to do, after some confusion about what was public or not. I’m not a journalist, but i’m sure something in the stuff I took out was news, but it’s of less relevance to me than a general picture of the space, so this I did not argue. The comments had already being picked up by other sites so the information is out there anyway.

But the last one did lead to a pretty annoying battle in the comments about rival companies in the space, lawsuits, patent infringements and all sorts of stuff. I the end I removed 7 comments and that I’m not happy with. Obvious spam is the only stuff I usually delete. I’ve even left up astroturf comments, with an added editorial about what they are and who they are from. But in this case there were a whole bunch of legal issues being discussed combined with personal attacks between people who look like they are in the middle of a running battle across multiple sites. Some of the comments were also cross-posted to a forum where the discussion continued along with a few emails. (I wonder if the posters considered the irony of battling for patent protection whilst ignoring copyright protection?). The posts are published under a CC license, but other peoples comments aren’t.

I closed the discussion by saying I needed to understand more of the issue and I’ve taken a look at it and decided that I’m not going into it anymore (the reason I’ve been careful with company names and technologies in this post) as it can only get ugly.