With a bit of luck you’ll notice we’re all blogging here regularly. Wednesday is my day, and I’m unprepared. Thoroughly unprepared. So exactly what will come out when I empty my brainbox onto the keyboard? Twaddle, probably, but fortunately I’m not alone in my ineptitude. It’s a problem plaguing the web.
Blogs, Twitter, comments and message boards teem with diatribe blurted out before it can be given the cognition it deserves. The results range from the incomprehensible to the abusive, but how do you deal with it? And should you?
The appeal of blogs, tweets and even new tools like AudioBoo are their immediacy, their intimacy and their spur of the moment honesty. But too often those rough diamonds are lost amongst the swill of gobbledegook from the bloggosphere, twitterati and comment trolls.
With a few exceptions, devining reliable information from the web is a dark art, but one we’re mastering. At Republic Publishing we’re immensely proud of our editorial standards. None of our sites host unbalanced outbursts, un-checked sources or baseless opinion.
As old fashioned as it sounds in the shiny world of the web, they’re editorial traditions, often forgotten by online publishers, but just as valid online as in the print domain.
But that’s just the content we can control. What about reader input, or to use media parlance, “user-generated content.”
Potentially, it’s a minefield. Take the comments section of Electricpig. In the past 12 months just ten percent of comments were legitimate, and in the great scheme of the web, that’s remarkably high.
In the last year, spammers have hurled just shy of 30,000 bogus links, swearwords and gibberish its way. Easily enough to drown out valid and interesting debate. But it’s worth the effort to sift the gold dust from the silt. Engaging our audience is what makes Republic Publishing’s approach work.
We don’t just slap content on the web and hope for the best. We reach out to readers with properly planned, brilliantly executed copy, pictures and video. It’s hardly surprising they want to get involved. If only more of the web thought the same way.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, of course I planned this blog post. Fooled you though, didn’t I?