One of the things about blogging that can be really irritating is the habit of posting before putting one’s brain in gear. I bet you are like me and have seen posts being published that either later turn out to be down right stupid right through to borderline irresponsible. Claims get made and accusations get flung all in order to be among the first to post about something or to get a reaction in there before anyone else does.

We’ve all probably done it at some time or another - and I include myself as well as one of the bloggers guilty of doing it. We do this to get attention, get our blog read and with all the different aggregators out there it’s not hard to do just that. It was this I was thinking about earlier today when I noticed something happening on one of the services I use daily.

Typically the first reaction would have to been to write up some post about what I thought was wrong - slap a really good digg style headline on it and let it loose. As close as I was to doing that over the last few days that I had noticed the problem I held off. Instead today I emailed the dev team privately about my concerns with some samples hoping it would help them sort the problem out. Not to long after that I received a reply back thanking me very much for the report and for doing it by email.

Why did I do this?

Because I have come to the conclusion that the potential page views that I might have gotten as a result of posting about the problem wasn’t worth the reaction that it would have gotten and in turn cause an excellent company a lot of flack that they might not have deserved. Then there is the whole thing of my own feelings of how creating goodwill far outweighs the need to publish a hot post that would get a lot of attention. If I had posted about it that would have been going against my ethics - so I didn’t.

The thing is that while getting that short term burst of attention might puff up the ego a bit might be cool; especially if you’re the first to post about something, there has to be a point where considering the long term benefits of dealing with the matter privately is the better route to go. As good as that page view burst might be is it really worth the possible bad feelings that could develop between you and the company; or person, you blogging about. There has to be a point where the goodwill one can develop has to far outweigh those temporary page view counts.

Just something to consider.

Conversation Tags: blogging, ethics, goodwill, page views