I just posted this comment to Tyme’s blog, but I was the 102nd commentor.I was asleep when this blew up. Who will ever see my comment? So here’s what I wrote.
“I think I’ll pull the age card here, I grew up WITHOUT television. The first shows that came on TV were exactly like these online videos–weird experiments that were good and bad simultaneously. If you look back at Howdy Doody today you would think it was incredibly amateurish. It was all they knew how to do.
Online video is in its beginning stages. If all it is doing is replicating broadcast TV quality and quantity on a monitor, it’s not worth it. Scoble and Shel and Loren are ALL pioneers. They make moves, some good some bad. But they make moves. All 3 of them.
Both FastCompany.tv and Seagate couldn’t have paid enough to get all this advertising and page views. Shel is personally hurt, but will now improve his program; Robert takes criticism unbelievably well and will improve his program. FastCompany.tv is already vastly superior to FastCompany.com, on which I blog. So everyone here is a startup. We are all beta testers.
Here’s my take on it. Business requires compassion. There’s no such thing as “just business.” That’s so naive. That’s how people thought about employees in the 19th century factories or in third world sweat shops.
Here’s what I wrote about this originally. http://blog.stealthmode.com/2008/04/complications-o.html
Get some perspective, people. If you keep giving out all this negative energy, you will keep getting it back and wondering why”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Because I read your blog, I found out about this online “event”. At first I thought it was being staged for online publicity and link baiting. After reading a little bit here and there, I realized to my horror that it wasn’t.
There’s a way to get one’s point across without making things personal. In business, I don’t think it’s appropriate to attack the person behind the product unless it’s an ethical issue and is indeed, a personal issue. It *is* just business and personal attacks have no place in it.
For example, Tyme didn’t start off writing that the work being performed was bad, she started off writing that the wrong people were placed in the wrong positions and essentially, those people rather than the work produced by those people was faulty.
I think Tyme could have made the same points without the ad hominem arguments. She could have focused on the work itself and the results being produced rather than on the individual people involved. Her article made me a bit sad. Please notice that I am critiquing Tyme’s work rather than her as a person. I think there is everything to be gained by focusing on what she wrote rather than her as a writer.
Personal attacks strike me as being sophomoric and unnecessary. If new media is to grow and overtake more traditional forms of media, public professionalism is a must.
Oh, I so believe you are right. I don’t take issue with what she says; it’s how she says it. And the commenters are worse.