Disruptive Conversations

Voting is now open for the "Social News and Social Bookmarking" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Category: Social News and Social Bookmarking

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Voting is now open for the "Applications and Widgets" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting in this category.

Category: Applications and Widgets

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Over on my Voxeo blog site, we are using WordPress MU which is based on WordPress 2.3 and includes a very nice "tags" feature in addition to categories. This allows you to do things like have the "tag cloud" that you can see in the right sidebar of our "Speaking of Standards" blog. It's quite nice but in working with the blog site, we ran into one major annoyance - none of the offline blog editors on the Mac seemed to support WordPress 2.3 tags. This resulted in a bizarre posting process where if you wrote the post offline you then needed to login to the site to go back and add tags to the post. Thankfully, a quick search brought me to a post back in September indicating that marsedit already supported WP 2.3 tags! All that is required is to go into the View menu (when writing a post) and choose "Keywords Field". When you enter in keywords, those are then automagically mapped to WP 2.3 tags when you publish the post. VERY nice!

Technorati Tags: marsedit, tags, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, blog editors

Voting is now open for the "Mainstream and Large-Scale Social Network" category of the Open Web Awards (described here).  Please vote for your favorite site!  The 10 nominees are listed below and you will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. At that point, the top 3 choices will be selected and we’ll move into the final round of voting.

For more information, see the post on Mashable.com kicking off the voting.

Category: Mainstream and Large Scale Networks

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, Sam Sethi indicates he is restoring the post about Marc. Thank you, Sam!
--------

Dear Sam,

I don't know you. Odds are you don't know me. I've been a huge fan of your blognation network and am personal friends with several of the authors who write for you. Today it is pretty clear you are having some challenges. It is probably not one of your better days. Understandably, you seem to be removing all traces of Oliver Starr from your us.blognation.com site. Personally, I think that's rather short-sighted because Oliver and Marc and everyone who wrote for you there were talented writers and many of us linked to those pages and valued their writing. If you do want to salvage blognation.com, many of us have given you lots of "link love" which will now wind up getting errors. From an SEO point-of-view, it does not seem to be the smartest move. But it's your site and you can do with it what you will. Oliver has personally attacked you in a very public manner. You are no doubt angry and that is understandable.

But why? Why? Why? Why did you have to pull down the post about Marc Orchant's massive heart attack? (and along with it all the comments left by well-wishers?)

All around the blogosphere, hundreds upon hundreds of bloggers have linked to that post (as did I). When last I saw, there were something like close to 200 comments left to that post. It is very clear from Oliver's update page that this was great solace to Marc's family.

Why did you pull the post down? Sure, it was written by Oliver, but so what? It is about one of your employees who suffered a massive heart attack and even now lies in a coma! Through the blogosphere people have heard about Marc and will be continuing to check in on that page to get the status of Marc's recovery.

Can you please bring that post back?

Obviously, if Oliver is no longer part of blognation, he can't update the page and it sounds like he is more directly connected to Marc than you are. Okay, so why can't you go into that (restored) page and simply put at the very top something like this:

UPDATE: As Oliver Starr is no longer associated with Blognation, future updates on Marc's condition and recovery can be found on Oliver's update page about Marc. Our thoughts are with Marc and his family in this terrible time.

Or some words like that. Let people come back to the page about Marc's condition and then find out where to go to get updates.

Please.

You and Oliver can have your public disagreement and flame each other all you want... but let's leave Marc out of the picture. He's in a coma and he and his family need the thoughts, prayers, good wishes, resources, etc. of all the rest of us.

Please do the right thing and bring that page back. Please bring back those comments which were obviously appreciated by Marc's family.

At the very least, can you please put a redirect in your web server that maps the URL for the original post about Marc to Oliver's update page? Yes, I know you don't like Oliver right now and probably would sooner stick a knife in your body than link to Oliver's new site... but please...

do it for Marc.

Thank you for your consideration,
Dan York

Technorati Tags: blognation, marc orchant, marcorchant, sam sethi, samsethi

Is the Blognation network of blogs really built on a house of cards? Is it in the process of a major meltdown?

This morning at about 5am US Pacific time, I headed over to us.blognation.com to see if there was any update on the status of Marc Orchant. You can imagine then, my surprise at being confronted with "An Open Letter to Sam Sethi" posted by Oliver Starr:

Please Note: This is an open letter to Sam Sethi, Founder and CEO of Blognation. I have elected to write this letter after having been one of the principal Blognation authors since August of this year. In all that time I have not received the pay promised in my contract nor the reimbursement promised for expenses incurred on behalf of Blognation during this period. I am not alone. Every other Blognation author is in the same unsavory situation.

This open letter details in very broad strokes the reasons why I have lost faith in Sam. It makes specific statements as to the veracity of things Sam has said or written as well as things he has failed to do. I do not say these things lightly. Every statement made in this letter can be backed up with verifiable written material from email correspondence, Skype chats, or SMS messages.

The introductory post had more and ended with this:

Lastly, this post is likely to be removed very shortly after I post it so please, make a screen capture, download it to an off-line reader, copy and paste it into a document or repost it on your own blog(really). At the end, this is a cautionary tale and the victims are the people that have worked for months on the content many of you have enjoyed but for which Sam Sethi has yet to (and may never) pay.

The post then went on into the actual "open letter to Sam Sethi" which did, at great length, go into the allegations Oliver raises against Sam.

True to what Oliver wrote, the post was yanked. Before I could save it to read later, I clicked on another link to see something and a second or two later when I went back in the browser, the post was gone - as were all other posts after October 31st!

Oliver did, though, publish the post in its entirety over on his new website, owstarr.com.

It is, indeed, a sordid story.

Obviously, it is only one side of the story and until we see some response from Sam, presumably on one of the blognation pages (or perhaps on his Twitter page) we can't see the other side of the story.

Given that some of the other authors who are involved with blognation are friends of mine, I would very dearly like to hope that Blognation is not the house of cards that Oliver alleges it to be. They have all (including Oliver) been outstanding writers and I have very much enjoyed reading their posts. Hopefully the network will be able to continue, although if Oliver's allegations are true it is hard to see how it could realistically go on for much longer.

Right now, we really need to wait to hear from Sam - or from other authors within the blognation network.

This is not a good day for the blogosphere.

---

UPDATE #1, 6:15am: Tech Crunch is also carrying Oliver's letter in its entirety.

UPDATE #2 - In removing Oliver's posts, Sam also removed the post about Marc Orchant that almost all of us have been linking to! Oliver Starr, though, now has a new page providing updates about Marc.

Technorati Tags: blog networks, blogging, blognation, sam sethi

The nomination phase of the Open Web Awards is now complete. Thank you for participating with nominations. I'll now be sending those along to the Mashable.com staff. Stand by for the actual voting which will begin soon. Thanks again to all of you who nominated sites.

Technorati Tags: open web awards

As I was getting online this morning here in Vancouver, I was horrified to read the news that Marc Orchant had suffered a massive heart attack. Marc had been a blogger at ZDNet for quite some time and lately had moved over to help launch Blognation US. I'd come to know him through blogging and also through his occasional participation in the PacificIT Skype groupchat that Robert Sanzalone has been running for quite some time. He's a great guy... and I dearly hope he has a speedy recovery.

My thoughts will certainly be with him and his family over the next few days.

Technorati Tags: marc orchant

Catching up on some blog reading I came across Chris Brogan's great post "Consider Your Media-as-Business Strategy" and yesterday's "Three Untapped Values of Social Networks". If you are working with social media (or thinking about it...) and aren't reading Chris's blog, I would strongly suggest you give it a chance. He's a great writer with great insight.

Technorati Tags: chris brogan, socialmedia

As I've written here (and on Disruptive Telephony) in the past about the need for improved management of our online identity, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of the Internet Identity Workshop on Monday - Wednesday of next week in Mountain View, California. We need to get it right. If you are out there in the area and can attend, I'd highly recommend it. (I won't be there as I'll be up in Vancouver at IETF 70.)

Technorati Tags: identity, openid