A good blog doesn't have to put up with too much 'graffiti' (click for pic credit)
Sandwell Councillor, Bob Piper, has a good post here about his recent trip to Bruges, raising questions about graffiti. It seems there may be a case for a high level of short-term investment to make the problem go away?
“One aspect of the City that distinguished it from so many places I have visited in the last few years, in this country and abroad, was the total absence of graffiti. Apparently the City Council has a policy that they remove graffiti free of charge, usually within one hour of it being reported. A few years ago they used to charge private dwellings and people thought, what the heck, pay to get it removed now, and tomorrow it could be back. Since it became a charge-free service, and instantly removed, the spray painters got fed up first and decided they were wasting their time and effort on their ‘art’ which would never be seen. Hence Bruges is free of the scruffy mess which blitzes so many cities. I think I’ll suggest Sandwell gives it a try. Does anyone know if this instant removal service has been tried anywhere here, and to what effect?”
I’m currently working on a project (all will be revealed soon – I promise) that will help people be able to adopt a similar approach to their comments boxes. Anyone who has written for a high-volume blog (and the Telegraph or Guardian blogs are a great case-in-point) will be familiar with the way that trolls lurk in the comment threads waiting to make their same repetitive ad hominem spEak You’re bRanes points. People with something worth saying often avoid the blogosphere because of this – quite rationally in my view.
My view on dealing with trolls is similar to the City of Bruges view on dealing with graffiti. Delete early and often – a bit of up-front investment makes life easier in the long run. The counterargument that this is ‘censorship’ is nonsense. Blogs have trackbacks. If you want to spEak You’re bRaines you can do so on your own site in minutes using Blogger or WordPress.com among many others.
In the context of this, I think that Kerry McCarthy MP has made the first step along a road that I think that a lot of MPs should follow. There is a fairly nasty shrill faction of bloggers who seek to harass her personally online – constantly demanding apologies and feigning outrage.
“Anyway, Iain Dale got upset, as he often does, and bandied around words like ‘petty’ and ‘pathetic’, at which point I blocked him. For non-Twitter people that means he can’t see my tweets and can’t send tweets to me. In other words, in the words of his idol, Cliff Richard, “we don’t talk anymore”. (And no, that’s not a feeble attempt to smear; he loves Cliff, which is his prerogative, if a little weird.)
Some might think this rather an overreaction. Cue all the usual stuff about ‘MPs are supposed to be thick-skinned’ and ‘you’re obviously not willing to engage’ or ‘you only want to talk to people who agree with you’, which is patent nonsense, if you look at the number of people I do follow on Twitter and the amount of to-ing and fro-ing I do in conversation with them.
So why did I block him? Partly it’s just because he caught me at the wrong time. But also because it seems clear to me that the Tory strategy on Twitter is to try to provoke me into spats, so that I end up spending all night arguing with them rather than engaging with ‘real’ people. This has the dual purpose of drawing attention to themselves (and most of them are rampant self-publicists), and of making me look like I’m someone who spends all her spare time in undignified online squabbling. It looks especially bad if people come to the argument late, and wonder what on earth is going on.
I therefore have two choices – try to ignore them, which means they’re still there as an irritant, or block them so that I can use Twitter for enjoyment and engagement, which is how it should be used. In the case of Iain Dale (and Shane Greer and Tory Bear before him) I’ve decided to block because, frankly, I’m fed up with them. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”
Anyway, this project that I’m not ready to tell you about yet: It will help MPs who previously didn’t want to blog to do so without having to constantly run this trollish gauntlet. Details to follow!
