Discussion Out There: Controversies

Once in a while a controversy comes along that has people talking about blogging in a particularly interesting way. Whenever that happens, I always wish that I had a logical place to track and discuss the development. That's one of the reasons for this blog.

So, what kinds of controversy? Well, I'm collecting a basketful of past ones and presenting them below. Someday I may write a proper post about these, or at least a proper listing of links. But today, it's just one link per, of the many very good ones that were posted for each controversy.

There was the controversy about perfume bloggers who went ahead and blogged without, in the opinion of some, sufficient expertise. Tangled with the suggestion that there were just too many perfume bloggers anyway. Part II of a rant from MuseinWoodenShoes offered a dandy analysis and many links, including a link to Part I.

In 2010, a garden blogger complained about people who have "ugly gardens" giving vegetable gardeners a bad name. An uprising of garden bloggers resulted; this post on GardenBloggers.com presented links to a great deal of that discussion, and a detailed discussion of its own. The discussion wasn't about blogging, but I found it fascinating to see how the blogging world so quickly responded to the accusation, blogger after blogger pointing to other bloggers talking about the issue. And the discussion had a lot of parallels to the above discussion about perfume bloggers--thoughts about the conflict between the expert versus the joyous amateur were very similar.

Also in 2010, the FTC decided to crack down on all of us ethics-impaired bloggers, since obviously other forms of media like, oh, fashion magazines, would never dream of allowing the slightest conflict of interest between advertising and editorial. (Ahem.) The Perfume Posse article "Swag Wank", by March, is a fine and entertaining example of the many discussions of the topic.

In 2011, there was the shocking discovery that some bloggers blog for free! (OK, sorry, I'll cut down on the sarcasm.) This was sparked by the rebellion when the Huffington Post collected a big bag of money for a site that contained content created for free by a herd of bloggers. I  actually did discuss this (with limited sympathy for those bloggers), so I'm going to point to my own post, though no doubt there are many better ones.

Image: By Olivier Aumage. Wikimedia Commons.