My cheap advice for TechCrunch – which came from a backyard discussion at Zeitgeist -- was popular enough that I’ve been arm-twisted to post the rest of my monologue. If you need to fight, do it right!

Rule 1: Only fight with opponents bigger than yourself.
Jack Shafer at Slate sets the example. He goes after TV news and the big newspapers and magazines. That includes his corporate colleagues the Washington Post and Newsweek. But you don’t see Jack stooping to single out the individual foibles of small-town papers, or harping on bloggers with 150,000 daily readers. That would seem petty and one-sided. No, Jack only spars with the entire blogosphere at once.

Corollary: Let the little people pick on you. It’s a form of flattery, it’s free traffic, and occasionally you'll learn something from them. Don't post back. Do link to anything worthwhile they write, whether it's about you or anything else.

Rule 2: Stick to the arguments you know.
Jeff Jarvis and Nick Denton can credibly accuse newspaper staffers of playing specific games with the truth because they’ve been party to those games themselves. You haven’t. And you can't read other people's minds. So if you see a post about, say, the new MacBook that you know is wrong, just correct the facts about the laptop. Don’t extrapolate about the writer’s agenda or biases. Don't turn your post into an ethics essay. You’ll get it all wrong and besides, the Mac’s more interesting.

Rule 3: Don't talk about the fight.
In any kung fu movie there’s always that one guy who won’t shut up – my style cannot be defeated! – and the other guy who says nothing for the first two hours. Who wins?

"Instead of posting long, boring videos telling me my videos are long and boring, he posts videos of ships driving into bridges." - Scoble

Link to this entry Posted on 11/26/06; 11:09:04 AM