Richard BF

I participate in a Yahoo email group (which anyone can join) which discusses videblogging theory, and in reply to a discussion about the importance of cat videos (yeah, go figure), Michael Meiser, a web site developer, incorrectly attributed to me a comment that…

the number of political videoblogs pale in comparison to videos of people’s cats

Not only did he get the author wrong, but strangely enough proceeded to misinterpret the statement (above) as meaning that I (not the person who actually wrote it) thought that cat videos are more popular than political videos, and proceeded to argue the point.

Anyways, in my quite congenial reply, I stupidly mentioned how I thought that Evilvlog was a site where videobloggers could air their works without spoiling their own sites, and that this in a way was just audience retention, and flew in the face of “just putting shit out there”, and thus contradicted their raison detre. My bad.

It was a mistake to state my opinion in front of Michael, because he then went on a fairly long tirade about how fantastic Evilvlog is, and that I just don’t get it. My subsequent reply to which, he decided to post on Evilvlog, which you can read at Evilvlog = College humor.

Michael then proceeded to post a fairly scathing and quite nasty 253 line reply to the original theory list, implying that I was basically a nobody who should start a vlog, and that I was attacking all the editors of Evilvlog personally and thus “insulting many of the core and original members of vlogging itself”. Scary stuff, to be threatened as not being a somebody. Far be it from me to challenge the norms of videoblogging, right? Especially several Evilvlog editors who I hold in very high regard.

Now Michael chose not to reply to me in a public space, but instead sent his 253 line novella to the same email list “behind a membership-only firewall (of course)”, a comment with which he appended to the bottom of my email he posted to Evilvlog, I’m assuming as an attempt to belittle me. I’m not going to return the favour and post all of his replies in a public space however. I’d probably run out of bandwidth anyway.

So, to the point of this post… My email has been posted to Evilvlog completely out of context, at the height of a heated discussion from both sides of the argument, and presented in a way to perhaps denegrate me, and due to pure spite on behalf of Michael Meiser, because I do not share his views. Maybe this fits with their reason for existing, I don’t really know, but if it is, then perhaps they need to take a more detailed look at what their site is actually about. And if all the editors of Evilvlog support his view, then the videoblogging community is in a very sorry state indeed.

In fact by posting my email to Evilvlog out of context, with editorial comment, Michael has ironically imitated the very media they say they are challenging, in that it puts me in a quite indefensible position, due to the supposed popularity of the site, and the “respectable names” who are editors for the site.

I really hate having to air my dirty laundry on my blog, but unfortunately Michael left me no choice but to at least say something in my defence. Aint the ‘net wonderful…