Well didn’t I just get told!

So you know how writing a blog is a conversation… the whole concept predicated on an interactive journaling exercise?  This belief in interactivity is held so strongly that there are people who have claimed a blog is not a blog without commenting.

So say you build a blog specifically for the conversation – say like The Apprentice Blog.

Conversations start, they build, they grow.  The community builds. You have thousands of regular readers.  The blog grows and develops and conversations start happening without you even starting them.

Then things start going a little wonky, you don’t update for a couple of days ’cause you’re sick.. and people start getting a little harsh.

So you remind everyone to Play Nice.  You clean up some of the mess, remind yourself not to take any of it personally, and think all is well.  But you are wrong.  Oh so wrong.

What do you do when it actually becomes personal?  What happens when things go horribly awry?  How do you deal with people take this stuff way too seriously, and are way to hostile?

Well… turning off the commenting sounds like a pretty fine idea to me right about now.  Or perhaps I’ll just retreat to an island and run a nice little private blog about the dogs and photographs of ice.  It seems pretty damned appealing right now.

Let’s just say, I’m pretty happy I’m operating under a pseudonym.