Instablogs has been copping a fair bit of criticism in the past few days since its launch a week back. One of their latest posts – Why This Unfair Treatment? – takes a look at a blogger’s argument that they are spam, their latest post explains their Plagiarism episode and a post a few days back looks at the best of the criticism of their network.
I’d like to give the Instablogs team a little more unsolicited advice and feedback (if they’ll allow me to).
My impression of their main blog at this point is that they are getting sucked into the trap of having to respond to every criticism that is being leveled at them. This is something that I see many bloggers do – they get critiqued and feel the need to justify, defend, argue and explain every negative mention of their work.
While I know this temptation on a personal level (I used to get sucked into it too) I would advise all bloggers to be careful of this as it can really bring down the tone of your blog. This is what I sense is happening over at Instablogs. At the time of writing this post virtually every post (except for one that I can see) on the main blog of Instablogs has some mention of some negative aspect of the launch.
I would agree that their launch could have gone better (they definitely have needed to address some things on their main blog) but I would suggest that there is only so much negativity that people will put up with on a blog. There comes a time when a blogger (or blog network) needs to move past the criticism.
After about 36 hours of the b5media launch – as directors we decided we’d given enough air to some of the criticism leveled at us and that we were going to move on to a more positive outlook. We heard the criticism, responded to it, adapted a few things in response to the best critiques and then drew a line in the sand and decided to move forward with some positive stories and hard work in getting things going for the network.
One of the problems of getting into a defense mentality is that you get distracted from the task at hand, another is that you find yourself getting into a negative frame of mind (which brings down your work and ends up being quite depressing) and thirdly every time you buy into a debate about your blogging it seems to bring out more critics and attack.
My advice to Instablogs (and all bloggers) is to take on board the critiques but to move on. Give yourself a few days without defending yourself and concentrate on building a quality network – this is the best defense you’ll ever find to what others are saying about you.
