The Reader Appreciation Project

Hurricane Katrina brought a real disaster to New Orleans and surrounding areas. People who survived it found themselves in the situation of not having anymore house to sleep in, no more clothes to wear, and so many times, no more family, or even no more life.

But as the human brain is set to forget, after a while people came back to New Orleans and tried to re-build their lives on the ruins of their old ones. Some of those people are bloggers. Maybe you’ve read their blogs many times without knowing that they were running away from the hurricane as they were writing those posts.

I was thinking the other day at a friend of mine, who’s working with me on an internet project, and who excused himself to be late with some things because he had to prepare for the hurricane. I’m fortunate to live in a blessed area, with moderate climate. The biggest wind I’ve ever seen was barely able to put down a dead tree. I think that if I had to face such a disaster, survival would have taken the first spot in my priorities (and the next ten spots on my priorities list would have been empty).

Today I discovered that there are people like PB, who after surviving Katrina, is now running away from Gustav, and meanwhile he still finds time to make a video post. Unbelievable, while being away, he’ll have to pay some $300 a night (or $100 a night) for the hotel room, as far as I’ve understood from his video. Again, I don’t get this democracy which cannot find a solution for lodging these people who were terribly hit by Katrina and who are in danger to be devastated again, this time by Gustav. Why do they give names to those storms? Only to have somebody to blame it on for so many deaths?

I’ve never read PB’s former blog (which he recently sold), but I cannot stop myself from thinking that maybe other bloggers I read are in the same situation. What I know, is that there are bloggers who pray for PB and for all other people in distress.

I surely hope Gustav dies young. Do you?

Let’s pretend for one second that I’m a reader. Just for a second. Now I go to a blog (or any old website) and I’m after what I’m after.

I could be looking for some news, gossip perhaps on the latest Britney Spears fiasco, or looking for posts that talk about how the New York Giants creamed the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

Now indulge me if you will. I’m a reader and I stumble upon a blog post. I may have gotten there via feed reader, via someone else linking to it… but I got there nonetheless.

So I’m reading the post and it intrigues me some. I see there’s a comment section and feel I have something relevant to say and I have an extra resource for people to check out.

I type out my comment. I proof it, double-check my research, and make sure my HTML is all perfect and legit.

I hit the “Submit” button, and boom… I get the message that says, “Your comment has been sent to moderation.”

I’m not too unhappy since bloggers need to screen their comments, but I imagine it was that link I included that got my comment caught by the comment trolls.

But alas, I stroll on and read further.

A few days later I come back to this blog to see if anybody has responded (the punk didn’t have a comment subscription option) and find that my comment has been stripped.

I’m not talking about being stripped in a good way either. The blockquote I inserted? Gone. The link I inserted to what I thought was a relevant source? Gone. In a way, I felt like I had been robbed. Like someone cheated me out of something.

I was a little peeved. Perhaps a little angry. Especially when I saw that someone had responded to my comment, which was now obviously taken out of context without the “extra” information that I had included in the first place.

I e-mailed the owner of the site. I wanted my comment back. If the guy couldn’t get my comment right in the first place, I didn’t want it on his site.

Dear Mr. Blogger:
Either restore my comment to its original state or take it off your site. I don’t want people to have an invalid perception of what I actually said.

He didn’t respond, and he didn’t delete my comment.

Guess that’s the last time I go to this guy’s site. I just simply can’t trust people like that.

The above commentary was a fictional scenario inspired by a post by Lorelle VanFossen: Does Your Blog Comments Strip HTML and Links?