Self-righteous only works if you are the only one who is right

So I will admit my Blog Queen dander is up. Mostly because I haven't had a sane work week since last year, and some of that's been Gotdotnet, but of late it's been blog work, working with Telligent on bugfixes and features that Microsoft employee bloggers want done in Community Server. There's a lot we are working on, and when the bloggers ain't happy at Microsoft, ain't nobody happy. Every so often I'm tempted to say - "Folks, this isn't heart monitoring software we are dealing with here - if you can't blog, no one dies." But then I remember I'm dealing with addicts, and a blog habit is really hard to quit. Case in point...

Josh Ledgard is a compadre of mine in the community space at Microsoft, but he crossed the line from "thoughtful requirements gathering" recently in this post. I won't say he's lost complete cred with me, because I know him too well as an insightful person for that, but if you want a few more facts about what his post describes and why I am grumpy about it, this is the comment I wrote:

Josh,

This post represents matters as though you never spoke to members of the communities team or myself in mile-long email threads about this tagging topic. This post represents the dialog as a stonewall - that no one from Microsoft.com listened to a lengthy list of requirements that you sent. This post also suggests that *you* never listened to the blog portal product manager or myself when we talked about practical considerations, dates or schedules. You work in Visual Studio so I know you understand software development life cycle issues.

And the kicker kills me - I've personally been busting my butt working with Telligent to get that HTML scrubber isssue dealt with - solved it even, and we had to roll back from that build for reasons that have nothing to do with denying you the right to tag or what our future tagging direction is.

This to me is an example of something that even Robert Scoble has had to apologize for - criticizing a team you are not part of is a very dicey thing to do respectfully. Do you really want other people (like me) to blog about the things that went wrong in the Visual Studio Beta 2 schedule or projects you have specifically worked on? If that makes you feel uneasy, then you understand my situation.

I have always valued and respected your creative input on matters community, but I have to question how constructive you are being here. Microsoft doesn't make ANYONE blog on blogs.technet.com or blogs.msdn.com and there are plenty of other places to choose from. But besides MSN Spaces these two sites represent the one platform where employees like you can actually influence how we develop it from the inside. So you have to decide - do you want to help the Microsoft employee blog sites win, or not?

I'm up for a healthy debate on tagging (and you left out completely the horrors of taxonomy which social tagging doesn't really solve). But this, bah! I know you Josh - you can do better posts than this.

Betsy