Tuesday, April 1, 2008, 5:57am

Comment Policy

Recently I posted a comment to a blog I’ve been half-following for several years now. The blog discusses college entrepreneurship and making money online, but I’ve always felt the author talked a good game but didn’t actually make much money online. The types of products he would promote and the suggestions he would give would be rather shallow and somewhat obvious.

Anyway, the other day the author posts a mini-ad about his one-page, straight text consulting website and how he doesn’t need anything more because he has enough work via word-of-mouth. Here’s the text:

If you have a serious business, serious capital investment and you’d
like to work with me, I state my consulting rates very clearly on this
one page website…

I click the link and find his rates are $1,000/hr or $5,000/week, non-negotiable. For some reason, this finally did it for me. I felt the needed to call his bluff. Why would he even mention this small, one-page website and his ridiculous rates on a site geared toward college kids trying to make money? If he really does get those rates through referrals by existing clients, I think he could afford to pay someone $300 for a decent design. To me, the post was obviously designed to increase his credibility on the site and to appear “established” and “respected”.

So I told him all that by leaving a comment on the blog, hopefully to start a discussion about his work or at least about personal branding. Nope. Not only no discussion, but my comment was immediately deleted (and I know it was deleted AFTER it went live because I checked another computer after posting specifically to see if it was “awaiting moderation” or if it had automatically gone live).

Blogs are about discussion and about opinion. If you don’t like what someone says but it isn’t inappropriate and doesn’t slander or threaten other people, you have a responsibility to your readers as a blog author to keep it up and, ideally, respond.

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