Cruddas fever - 1 comment

I've met Jon Cruddas (briefly) - he seems like a great guy, and I don't have a big problem with the fervour for his campaign that we're seeing amongst Labour bloggers, except when people are disproportionately using our recommendations facility to plug, frankly, just about any blog post that offers favourable coverage.

I know it's pointless to issue guidelines about recommendations, but the original vision was that it was the "best" articles that would attract votes, not just the ones you liked or that supported a particular faction or campaign that you were associated with. It's not a huge deal, but there have been some pretty blatant examples of this happening, and today's is just one of several.



I don't know whether these seven votes are the result of one person or several, and I'm sure it's nothing to do with the bloggers who appear above, but surely people can see that recommending posts (one of which consists of a single link) in this way is unethical, just as it is unethical to vote for your own posts. In the great scheme of things this hardly matters a jot, but we're not so vast and faceless a network that there aren't people who care about keeping things tidy, honest, and sticking up for those bloggers who plough lonely furrows but who still produce great posts.

Update (10/03 @ 00:50): whoever's doing this obviously isn't reading, as the last three recommendations have gone onto the same pile.