I guess it wouldn’t be a weekend in the blogosphere without a little drama of some kind, and this weekend it was Mike Arrington’s no-show at BlogWorld Expo. The soap opera apparently began with a comment from Leo “TWiT” Laporte at the conference about how Mike didn’t come because he “forgot” (something I can only assume was Leo’s idea of a joke).
It quickly escalated into a full-on Arrington hate-a-thon, in which people used Mike’s absence from the conference as a jumping-off point for all kinds of ad hominem attacks (like the ones in Tony’s comment section at Deep Jive Interests) and conspiracy theories about link-bait. In the end, conference organizer Rick Calvert set the story straight by explaining how confusion over dates and a lack of communication helped lead to Mike not being there, and I think a lot of people who piled on the Mike-bashing bandwagon might be feeling a little sheepish now.
I have some personal experience with Mike and conferences, since he keynoted at the last mesh conference I helped organize in Toronto in May, and I can say that while he was occasionally difficult to reach via email (not surprising, really, with the volume of email he probably gets), he went out of his way to stay in touch, showed up on time and took part in all of the events without a word of complaint despite being severely jet-lagged. He even stayed longer than he had originally planned.
If there’s one thing that events like this weekend’s hate-a-thon reinforce, it’s that rushing to judgment in a blog post (or a comment on a post) without having all the facts is rarely — if ever — a smart thing to do. More often than not it’s better to wait.
