Well, I’ve decided to no longer contribute to the Core77 website. After a recent post another one of the “cloggers” decided to add a comment inferring that I was advertising for the company covered in the entry. And his comment was subsequently reviewed and approved by the site webmaster. You can see the same text – just with more taken from the press release – also posted on this blog (Link). His comment:

Drop the cost to $50 and you probably wouldn’t have to keep advertising

To be honest, his comments confused me until I discovered he’s an editor at two magazines – one entirely geared toward the industry about which both he and I were submitting news. I’m not going to post what I suspect might be going on because I don’t know, but it’s enough to get me thinking that I’d rather just not bother. Besides, this site and some other things I have going on is keeping me plenty busy.

{Update: For those industrial designers that visit this blog, I wanted to append this post with some new information. The comment quoted above may have been posted by someone unknown to the people at Core77, since the unnamed person to whom I’m referring has informed them that he posted no comments and that apparently someone unknown to him accessed his account without his knowledge or approval. Given my ongoing battle with hackers and defacers, I can certainly imagine this to be a possibility; more so if this is motivated by more than just the challenge of the hack. Who knows, it could simply have been a visiting vendor with momentary access to that person’s machine. Given that possibility I should have reacted with a more level head and simply sent an email or made a phone call to resolve the issue. Unfortunately I didn’t.

That doesn’t, however, mitigate some other issues that concern me which have become apparent as a result of this situation. Because I don’t administer that site, I can’t immediately deal with comments that could be libellous and damaging to my reputation. And the Core77 site is too popular and the net moves too fast for me to want to wait on anyone else to deal with those potential issues. It’s enough that I don’t have time to monitor the Core77 site for myself due to my own workload. I certainly can’t expect them to babysit for me. So while the opportunity was there for me to continue contributing, that concern and my own projects, keeps me in an observation-only mode. Core is still without doubt the best site currently covering Industrial Design on the net and I’m fortunate to have had a chance to contribute. But now I think I’ll stick to pointing people to their entries and articles instead of writing them.}