Well sort of. What it has actually done is ban the updating of status or profile on social networks for the duration any NFL game and 90 minutes either side, a move meant to protect  proprietary information such as the score. Fair enough one might say, except this ban does not just cover players but also any of their third party representatives and the media.

In it’s own words the NFL said

“Longstanding policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress apply fully to Twitter and other social media platforms,…Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game.”

You may recall that Premier Football also made moves to protect its proprietary information earlier this year by issuing cease and desist notices to blogs that provided fixtures lists and live match updates, but that covered the wild frontier of the blogosphere, not established media outfits. While the banning of players, officials and representatives is covered by a, probably unenforceable, social media policy, one would think that trying to stifle the press would be directly against the First Amendment which prohibits the infringement of both free speech and the freedom of the press. Of course it is possible that the press will welcome this move as a way of also protecting its role as provider of the latest and most detailed sports news.

It has been suggested by some that this latest clampdown has been instigated by Chad Ochocinco, wide receiver for the Bengals, who has something of a twitter addiction. It was his sideline tweeting that seemed to get tweeting banned during games by players. Now he has been planning to tweet from the sidelines by having a competition winner sat in the crowd make the updates for him after interpreting pre-arranged hand signals, although the clip of Ochocinco talking about the contest on his uStream show on 26th August seems to have been pulled.

The Bengal’s first match is against the Denver Broncos on Sunday 13th Sept at 1300, local time, which surely will be the first test of the NFL’s new policy, might be time to switch to watching another oddly-shaped-ball game.

It seems that the Daily Mail, the midrange UK daily newspaper, has taken one of Oscar Wilde’s more famous quotes to heart as it plans to stop moderating user comments in the near future. According to a report in New Media Age there will be a filter for inappropriate language but comments will only be reviewed if reported by other users. This is a system employed by the Daily Express and Star, who also disable comments on legally sensitive stories. James Bromley, MD of Mail Online, told NAM:-

“We have hundreds of thousands of comments every month. Because of the volume, not all were going up. We want to give people their chance to respond and for it to appear immediately. This improves the user experience.”

Currently the Mail is the most popular online version of a mainstream paper, with almost 30 million unique visitors per month, it also claims to have the highest percentage of UK based visitors of any other UK news paper site and high engagement levels and no doubt its number one stats is reflected in its advertising charges. Whether that remains the case when advertisers will no longer be guaranteed their content will not appear next to unmoderated comments.

Relying on the community to self-moderate can be a risky strategy at the best of times, there is a reason why Godwin’s law still holds true almost two decades after its inception. The Daily Mail can not also be regarded as the most neutral reporter of news that attracts literate and balanced individuals as commenters so there are bound to be some interesting comment streams on some of its more trollish inflammatory articles. It will be interesting to watch how this develops and if in six months the Mail returns to pre-comment moderation to save falling ad revenues.

The Interwebz, and more specifically the world wide web, have both been around for quite some time now. Blogging has entered the difficult tweenager stage and even Twitter is getting past the terrible two’s tantrum throwing stage. There’s also now officially a ratio of one-to-one for every social media guru/maven/expert/sith lord to every non-social meda n00b. Pretty much all we seem to do is talk about blogging/micro-blogging/citizen journalist, how to do it well, it’s importance and impact. The horror stories of what happens when you cock up can circulate for years (seriously if I attend one more social media seminar that references either Dell Hell or the Kryptonite, I may well go postal), so it’s stunning that some companies don’t seem to realise that people use the web to talk about them and that anything they may do in a slight untoward manner may well get picked up on. It’s also surprising that marketeers still don’t seem to understand human nature and that it’s not just bloggers who don’t check their facts.

A colleague flagged an interesting tale of woe from the Inquirer about a blog competition ran by Asus that had attracted complaints due to a late in the day change to how the winner would be picked, the intro calmly stated that:

IRATE BLOGGERS are up in arms at Asus after a blogging competition at electricpig.com turned sour.

Which seemed like an excellent opportunity for me to wax lyrical about how companies need to be wary of trying to play things their own way and shouldn’t expect to get away without at least a minor blogstorm. Indeed, the whole point of the post was initially intended to be something along the lines of ‘For god’s sake people, when will you realise that the web is nothing that a huge rumour mill and stop adding grist by underestimating this. This now forms lesson one for this post, because as I researched into the story it became apparent that Asus had little option but to change the selection process.

From what I can gather, as I can’t find the original competition post, readers of Electricpig were invited to pitch to become an Asus reviewer for a month, they could pick which product they wanted and had to produce three articles per week for the duration of the competition. Six bloggers would be chosen and the winner would be decided on by a reader vote for the best one, they would then be able to keep the product they reviewed. One lucky commentator would also be given an Eee PC, so far so funky. Posts were written, the competition closed and the votes piled in, and the winner by a fair stretch was Gavyn Britton, except there was then some discussion as to whether he had gamed the system by asking for votes on other forums. Second lesson, people will always try to game the system and sometimes being overly-cynical is actually a good thing.

It was decided to then ask the six bloggers involved to vote for their favourite reviewer, which meant Emma Hill, who’d only gained 1% of the popular vote, won. Unfortunately, the post about her winning rather glossed over the reason why the selection process had changed:

The final twist to the campaign came when we asked the six bloggers to turn on each other who they felt gave the best blogging experience. We’re happy to announce that Emma Hill, who affectionately called the ASUS Eee Top 1602 ‘ET’ and even took some cracking photos of ET in action to prove the point!

Which then meant that the Electricpig readers felt cheated and disenfranchised, leading them to complain to The Inquirer, herein lies the third lesson. The web is about transparency, it’s difficult for people to create conspiracy theories if there is nothing left for them to doubt and question, so if you are doing stuff online as a brand be open about, explain why things are the way they are and be open to discussion as to your reasons. In this case, if the final post announcing the winner had been clearer about why the selection process had changed. Another possibility would have been to ask the readers themselves how they felt the situation should be resolved. Perhaps then people wouldn’t have complained to the Inq, which in turn would not have written a misleading article blaming Asus for arbitrarily changing the rules, which in turn leads to the forth and final lesson for this post, don’t take anything you read at face value.