Let’s say you are the founder of a company called Mediascrape, which appears to be trying to be a web 2.0-esque start-up in the media space. And let’s say that as this founder, the “about” page describing your firm includes the sentence “MediaScrape also encourages individuals around the world to submit their news stories, providing a venue for empowered individual journalism as the most democratic form of news reporting.” And let’s say you’ve had feature articles written about you, describing you as “refreshingly forthcoming“, where it is made to appear your goal is to develop a site that allows a diversity of opinions to be aired. And let’s say that TechCrunch, which according to Technorati is the #2 rated blog, wrote an article about your company that included quite a few negative comments – or more specifically “oddities that (the author) can’t work out”, which he goes on to describe, and numerous commenters appear to support. What would you do?

If you answered something along the lines of “respond in thoughtful detail in the blog comments”, added in a “perhaps provide a more complete response on my own blog, linking back to the main article”, and/or “I’d directly address any of the ‘oddities’ that needed attending to”, I would be inclined to think you are on the right track. However, if you responded “I would threaten legal action via email”, you would be more in line with the option mediascrape founder Tyler Cavell chose. I think me might look back and regret that email.