cruel to be kind

“I’d love to hear what you’re interested in” says Ken Moss, the general manager of the MSN Search service, on their new blog.

“I’m listening“, he adds.

Great! People who know me, that I love to give constructive feedback, bring in ideas and much more. Perfect oportunity for me, especially with the newly found annoyances around Google, right?

Yes, it could have been the beginning of something beautiful, but the saga ended, before it begun:

You must sign in using a Microsoft .NET Passport to publish a comment to this website.

So – like every other MSN Spaces blog I know about – this will be another read-only blog.

I’ll try the trackback function with this entry, but to be honest, if I want to comment, I don’t want to be forced into my own blogs. You could say “who is she?” and point out that there will be many, many other people, all of them using a passport account, all of them leaving good and valid comments. And you will be right. And wrong at the same time.

“Not welcome” is written in big letters on every of those “you have to register first” blogs, and with Passport it is even worse. The question is: How many people will you (without knowing) reject because of this?

And please, don’t be mistaken: I do have a Passport account. I could use it and I would have no problem when doing so – I stand by my name and by my actions. I just choose not to join the conversation on a normal blog with this kind of user registry.

Will I subscribe to the blog? Probably. And ever time I read it, every time I feel like I would like to comment, it will be the same angry feeling as I do have now. And I am sure not the only one feeling this way.

Angry is not the right word, but think of being promised a very tasty, high quality desert. Just to find out that you are supposed to eat a toad first. As delicious as the desert may be – other companies offer nice desert without toads.

Now, will this blog attract feedback, establish relation with the user base and built up dep customer relations? Of course, with some people. But not with me.

Who am I again? Oh yeah. A multiplier. People ask me to train them, especially on search engine stuff. People pay me to help them understand search engines. People trust my judgement and take my suggestion as ‘the words’. The woman who tells them to stop using IE, install Firefox and install a Google toolbar. Perhaps a A9 toolbar.

Nothing you need to worry about.

(via Scoble)

Tags: cruel to be kind