I won’t ever claim to be as knowledgable about the science of blogging as some of the pros, but one thing I’m sure of is that if your desire is to alienate your readers, the best way to do that is to attack them when they disagree with you.

I had my first blog feud today with Adie Cooke of Net Business Blog. He posted about how one of his clients had a logo redesign to go with their new ecommerce site. I had my misgivings about the post because I felt the information was a bit lacking and the arguments he was making were, well, wrong.

Let me state for the record that I have been a subscriber to Net Business for awhile now and he typically has some really informative pieces. I’m not really sure why it is, but I’ve never commented there before, but since this particular post dipped into my area of expertise, I figured I’d chime in.

I tried to be as constructive as possible with my comment and avoid making any ego driven comments. I’m not the greatest designer ever, far from it, so I wanted to come off as knowledgeable and helpful but humble. Unfortunately, Adie didn’t take it that way.

I always subscribe to comments when I’ve commented because I never know when I will learn something, but when I got a message with Adie’s response, I was honestly taken back. I wouldn’t say his response was caustic, but definitely not happy. His first comment I chalk up to being a miscommunication, but his second comment was definitely passive aggressive, calling me ignorant in a round about way.

Now I’m a pretty easy going guy, but if you call me ignorant, especially on a subject I feel I’ve fairly knowledgeable on, I’m going to stand up for myself. So I responded, still professional, but definitely telling him what I thought about him and his comments. Once that was posted, I was done with it… or so I thought.

I then got another email, this one an automated response to my first comment:

Hello Dave Conrey,

Thank you for posting a comment on this Article…

If you haven’t already, please sign up to our full RSS Feed

Now I’m pissed off. So you want me to subscribe to your feed? Why? So you can attack me again in another post? Reading this pandering auto email after that exchange made me reject him completely, and I let him know in a response email. Then I went to Google Reader and unsubscribed myself.

So, if you’re a blogger, but tired of all your trusted subscribers, follow Adie’s example.

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