Embargoes and The Rest of Us

Although I did win “Best Blogger” at the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle awards this year, I am by no means an A Lister. I live in North Carolina, I don’t blog 20 hours a day and I’ve never been on the Gillmor Gang (although Gillmor did comment on one of my posts a while back, which was neat).

So, I was a little surprised last month when I unknowingly broke an embargo regarding Disqus’ integration of Seesmic…

Disqus Now Has Seesmic Integration at CostPerNews: “Now, you can enable video comments through Seesmic integration with Disqus.”

I’m reminded of this because I was goofing around on Summize this morning and came across this back-and-forth between Robert Scoble and CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern:

disqusembargo.jpg

Truth be told, I stumbled upon the new feature that morning while approving a comment and just before heading out on a flight. I thought it was curious, so I did what any blue-blooded American with a blog would do… I blogged it. I was almost late for my flight, but I thought it was a neat new feature that I wanted to share with my small yet devoted audience here.

When I landed later that day, I had a number of emails flood into the BlackBerry asking why I “went early” with the story and broke the embargo. I felt bad at first, but then I realized that I had blogged about a feature that was already there… how was that breaking anything?

If I had been aware of such an embargo, I would have definitely not posted the story until the approved time (I’ve honored dozens of them here) and really don’t see the need or gain from being able to yell “FIRST!” on TechMeme at this point (this blog has been around for a while, is comfortable in its little niche and is not meant to be on TechMeme anyway).

Moral of the story… if you’re a tech provider / merchant and you’re going to put a-listers under an embargo, don’t release the feature early so that z-listers like myself can see and blog about it.

Belated apologies to Robert, Allen, TechCrunch, etc for jumping the gun of a race I didn’t know I was running.

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