Does calling it a blog make it so?

[technophelia]

I came up the Maple Leaf Foods blog - this blog has the purpose of trying to deal with the concerns of consumers on their Our Journey to Food Safety Leadership. Apparently this blog is supposed to be a shining example of corporate accountability - but most of the posts I read were along the lines of: the listeriosis problem could never have been prevented.

What first struck me was the lack of comments - they are getting traffic no doubt but no comments. I looked in their blog policy, and they say they want to hear the positive and negative and would not censor comments. So I went deeper and found comments - all resoundingly positive. So either they ARE censoring comments or NOBODY has anything bad to say about Maple Leaf Foods following the listeriosis problems in some of their plants.

So I read deeper - in their terms and conditions - and found that they prohibit linking to their blog without written consent from Maple Leaf Foods. No linking? To a blog? I can understand government, maybe news sites, maybe lawyers sites, doing stuff like this. But a blog?

This leads me to wonder - does calling it a blog make it a blog? What is the cutoff point - does a blog have to exist within the blogosphere (connected through links) to actually be a blog, does it have to include a real social element?

Just wondering what other people thought about this...

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by technophelia

I came up the Maple Leaf Foods blog - this blog has the purpose of trying to deal with the concerns of consumers on their Our Journey to Food Safety Leadership. Apparently this blog is supposed to be a shining example of corporate accountability - but most of the posts I read were along the lines of: the listeriosis problem could never have been prevented.

What first struck me was the lack of comments - they are getting traffic no doubt but no comments. I looked in their blog policy, and they say they want to hear the positive and negative and would not censor comments. So I went deeper and found comments - all resoundingly positive. So either they ARE censoring comments or NOBODY has anything bad to say about Maple Leaf Foods following the listeriosis problems in some of their plants.

this sounds like a PR company exercise - i.e. damage limitation

I've done this myself for clients in order to knock out negative search engine listings - you simply flood the search results with positive stuff

there's also a dark side to this - where you flood the listings with negative stuff about your clients competitors - usually done from a number of self hosted and free hosted blog sites and social networking pages

anyway it doesn't sound like a genuine blog to me

[Monkeyman09]

I'm just wondering how you found this blog if there are no links to it?

[trishacupra]

The 'no linking' policy sounds ridiculous. Are they going to make Google get written consent to link to them in its search results? Plain stupid.