This is why we blog

Many people ask me what the value is of blogging, and whether I think this form of 'citizen journalism' is really going to make a difference i.e. are people really going to listen to what us bloggers have to say?

Well today I found an example of just how powerful bloggers with a civic conscience can be. The Do Not Fly Air France saga continues, with more and more examples of shocking customer service by the airline, including another of Colin's colleagues in Tunis at WSIS who had her luggage lost as well. Read some horror stories here.

So some angry people got together to launch a googlebombing attack on Air France. Googlebombing is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine. You can check the results here, here and here. So now the first thing that anyone searching for the airline will see is how shocking they really are through blog postings and other articles by some reliable sources and first-hand accounts, that they would never have had access to otherwise.

So to all my skeptics out there, appreciate the subtle power that pissed-off net savvy bloggers have against corporate giants that are getting too big for their boots. And DON'T FLY AIR FRANCE!

posted by Cat Murray @ 11:44