I’ve written on this issue enough I think – as I sat here this morning with my morning coffee, I was trying to decide whether or not to even broach the subject of Shel Israel v. Loren Feldman again.. but then I decided that perhaps the best thing to do would be to ask the community here at The Blog Herald what advice they would give to Shel Israel?
You know the backstory, so I won’t bother repeating it.
But Shel’s latest post makes it clear that he has no idea how to deal with Loren Feldman and continues to dig himself deeper and deeper into a hole. Witness:
I’m often asked what caused the grudge between us is. I don’t know. In fact, I have never met Loren Feldman. To my knowledge, we have only been in the same room once and that was at South by Southwest, so I do not know why Loren is doing what he is doing. My guess is that it has more to do with my friend and colleague, Robert Scoble than me. The two worked together at Podtech and when Loren posted a video called “TechNigga,” Robert was among many people who found the piece offensive. Personally, I consider the piece tasteless at best, but was not involved at that time in any conversations regarding it.
But if you think the show will fail because of Loren Feldman and his puppet, you are vastly overrating him. He has managed to annoy, distract and embarrass me. He has confused people by usurping my site (BTW someone at FastCompany owns LorenFeldman.com. Perhaps we could arrange a swap. Someone in Washington State owns RobertScoble.com and several variations of Michael Arrington URL have been secured by third parties as well).
What would be the advice that you would give to Shel? Where did he make mistakes? What course corrections should he do?
For what it’s worth, Chartreuse offered the most coherent advice about dealing with Loren that I’ve read:
The rap game taught a generation that the best way to get attention (which, of course, is internet currency) is to take sides and make (a lot) of noise.
What we have in the blogosphere is the generation that grew up on Tupac vs. Biggie playing the same game in their universe.
Unfortunately Shel seems to have grown up on Laurence Welk putting him at an obvious disadvantage.
In so many ways..
Tom also offers up some interesting perspectives as well.
I’ll offer my advice in the next day or so in the comments.