It's certainly not the clearest post the man has ever made but I think there are some lessons to be learned from the meta-content of it all.
To my eyes there are two lessons here...
1. If you treat people fairly and truly have a good reputation in a community that will do more to defend your reputation than anything else. Because people will stand up for you.
2. If you are a person who has been treated fairly by someone else you should start thinking of it as your duty to defend them against attacks. Because in a world where an anonymous person can ruin someone's reputation it's up to all of us to protect each other against such attacks.
Again he wasn't very clear and I have no inside information but those seemed to be the clear lessons (at least IMHO)
Maybe it's just because I haven't had any coffee today, but I failed to pick up on this to the depth you have, so thank you for bringing it to the surface. I think the original post should point to or incorporate this.
Disqus should pull in the reactions. Unfortunately I don't think they give the blog author tools to highlight select favorites, or to weight them by community votes
Re:How To Defend Your Reputation
by fredwilson on Sunday March 28, 2010 @12:50PM
(#1224830)
agreed. it was not my best post. i could and should have done better.
but you have captured the essence of it
thank you
nice Tom, 3 musketeers meets the social web.
Actually he refers back to a post a few weeks ago that does actually tell you how to defend your reputation online(albeit a bit indirectly).
Which is not to say anything bad about the author. I would probably try to defend my reputation if someone were attacking it, as well, but I would not have the wherewithal to be nearly so effective at it.