Neil McIntosh writes about how users reacted when the Guardian newspaper printed postings from the website's "talkboard":
"The result, in talk-room parlance, was that we were badly flamed. Some users said it was a blatant breach of trust. Users were concerned that what they thought was a discussion between a few of them might, exposed to a bigger audience, leave them vulnerable to identification."
It's strange to imagine a posting on a Web-based message board, open to the entire Internet and sucked into the great vacuum of Google, as "private" but regard printing in a newspaper -- inherently limited by the realities of physical distribution -- as "public."
But strange or not, some users of the website seem to be regarding it as so.
I've been involved in Web-to-print moves like this for about a decade now, and I've never had a problem like this -- but Neil's column is a reminder that it could happen at any time.
Let this stand as a warning to website managers: explain yourself, explain yourself again, and then explain yourself some more. Pretty much all of us have been careful to include unlimited republication clauses in our user agreements, but that's not enough. This is a social interaction issue, not a legal one.
