This post is 100% true!
When I met Andrew Alleman of DNW at TRAFFIC Las Vegas earlier this year, my impression of him was that of a serious and polite domain professional. Comparing Andrew to goofy old me would be like projecting Tom and Jerry cartoons during the Cannes film festival. 😀
At that time, DomainGang was a mere four months old, growing still amidst some controversy; especially from people that all of a sudden had to face the funny side of domaining, versus the same old stream of regurgitated news.
Over breakfast, Andrew made a point, which I wasn’t sure how to process at that time.
Andrew referred to the confusion by some, over DomainGang articles that were intended to be serious in their message, versus incredulous, outlandish parodies of “news” no-one would hopefully take for real, beyond the intent to deliver entertainment.
And yet, DomainGang was launched with fun in mind, because we thought that in some alternate universe Ron Jackson could actually sell DNJournal for seven figures and retire a millionaire. Or, that real interviews with real domainers, such as Joshua Pellisero, Chef Patrick or Bill Kara – or even scoops about stolen domains could easily co-exist with humorous manuals such as the “7 Dirty Words of Domaining” and real situations involving fictional Russian billionaire domainers.
It seems that Andrew Alleman was right, and it only took six more months to realize.
It took a brutal assassination of a Greek journalist & blogger, whereupon an article related to a horrible event seemed so out of place among the “American Candy” story or the “10 Reasons we like Frager Factor“.
After the Socrates Giolias murder story was posted, it was the first time I witnessed the same confusion referred to by Andrew Alleman at TRAFFIC Las Vegas. After the article appeared on DomainGang, it was as if there was no way to surround that article with dozens of others, like the ones listed above – without some clarification over its content – so I decided to postpone all scheduled posts for the remainder of Monday and think about a solution.
As a writer, when words come together to form a story, a plot, or a piece of breaking news the urge to unleash the beast of creativity is often too strong. There would be no way for me not to write and post the story about a murdered administrator of the biggest blog in Greece; simply because of my ethnic background and due to my professional history in both print and electronic journalism since the late 80’s.
The solution that I’ve come up with, here at DomainGang is simple.
Any article, post or story that is 100% true, regardless of the amount of humor it contains will be tagged from now on with a special “100%” graphic, which will be found at the bottom of the article.
Articles that lack that “100%” seal are most definitely deliverers of a message, an analysis, an opinion; be it reviews of domaining issues, humorous musings about domaining happenings, or even fictional events that happen in some alternate domaining universe.
However, unless they are 100% true in their content, there will be no such image at the bottom.
To recap: 100% means that the entire contents constitute a delivery of facts and figures. We’ll save the parody for everything else that does not bear the “100%” image. Hopefully, this will satisfy some of our readers and it will help with the apparent confusion some have been having over our content.
Now, if only Ron Jackson had indeed retired a millionaire, life would be grand! 😀
