Hi everyone,

I'm in a bit of a quandary. Late last week, there was
a flurry of activity on the social network site I set
up, Stop Cyberbullying
(http://stopcyberbullying.ning.com), which I created
to give teachers a place to share best practices on
bullying education. In a matter of hours we were
flooded with a number of new users who were
vandalizing the community in extremely obnoxious ways.


The reason for the vandalism? Well, it turns out the
latest issue of Wired Magazine decided to name the
Stop Cyberbullying community as "one of the six lamest
social networks" on the Internet.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-09/st_socialnetworks

Here's what they had to say about us:

Stop Cyberbullying (stopcyberbullying.ning.com)
What it is: A safe place for frank discussions on the
topic of Internet bullying
Who you'll meet: Pussies
What's annoying: Dare to call them pussies, and
they'll gang up on you mercilessly.

Now I know this was intended as a joke, but the
consequences have been very serious. We had no choice
but to lock down the community, making it private and
invite-only, and work with the site host, ning.com, to
expel all the vandals. So needless to say, I'm pretty
annoyed, but I don't want to make the situation worse.
My gut is telling me to call them out and write an
open letter to Wired on my blog, telling them that
they're a part of the problem - eg, "Wired mocks
educators for combating cyberbullying" - but I fear
that doing so will lead to more vandals and bullies
attacking the site, and Wired basically saying "we
told you so."

Any thoughts on what should I do?

thanks,
andy


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Andy Carvin
andycarvin at yahoo com
www.andycarvin.com
www.pbs.org/learningnow
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