cts | Volt a Day | Back to the Important Stuff November 16, 2010

The Volt won the Car of the Year award from Motor Trend. These are good times for an electric car (even one that drags around a range-extending generator).

I parked this morning in a spot marked for Electric Vehicles Only and I didn't get a ticket.

And I talked to Lyle Dennis for twenty minutes (he was driving in his Volt, so I missed a few of his comments), sorting out why I was banned momentarily from GM-Volt.com and how we could move on to have a community where people felt free to communicate.

I am entirely sympathetic to his position, which is that he has built up the audience for his blog over four years and that in the past couple months there have been a bunch of rival Volt forums that want to drive traffic to their site. So they send people over to GM-Volt to post things like "See what I wrote over here on this site..." just to drive readers over to their site and get them to register.

From that perspective, it is hard to understand why you would have a contributor like me, who does have links to content off of the GM-Volt site, but isn't actually trying to make any money.

Once we cleared up the fact that I had no motive to gain traffic on another site, other than wanting the Volt community to be aware of things they would be interested in, Lyle was happy to say I could post whatever I wanted. We discussed the difficulties of protecting a community from spam, especially if that spam came from community members.

I am cautiously optimistic that this is cleared up and behind us. I will continue to contribute to GM-Volt and will point people there until there is an editorial issue.