cts | Volt a Day | The Real GM Volt Blog Deal October 21, 2010

I love Nero Wolfe. If you don’t know him and you like mysteries you should look him up and read a few. They are fantastic. Rex Stout worked hard and made a real character to live inside the mysteries he constructed. Nero had rules he lived by and his rigid schedule and guidelines for interaction with clients made even the less-interesting murders fascinating reading.

In one of the mysteries Nero has to leave his brownstone, which he really never does. He has to go all the way to Montana. He winds up camping, which is really as far from the comforts of his Manhattan brownstone as any of his readers can imagine. One of the clients keeps telling Nero that when this adventure is over he needs to treat Nero to “a Real Montana Trout Deal.” (That recipe is on the web, because the Internet is so amazing.) In the end Nero finds the murderer and also shows the ranch “A Real Nero Wolfe Trout Deal,” which is an improvement on the traditional.

I didn’t do much poking around on the web before I started my Volt blog, and certainly didn’t keep track of where I wandered. After I was up and running I followed a few articles from Facebook out to Voltage and, eventually, to GM-Volt. The former is a creation of GM and the latter is a (much earlier) creation of Lyle Dennis.

There is probably no one outside of GM who has had more anticipation for the Volt than Lyle. He started one website about green cars and then let it dissolve into the hands of his partners and started GM-Volt instead. He has been doing a post every day for the past three years and nine months. That’s essentially from the moment the Volt was introduced. I’m a piker in comparison.

Lyle is a doctor (a neurologist), and has now written thousands of little blog entries on this one car. He built a community in the comments section of the blog and eventually connected a vBulletin set of forums to the site. That let people really build a community, starting their own discussion threads, uploading photos, and having longer discussions.

He also added a place for readers to start their own blogs, but when I poked around in there it was mostly a wasteland. (That's a tough portion to run, because 97% of blogs on the Internet are abandoned before they reach their tenth post.)

I met Lyle in Detroit on my trip to have dinner with the Volt team and see the plant where they would be made. He was friendly, in the manner of a doctor, and polite. It is fascinating to me that someone who merely latched onto a single product and wrote about it incessantly has been granted the sort of access that a generation ago would have been reserved for an investigative reporter from the New York Times. (And, it should be noted, it was easy to scoop Lyle’s reporting, so it’s not like he is doing a lot of investigative reporting, at least not in the old sense that reporters did that.)

But, overall, GM-Volt is the Real GM Volt Blog Deal. It is the one people should be turning to. There are thousands of people signed up on the site, and since I figured I would keep my journal on my own blog I wrote to Lyle, after adding his site to my Blogroll links, and asked him to put Voltaday in his links He wrote back:

Unfortunately I don’t have a blogroll.  GM-Volt.com has evolved into a fairly significant financial operation, so screen space is limited and only given to paid sponsored links.

So I signed up for his site and put my site’s URL in my signature block, along with my Twitter name. That way if I was contributing content to his site, people would have a chance to see what my credentials were and, if interested, they could read in more detail some of my journal entries on the same subjects.

My signature block was edited and that information was removed.

I was given some swag by GM during my visit to Detroit and I ran a little give away. That seemed like it would interest some of the GM-Volt community, so I started a discussion thread and mentioned the contest. That thread was deleted with no mail or explanation to me. Since they were upgrading the forum software at the time, I asked if there was a technical issue. Lyle wrote back:

I don't permit the use GM-Volt as a platform to promote/encourage visitors to go to other Volt-related sites.  Its like putting up a sign for Target at Wal-Mart!

You are more than welcome to participate and mix-in on GM-Volt, but please do not promote traffic to other sites.

This has been my editorial policy since day one, and has been my approach to both building and keeping traffic.

I participate in only a few online communities, among them a group of the pilot-owners of a single brand of small airplane. When I first joined, the community was run by someone who really didn’t have our best interests in mind. He would regularly run roughshod over the moderation, deleting and editing posts. He ignored requests to run things differently. I wrote a spider in Ruby that strolled his forums and pulled down all of the content. In a month the community moved to their own server so that we could be in control of our own destiny. We no longer suffer the sort of control and censorship issues we were dealing with then.

The content in a community is protected by copyright of the authors. The standard agreements in the vBulletin suite do not remove those rights. The content in the GM-Volt forums has already been crawled (by Google, for one), and popping the content back up in another vBulletin installation would be less than a day of work for someone who knew what they were doing.

This is to show how mobile a community on the Internet is, and what is important to it. There are a few simple rules that someone like Lyle should keep in mind:

• Sending traffic out to non-profit sites is a good policy. You are helping your community members. Although you are watching your bottom line, in the end if you take care of the community, it will reward you. If you are the best place to come to for someone who wants to learn about the CAB members and where they blog, that’s going to be good for your traffic. If you are a clearing house for information, you become a hub.That’s a good thing.
• Deleting, editing, or suppressing posts is a really bad idea. It is only a matter of time before you have enough technically-savvy people onboard who will have the motivation to take down your community and move it somewhere else. If you think that there’s some way you can protect yourself from this (banning certain IP addresses, eavesdropping on Private Messages) you are wrong, and in the vBulletin community (and phpBBS community) you can read the stories of many people who thought they were invulnerable and learned otherwise.
• The web has gotten very good at being connected. Visitors arriving at my blog are almost always searching for “Colin Summers Volt CAB,” terms which Lyle has in a blog entry on his site. (He lifted my information about the fuel tank size, but didn’t link back to my article, something considered ethically unsound on the web among bloggers.) Rigid control of your web site visitors is not really possible and it just inconveniences them, forcing them to do more work.

All this GM-Volt stuff is really about business for me. Yes, it’s a passion and I’ve worked very hard to spread the word and develop authority. But now that the car is here everyone and their brother is springing up with a new Volt website. Dozens now, including Mark Swain and his brand new CAB site that I just found out about today after starting my CAB forum (thanks for your supportive comments btw (~sarcasm)).

At this point I have no interest in sending people off my site for Volt news or discussion or Volt anything else, and that includes Voltage (always has and they know it). Maybe it’s the wrong approach and doesn't seem very social, but it is what it is.

Here is an important point: I have a hundred readers on my blog. That’s practically no one. There are no advertisements. It is very limited content. There’s no way it is a competitor to Lyle’s site. There is nothing lost when a reader hops to another site to check it out. They open another browser window, or another tab, and once they have satisfied their curiosity they return to the GM-Volt blog or forums where they were. The only thing Lyle is doing is robbing his loyal following of some deeper material.

If I were advertising on my site, trying to register users for something, or gathering a population I could understand some of his petty decisions (like editing one of my posts where I complimented Kris Trexler), but since I am only providing another perspective, I believe he is acting against the interests of the community he helped build.

I hope he comes around. Communities are always better when people are working to make them better.