Annoying internet habits…

Internet etiquette. Some understand it, some don’t, and others just don’t care. But good internet etiquette can make a difference as to whether people pay attention to what you have to say or not. And in this day and age with broadband internet granting a potentially worldwide stage to anyone who has something interesting to say, ‘competition’ can be fierce.

So why would we pay attention to the person with annoying internet habits over the person with good etiquette when both have something of equal interest to share with us? We don’t.
Plus, remember what our parents always said – you only have one chance to make a good first impression. On the internet, your written word and your etiquette are the only tools you have to make that first impression.

I would much rather read a musing from the blogger who utilizes good grammar, punctuation and capitalization skills over the person who chooses to type nearly illegible text with no punctuation, all caps, and numerous grammatical errors.

Here are some of my top annoyances on the internet. Feel free to reply with some of your own.

All venues

**Using all capital letters. As the internet’s form of ‘shouting’, it is just plain rude, at worst. At best, it is pure laziness and is hard for the eyes to look at for very long.

**Using only lower case letters. While it doesn’t have the same ‘rude’ connotation that capital letters do, it is equally difficult to read, as the lack of break in characters is monotonous. And again, it is laziness on the typist’s part. Unless, of course, their shift and cap keys are broken. It also has the effect of implying the typist doesn’t believe anything they have written has any importance, denoted by the lack of capitalization. If you don’t think what you wrote is important, why should we read it?

**Poor spelling & typos. Everyone makes a few, it happens and it is OK in personal internet communications (not business!). But an overabundance of them implies a lack of education, intelligence, or apathy towards what you are saying. Again, if you don’t care, why should I?

**Rampant internet slang. U no wut I mean. 2 many shortcuts in ur text makes it hard to read and again diminishes what you are saying. These shortcuts are really only suited for venues that are limited in characters, like text messaging. LOL, I had to stop typing in shortcuts a third of the way through that second sentence – I was annoying myself just doing it!

Email

**It drives me nuts when people send an email with no subject line. It makes it fun to try and find that email later when I want to look at it again. And it diminishes the importance of your email if you didn’t even see fit to title it.

**People who reply to all on announcements. You know what I’m talking about. You are at work, they send out an announcement about a system being down, a change to employee insurance, whatever – and a dozen or more of the fools on distribution reply to all with inane comments or questions that didn’t need to go to the whole distribution group. Then it snowballs as even more reply to all with pleas to “Take me off this list!” and the like instead of replying to just the offenders.

**Forwarded email jokes, inspirational messages, etc. I like a lot of these as well as the next person, but if that is all you ever send me without ever sending a personal note, I’m going to start feeling like just another name in your distribution group, like you feel as if you are winning somehow the more people you can forward this stuff too. And one or two of these forwarded emails in the same day is plenty.

Those people who forward everything they get – often 10 or more in one day – are usually going to see my delete button before I ever even open them. Send me 1 or 2 today and then another each day over the next week or so. I will pay much better attention to your emails that way, I promise.

**If you are forwarding emails to a group of people, take out the names and email addresses from the previous email header please, and use the BCC or Blind Carbon Copy for the new recipients. It is just polite. Spam is often generated from forwarded lists where someone has a business, gets a forwarded list with tons of email addresses, and then adds all of these unfortunates to their spam lists. Oh yeah, and this is how one of my ex-boyfriends got my new email address too, from just such an email chain that some common friends happened to send. Nice.

MySpace

**Numerous bulletins in a short period of time are just tiresome, especially when they are posted back to back. It’s a huge “Look at me!” yell, which is offputting in its seeming desperation. It also implies an extreme egotism on the part of the poster that says they think what they have to say is much more important than anything anyone else on the bulletins might have to say, since their page of posts pushes everyone else’s off the front page of the bulletins window.

If you are a comedian, author, band, etc. promoting a new release, appearance, contest or the like, there are better ways to catch your fans’ attention. Posting too many items simultaneously will have the undesired effect of making many of us inured to your bulletins and ignore them, or even deleting you from my friends. Why not post all the items in a blog, or multiple blogs, and then post a bulletin with a short announcment that you have news, excerpts, tour dates, etc. on your blog, providing a link to that blog page?

I pretty much delete almost anyone who abuses bulletins now, simply because I find it so irritating, and I choose not to be irritated, which requires deletion of the offenders from my own Friends list. If you are guilty of this and I haven’t removed you from my Friends list, I must either really like you personally or be a big fan of your work. But I’m still tempted every time you do it…

**Bulletins that should have been blogs. Some people seem to treat the Bulletins like their own personal blog and post their every little thought as a bulletin. That’s what your blog is for, and guess what? MySpace kindly includes a blog in your MySpace account. Bulletins should be for announcements, news, the occasional ‘tag’ type game or quiz, etc.

**Here’s one of my all-time biggest MySpace pet peeves: people who bulletin post a ‘friends test’ to see who their ‘true friends’ are. You’ve seen these, I’m certain. The bulletin post rants on and on about how many ‘fake friends’ there are on MySpace – people who just go around friending everyone they can in order to bump their friends count up. Funny thing is, every time I’ve seen this bulletin post, it has come from someone that is a complete stranger to me, and yet they friended me! So now, after having initiated the friending with me, they are testing me to see if I am a real friend? Well, it looks like I’m going to fail this one, so I’ll just do you the favor of removing you from my friends list so you don’t have to trouble yourself. I’m sure you will be busy with all those deletions of the other ‘fake friends’ you find in the results of your little test. See? I’m just helping you along here.

Jennifer Ray
http://www.jenaray.com/