Often those who write articles to further their expert status in an industry in a trade journal or to put online on an Internet Article Submission Site will evoke comments from competitors. Many times these comments will be negative. Now then in the old way of doing things in trade journals this did not happen so much because it takes a lot of time to write out a comment and mail it and no one will see it until next month in the opinion section of the trade journals letters to the editor.

However in the Internet age people can interactively comment on an article in real time and in doing so will often slam the other, because they are a competitor of sorts. This issue recently came up in an online article submission sites Blog. One gentleman Bill stated that often competitors will comment on an article, usually they have nothing nice to say at all.

Indeed Bill makes another good point and I have had those who feel they are in commercial competition with me write negative comments; yet really I am retired and hardly trying to pitch a product or service. But they will attack an article or two with negative comments and then rate all the rest of the articles on a given subject with one stars and of course I know it is them as they do it the same day and with many articles.

The unfortunate thing is that comments, controversy and inter activity is important for website traffic, yet one must also consider the negative sides of the issues. Which can turn off authors or writers and detract from the over all website. So consider this in 2006.