From my posting today at Sun’s Security Community Blog:

Sun Microsystems its own internal vocabulary, and one of the phrases which used to be common was that of the CNN Moment – a “damaging public infrastructure failure often experienced by dot-com enterprises” which presumably would be big enough and embarrassing enough to end up on the front page of the eponymous website.

What I am finding is less obvious to some of my colleagues (and customers) is that as mainstream media websites become less relevant, blogs and other communities become more relevant in terms of how people will perceive you and your company; and the distributed nature of blogs means that stories don’t get retracted, they get amplified.

So nowadays we should fear “blog moments”, or perhaps social-tar-and-feathering, since once humiliation is stuck to your brand then it’s awfully hard to wash off.

(full version…)