Jill Golick is probably one of the most generous people, with her time, her patience, and her talent, that I’ve had the good fortune to meet in this industry.

Don’t second guess yourself here, Jill, please. You were invited. I cannot for the life of me believe the crust of this group. It sounds like things are fine if you’re in the bubble with them, and toxic for everyone else.

Clearly, judging by the subsequent reactions online, “offended” was not an out of line word to describe the reaction. Either by the Casecamp’ers or the Creative community.

I also am going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume the poster above is not repeating the dark lesson within the pilot of the West Wing when she talks about that “New York Attitude.” That would be truly ugly.

One thing is perfectly clear to me though. Taken at face value, the “New York attitude” is right. The preciousness of this group does not make them innovators.

When we seek our partnerships down the road, we creatives must remember that. Toronto might just be the problem that everyone says it is.

I am shocked by Robin’s comment above. Did I seem contemptuous from stage? That’s certainly wasn’t how I felt. I was a little nervous in front of that crowd and your question really did take me by surprise. But if I did come across as contemptuous and dismissive, I see how this all started.

I know I’ll never convince Robin that I was genuinely sorry, but I hope by now you and I have come to an understanding of the humanity behind the situation.

I actually believe you are genuine in having contributed to the body of knowledge and doing this little social engineering experiment. Everyone is running pilot projects to learn how better to do things in social media and what it is that the social space supports.

There’s a social experiment for you. Try a New York attitude in a Toronto crowd and you feel the love. You were telling the crowd – hey if you’ve got feelings that’s not my problem – it’s a big tough world and I didn’t ask you to have feelings so quit whinging you big baby. OK well you’ve got to know that what was understood by the crowd. Well, at least you know it now.

That said, I reiterate that you were genuine in wanting to contribute and learn for good and common reasons. I think it was just one of those Howard Dean “Yeehaw” moments when you bitchslapped the audience’s concern and the hush went out. Soon enough a preemptive clap began – that’s what they call the “slow clap” in the UK – here we applaud despite the fact that your time isn’t necessarily over on the stage.

No applause please. I’m finished.

Many of us are playing in these assorted walled gardens and sandboxes building significant value through the addition of our content. While these tools make it very easy to import your data, there’s scant options available to export your data in an easy and meaningful way.

While Jill can keep a copy of the words she inputs into facebook, what options were there for exporting the contents of her wall … or her photos … or videos. Nevermind all of her contacts. Let’s not forget Scoble got tossed off of facebook for trying to export into Outlook the birthdays of his friends. Yet another way to violate the TOS.

Even if we all play by the rules, nothing says Microsoft can’t buy out Yahoo and shut down delicious. What options then for all the bookmarks and tags and comments you’ve built up over the years. Should Google suddenly decide YouTube was a bad idea, what then for all the video content and community that’s been built.

Unless your data resides on your own machine, there is scant recourse available to you at this point of time. The discussions and debates over data-portability and ownership of data are important ones that any of us in this space should be keeping a close eye on – and more to the point, participating in the discussion.

I commented on your other post but thought I’d throw my two cents in here too.

First up, I’m very impressed with the way you’ve handled yourself through this. There are lots of vitriolic and hateful comments/posts out there but you’ve handled yourself with dignity and grace, even though you’re at the centre of this. It’s a small thing in the big picture, but it reflects very well on you. If only other people would follow your lead…

I find it fascinating that there’s an assumption that someone contacted Facebook to have the profiles removed. Sure, that might have happened, but it’s also entirely possible that there was a Facebook employee in the 350/400-strong audience or that someone at Facebook picked up on the controversy that erupted at the event. All of the people I know who have commented here – Eden, Connie, Tamera and others – pretty much *live* online. I know they would much rather discuss this openly than report it to Facebook.

The assumption that someone went “running to the teacher” is a little premature, I feel, but regardless it has spread to the comments on other posts too. That’s a shame, because it detracts from the debate that’s going on. I’m on the PR/communications side and I had issues with the transparency, but I feel like I’m learning a lot from this. Hopefully other people are too.

When someone breaks what you consider a cultural norm, adults don’t go tell the teacher, they advise the rule breaker on what they’ve done wrong. A little kindness might have helped.

“Deceptively friending” — I think not. If there was any emotion behind the clicking of the key to send the friendship request if was one of friendly invitation. You put the sinister spin on it. I was just offering to show you my project which you’d signed up to see at CaseCamp, but which frankly you could see more easily from your computer by friending the characters.

I’m sorry so many people did not notice that they were fictional. It was very obvious to other people. I don’t understand why finding that invitation in your notifications is so sinister to you.

I took my skills as a writer/producer to the net. I used my own money. A marketer invited me to CaseCamp. By the end of the presentation, the people at CaseCamp were threatening to call Facebook and my stuff removed the next day. I’m sorry you think I was entirely but I don’t see it that way.

But, this is where I have a serious problem, you’ve admitted you hope to make money on this, and were presenting to a group of advertisers, or ad agencies; somehow that doesn’t strike me as being more towards the art side than the business side. There is nothing wrong inherently in any of these goals and its an interesting medium. No one is saying “fuck you to the creative community”, but it’s amazing to see the temper tantrums and name calling on display here.

What we *are* saying, is that, as business people, and responsible to consumers *and* shareholders when we represent a company that may be interested in “purchasing” your stories as you reference above, we have a responsibility to *our* community to ensure every aspect of it is above board… and that includes not violating a social network’s terms of services, it includes not deceptively friending people and pretending to be real before the story even began (because to be honest, until case camp I had no idea there even *was* as story going on since I tend not to pay attention to the status updates of people I don’t know well, but may have met at a conference or event, or perhaps we’ve interacted on Twitter. These are the “rules” of the space your experiment is taking place in… your story would have been just as effective if you were upfront and followed the rules of “opt-in” and “transparency”.

It’s about trust and about following the rules of the ‘net. That should be a business concern to you because it will be to any companies you eventually work with. We aren’t the devils here, we’ve just been working online for a while now and helping to “sell” that creative and to push innovation to various brands.