Late last week, IFB posted a great article regarding the recent partnership with Chictopia & Payless. As a majority of you know, I intern for IFB so I was made aware of this partnership. Of course it made me angry because of the way Chictopia went about it; it seemed entirely sneaky. And yes, I agree that bloggers should be made aware when photos are used, just like we request from people who want to use our images via our blogs. There should of at least been a clickable link to trackback that individual. However, that is not what I'm trying to address here.

The article was great, expressed something that definitely needed to be brought up in the blogging community. We do need to be more aware of the ToS. What happened IS OUR FAULT. However, in the comments section, it seemed to go extremely downhill from there. It is absolutely, 100% true, that we are all entitled to our opinion. It seemed that the commenting turned from the actual issue to personally bashing bloggers. I was appalled at what people were saying, considering we are all in this blogging community together. We should all be on the same side. I found it extremely rude that instead of people discussing the issue at hand, which is companies discrediting/taking advantage of bloggers, it seemed to take a turn for the worse, singling out bloggers just because they spoke their opinion. I do believe in the multiple ways we do business but it is so inappropriate to bash someone for the way they handle their own.

We should be coming together as a community to make awareness. The private opinions you have about other bloggers should definitely remain quiet and if you do have an issue with someone, speak directly to them via email, in person, etc…not via Twitter, on public forums, or whatever nonsense your choosing to hide behind.

PS. Also, yes, my widgets for chictopia & lookbook.nu are gone but not because of this issue; it's due to tech errors with Typepad.

To view discussion, check the IFB website.