When Leo and I first coined the KUDOS acronym, we were playing around with the idea of ‘kudos’ itself – we knew that ‘kudos’ was the driving force of succesful social media activities, but felt that as a mere term, it was a little generic for analytic purposes. Hence the granular acronym of Knowledge, Usefulness, Desirability, Openness, and Shareability.
But ‘kudos’ is, of course, still applicable. What’s interesting is how when someone says ‘kudos’ online, they are invariably referring to something that fits our schema. A post today on the Daily Kos (who are appearing alot here, of late) is a nice example. Titled ‘Kudos to Davis Shuster’, the story runs thus:
MSNBC journalist David Shuster had badly misquoted a poll of Daily Kos members, suggesting that they were oerwhelmingly angry about Barack Obama’s national security team being too right wing. The poll, in fact, showed nothing of the sort. Kos blogger ‘Jed L’ took Shuster to task for this is a snarky post.
There’s a fairly large Venn crossover between Kos readers and MSNBC viewers, so it behooves the latter to remain on good terms with the former – particularly on issues of fairness and accuracy. So David Shuster wrote to ‘Jed L’, admitting the error, apologising for it profusely, and asking that the apology be shared with the rest of the Kos readers.
It’s a small, but perfectly formed bit of KUDOS. A piece of Knowledge (Shuster’s apology), which is Useful and Desirable to both him and his customers (the Kos readers / MSNBC viewers) is made Open and Shareable to all. And so ‘Jed L’ writes: “Everybody makes mistakes, but not everybody admits to them. I’ve always thought highly of David’s reporting, and now he gets even higher marks in my book.” The comments on the apology are mostly positive (though some, inevitably or not) and so, for now, it looks like we can agree with ‘Jed L’ and say ‘Kudos to David Shuster’.
