We've all had that horrible dream before. You know what I'm talking about: the one where you're due to give this big, fancy presentation to a whole bunch of people, then halfway through the speech somebody points at you, giggling, and holy crap, you're not wearing any pants!

This isn't really the case with marketing platforms like the Internet: in fact, nobody really cares if you do your surfing naked as long as, you know, they're not actually in the same room with you. And even then, you could probably get away with it in the long run.

The thing is, part of being human is screwing up in various ways. In a sense: it will happen. It's just a matter of when. Resign yourself to this, do your best, and accept that when a mistake occurs, it'll be forgotten quickly and nobody will think any less of you for it.

The only people who regularly fall victim to screw-up mockery are, well, already celebrities, and chances are that unless you screw up really, really badly, you're not going to warrant any lasting attention for your mistakes. As mentioned earlier: the Internet is too big to care.

Oh boy, a lot to say here.

What would you consider an exceptional screw-up? Posting naked pictures of yourself on every gaming forum in existence? Murdering a reviewer's kitten? Before we try stepping through any more over-the-top scenarios, let's just make one thing clear: there are some ways in which you can screw up rather fantastically and still get away with it. Heck, when Tim Schafer first applied for a game development job with LucasArts, he inadvertently told them that he'd pirated one of their games. You don't get much more faux pas than that.

We all make rather cringe-worthy mistakes in our lives — particularly when we're promoting ourselves — but they'll rarely come back to haunt us unless we have some dickish friends who want to embarrass us at a party. In a professional sense, you can do a lot of things massively wrong and still come out unscathed.

During my first tentative months as a freelance journalist, I had the awesome opportunity of conducting an in-person interview with Jimmy Wales, the big guy behind Wikipedia. Needless to say, I was very excited and decided that I absolutely had to make a good impression by asking really intelligent-sounding questions to come across as far more experienced than I actually was.

It was a complete disaster. First of all, I had to be incredibly rude and cancelled our original face-to-face interview in favour of e-mail correspondence because I'd forgotten about some prior university commitments. Then, in the interview itself, I passed a rather derogatory comment about "unfunny, blatant rip-offs" of Wikipedia such as Uncyclopedia. Jimmy carefully explained that he actually quite liked Uncyclopedia, and that Wikia Inc. now owned it.

Already reeling from my own short-sightedness, I decided that a last-ditch smarty pants question was in order: I asked Jimmy if he thought that open-source ever ran the risk of becoming proprietary itself due to rampant commercialism. Anybody familiar with, well, the basics of open-source would know that this is the most eye-bleedingly stupid question that anyone could ever ask – never mind somebody who was supposed to be a professional journalist. I could feel the palpable hesitation in his reply as he slowly — and clearly — explained open source to me and why this problem would not come to pass.

I left the question — and his answer — out of the final interview transcript.