contentious blogging

NYT has some good points on the current attitude in some parts of the blogosphere. They comment that it has in many ways been targeted toward women who are outspoken.

This has been discussed in Huffington and other places. One of the people interviewed was Lisa Stone one of the co-founders of BlogHer.com. BlogHer is a source and community for women bloggers. In one of my "almost down to dogfood" days I posted my video for sale at my account there.

Mr. Stone (no relation to Lisa) made some good points about the current attitude of some people who post on blogs – not the bloggers themselves – but those who post comments on these sites. They are similar to the unchecked responses that used to occur in forums only now they are taking place on blogs. Some people have disabled their comments and others have utilized blogs that allow you to specify who you want to read your posts. You can have public areas and hidden areas that only friends and family can read. I don't participate at any blog or forum unless it is with a person who has a name, picture and real identity. Those can all be falsified but there are sites that are issuing trusted status so that you know who you are talking to. Also at BlogHer there is a link to a new law firm (I think – it is not really clear) that is dealing with breeches of every kind in the blog world. A few of their links to cases that they had tried did not work.

A lot of this whole issue boils down to content. Content that is suitable for one site and not suitable for another site. Lisa makes that same statement on her own site Surfette. Do you dumb down the whole internet because a six year old might stumble across it and have some questions about it, or find a suitable alternative? The comment that Lisa made was that a blog that covers the war in Iraq might have pictures that would not be suitable in a site on baby clothes. Better metta tags might help, people being less reactive might help, familiarizing yourselves with; and utilizing parental controls on browsers will help.

Another site that has a somewhat edgy title (I had also linked to this site for awhile) also talked about the responses that she received and finally turning off the comments feature.

Another issue is competition. If you have a blog hosted by a blog site provider and are continually getting spanned and flamed it might be competing blog sites (or people from them) who would rather have your business. I have had blogs at three different locations. Only one of them received any comments or acknowledgement of readership. There was a good spam filter on that one and I also got a lot of spam. If you post about issues that some find controversial (religion, sex, politics) you might also get some needlessly ugly comments.

Blogs are also providing many news opportunities. As Technorati says, "71 million blogs some of them have to be good." If you live in a city where there are a lot of local bloggers you have ready-made instant news from more sources than you could every pay to be reporters. They are also interested in what they are blogging about so the information is often times more detailed and interesting. Tom Kunz points out that it is somewhat like one of the Tom Sawyer stories – the one where he gets his friends to paint the fence for him and then charges them to do it.