The author seems to conflating a number of problems that are not terribly new and laying them at the feet of blogs, for some reason. One is the problem of anonymous speech, and the way that it is liberty-enhancing in both good and bad ways (it makes some people feel free to libel others, for example). But blogs didn’t introduce this; message-board lawsuits have been around for almost a decade. Another is the way in which Internet speech generally tends toward extremes, and sometimes provokes a mob response. A third is the relative permanence of such comments, compared to their informal nature. None of this has anything to do with blogs in particular.

The major new claim in this article that I have not seen before is that there are teams of bloggers organized by competitors to slam an opponent’s service or product. Frankly, I find it hard to believe there is a lot of this going on. Any company engaging in such tactics would be taking on enormous legal and PR risks — and unlike irate consumers, the First Amendment protection for such speech would be nearly non-existent.

One thing that is true is that the rise in the popularity in blogs has occurred while the norms of using the Web as an information source are still settling out. Once, if a complaint was in print, that meant that substantial resources lay behind it, and aside from a few well-known crackpots (e.g. Lyndon LaRouche), resources correlate reasonably well with responsibility. I think some readers and targets are still making this assumption, but it is no longer justified when any idiot can post their complaints on a website. No one might reading it, in which case a business’s best response is simply to ignore it.

Similarly, it is easier for irate people to organize, but that doesn’t mean there are more of them, or that Internet speech is doing more harm than good for businesses. Previously, if I had a crazy complaint about a company, the odds that I could find a few like-minded individuals in my immediate vicinity were low. Now, crazy mobs are much easier to assemble. But I don’t know that we’ve seen a net increase in crazy people (meaning people with unusual enthusiasm about idiosyncratic complaints), as opposed to better organization. And it’s not only crazy people that are better organized; happy consumers, or well-founded complainers, are easier to aggregate as well. Plenty of small businesses are getting word-of-mouth, or word-of-link, business through the web that would have been impossible to achieve in a geographically restricted local market. So it seems hard to say there’s a net negative here. And even if there was, it would exist independent of blogs.