The story began when a pseudonymous commenter stopped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch site and left a vulgar comment in the reader commentary section. The site admin deleted the comment, and the commenter re-posted it. At this point, the site admin decided to do some basic sleuthing. He traced the commenter’s IP address to a local school, and then he alerted the school (which turned out to be the commenter’s employer) that the vulgar comment had originated from its IP address. The school’s sysadmin was able to trace it from there, and the commenter ultimately lost [...]]]> What happens when a commenter’s privacy expectations collide with a would-be tattletale? This recent news story raises that question, with some interesting facts.

The story began when a pseudonymous commenter stopped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch site and left a vulgar comment in the reader commentary section. The site admin deleted the comment, and the commenter re-posted it. At this point, the site admin decided to do some basic sleuthing. He traced the commenter’s IP address to a local school, and then he alerted the school (which turned out to be the commenter’s employer) that the vulgar comment had originated from its IP address. The school’s sysadmin was able to trace it from there, and the commenter ultimately lost his job.

I don’t know that any legal privacy rights have been violated here. (Dan?) But this does seem like overreaching by the site admin. Penalties like comment deletion or even banning are within the norms of site administration. Ratting someone out to their boss? I’m not so sure.

But what about Autoadmit? Those commenters also thought that their obnoxious comments would be anonymous; and they were also surprised by the way that the veil was lifted. Do they also enjoy a right to privacy in their attacks? The difference, I think, is in the nature of their comment. Autoadmit comments were attacks, targeted at specific women. The Post-Dispatch comment was obnoxious, but not targeted enough that anyone sued over it.

And in addition, autoadmit commenters’ identities were not simply revealed by an administrator’s whim. Instead, plaintiffs had to go through a legal process to obtain that information.

Are those distinctions that matter? Well, if a person’s comments have harmed others to the extent that they are willing to bring suit — as in the Autoadmit case — then perhaps they deserve scrutiny. (Especially given the gendered nature of those harms, as Danielle Citron’s research makes clear.) However, a site admin actively ratting out potty-mouthed commenters to their employers seems to fall on the other side of the line.

Which brings us to the subject I’m sure you’re all waiting for: What does this mean for me?

Well, for one thing, be careful with your comments.

But I can offer a very modest safe space. I can’t change other people’s actions, but I will say this: If you are a commenter here and you begin to ramble or fight or drop into potty humor, I may tell you to cut it out. I may delete your comment. I may even ban you altogether, especially if you show a persistent pattern of problem comments. But I will not send your stupid comments to your employer. They’re a nuisance, but they’re not worth anyone’s job. (One exception — if your comments indicate that you are planning or in the act of committing a crime or action which might endanger other people’s safety, I reserve the right to tell the authorities.)

As CNET reports, “Independent bloggers who fail to disclose paid reviews or freebies can face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to [...]]]> As I argue in my essay Individual Branding the web presents important and amazing new possibilities for individuals to earn money and much of that potential will flow from one’s online reputation. In short, as one blogs or shares information in another form, one becomes a trusted source and can start extract money from those activities. I argue that those acts have the seeds of the possible destruction of Benkler’s world of sharing. Today the FTC has targeted a practice that arguably could increase the reliability of social network endorsements but will also upset many people.

As CNET reports, “Independent bloggers who fail to disclose paid reviews or freebies can face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to the agency’s “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” published Monday.” The FTC has not updated the Guidelines since 1980. The press release is here. The full text of the Guides are here (pdf). It is 81 pages, and I have not read it as yet but one thing people should know is that the effective date is December 1, 2009.

From the release it appears that the guides take am expansive view of what presents a moment to disclose “The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” CNET suggests that celebrities and “mommy bloggers” could be in trouble under the new rules. (Here is my prediction on the riposte to come but that I don’t think is accurate: “The FTC hates moms. In a down economy and with more and more people needing new ways to earn, the FTC actions are a direct attack on the importance of moms.” Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.)

There are a ton of oddly connected things here. First, I just blogged about CITP and its FedThread project. That project would allow one to track this sort of moment rather quickly. Second, I was just at the Works In Progress Intellectual Property Conference at Seton Hall (which was yet again an excellent conference and for which everyone at Seton Hall deserves many thanks) where Zahr Stauffer presented a fascinating paper called Novels for Hire: Branded Entertainment, Copyright and the Law that I think will have something to say about these changes. As one blog notes, the practice of giving journalists freebies is common. Zahr’s paper shows how advertising and novels have had a rather curious interaction over the years. I think the paper will help understand the way writing and advertising have co-existed in either good or bad ways at different times with the shift to blogging fitting in as part of that history. The paper should be available soon so keep an eye out for it.

Electronics and other big ticket items seem to be where the concerns are. I look forward to finding out whether book, film, and music reviewers have to tell readers whether they received a review copy of the book. In general if one only says nice things about a review subject, one might receive more books etc. I think that non-professional blogs and other online information sources such as rating systems and FaceBook will allow people to find out whether they should buy a product (i.e., one might use a personal network to ask whether a product is good). That practice could undercut the quiet payment model.

Here is a possible way to understand this turn of events. 1) Secret endorsements die out and full disclosure of what has been given is the norm. 2) Small bloggers and big agencies are no longer able to seem credible as reviewers. 3) If people want independent reviews, they must pay magazines or other pay sources who can afford to buy the review items and avoid the taint of being given free stuff. 4) The public does not want to pay and instead reads the blog reviews with the disclosures and augments the research with social networks and user ratings which are more difficult to fake and possibly more reliable. 5) Yet again paid, professional independent news and reviews seems to be squeezed out.

CyberSLAPP’s site contains a spirited defense of a right of anonymous criticism which reads, in part:

Why is anonymous speech important?

There are a wide variety of reasons why people choose to speak anonymously. Many use anonymity to make criticisms that are difficult to state openly to their [...]]]> As Dan rightly notes, the recent court order unmasking the anonymous author of the “Skanks in NYC” blog raises serious privacy concerns. He elaborates on those concerns in his post, arguing that the court used too low of a standard, that the lawsuit may have been frivolous, and that anonymity needs greater protection. Dan links to CyberSLAPP, an EFF project which combats abusive lawsuits that seek to unmask anonymous critics of corporations or public figures.

CyberSLAPP’s site contains a spirited defense of a right of anonymous criticism which reads, in part:

Why is anonymous speech important?

There are a wide variety of reasons why people choose to speak anonymously. Many use anonymity to make criticisms that are difficult to state openly to their boss, for example, or the principal of their children’s school. The Internet has become a place where persons who might otherwise be stigmatized or embarrassed can gather and share information and support victims of violence, cancer patients, AIDS sufferers, child abuse and spousal abuse survivors, for example. They use newsgroups, Web sites, chat rooms, message boards, and other services to share sensitive and personal information anonymously without fear of embarassment or harm. Some police departments run phone services that allow anonymous reporting of crimes; it is only a matter of time before such services are available on the Internet. Anonymity also allows “whistleblowers” reporting on government or company abuses to bring important safety issues to light without fear of stigma or retaliation. And human rights workers and citizens of repressive regimes around the world who want to share information or just tell their stories frequently depend on staying anonymous sometimes for their very lives.

Is anonymous speech a right?

Yes. Anonymous speech is presumptively protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Anonymous pamphleteering played an important role for the Founding Fathers, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, whose Federalist Papers were first published anonymously. And the Supreme Court has consistently backed up that tradition, ruling, for example, that an Ohio law requiring authors to put their names on campaign literature was a violation of the First Amendment. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that protecting anonymous speech has the same purpose as the First Amendment itself: to “protect unpopular individuals from retaliation and their ideas from suppression.”

Of course, any sensible person would be opposed to silencing today’s James Madisons or Alexander Hamiltons. Is this really the correct analogy here, though? Is Skanks in NYC like the Federalist Papers?

Because, of course, the flip side of anonymity is that it can open the door to uniquely problematic personal attacks. This problem is set out in Danielle’s article Cyber Civil Rights, where she examines cases where anonymity was used as a shield to allow malicious online mobs to harass innocent victims, who tend to be disproportionately female. (And of course, the privacy sword cuts both ways here as well — it is a rather egregious invasion of privacy for a normal person to have their private life attacked on a blog.)

The Skanks in NYC blog has been taken down, but the news reports make clear that the site was not dedicated to political discourse, human rights advocacy, or whistleblowing about problematic corporate actions. Rather, it was a series of personal attacks on the model Liskula Cohen, calling her a whore, a ho, an old hag, the “skankiest in NYC” and a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank.” Cohen — who coincidentally was recently the victim of a freak, career-ending real-life attack by a stranger — was targeted in personal, particularly gendered ways by the Skanks in NYC site. (After all, there is no male analogue to words like slut, skank, or whore.)

These attacks affected her personally, and had negative effects on her career as well, as reported in various news accounts.

Cohen, who described herself as a “serial monogamist” and has a “zero tolerance drug policy,” said the words were defamatory and harmful to her career. Prospective clients would question her about the blog and what she was doing in the photos, she says.

“Finding new clients this year has not been a walk in the park,” she said. “I’ve worked very long in this industry.”

Frankly, Skanks in NYC doesn’t look like a set of Publius-esque words that deserves protection for anonymity. It does not match any of CyberSLAPP’s examples of helpful anonymity. Instead, it looks exactly like the many cases of anonymous and gendered personal attacks, like Autoadmit and Kathy Sierra attacks, which Danielle rightly labels destructive: Online attacks, often sexually framed, which targeted the personal well-being and careers of their disproportionately female victims.

I understand that the concern here is for the precedent. Google turned over the anonymous blogger’s identity in this case; who’s to say that they won’t do it in the case of Publius or a corporate whistleblower? But in this case, the court order is based to a large degree on the problematic nature of the blog itself — that it simply called Cohen a whore and a skank, and so was focused primarily on the alleged defamation, rather than any other substantive comment.

So it seems to me that the court got it right. I agree with Dan on the general principle that anonymity can be very beneficial and should be protected in many cases; I certainly don’t want to encourage the unmasking of any Publii. But there are exceptions to that standard, such as in the case of personal attacks like Autoadmit or Kathy Sierra, or Skanks in NYC. In those cases, I tend to fall back on a different maxim: Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Therefore, when Bridget Crawford, another of the main posters on feministlawprofessors.com, asked if I wanted to be named on their list of “self-identified feminist law professors,” I was thrilled to be asked. The question was raised, however: What does the label “feminist law professor” mean? If I was going to self-identify as a “feminist law professor,” I wanted to be sure I fit within the definition.

The reality is that those who know me [...]]]> I have long been a fan of the blog “Feministlawprofessors.com.” The blog does a stellar job of raising and discussing various issues, the content of the blog is sound and reasoned, and Ann Bartow, the founder of the website, has graciously cross-posted some of my posts on prostitution over the past couple years.

Therefore, when Bridget Crawford, another of the main posters on feministlawprofessors.com, asked if I wanted to be named on their list of “self-identified feminist law professors,” I was thrilled to be asked. The question was raised, however: What does the label “feminist law professor” mean? If I was going to self-identify as a “feminist law professor,” I wanted to be sure I fit within the definition.

The reality is that those who know me well might not immediately fit me within the category of “feminist law professor,” if we consider only the older stereotypes about what a feminist “looks like.” To wit, I have never taught “feminist legal theory” (though I could and would, happily), I am Catholic, I am fairly conservative, I have never been a member of NOW, I have been a member of the Federalist Society, I am not offended by some things that are clearly “gendered” (such as men opening doors for women), and I have never burned a bra.

That said, I support equality for all, and I engage in activities intended to support this goal. Indeed, one of the many things that troubles me about the legal profession is the fact that women make up roughly 50% of all law students but only about 19% of all law firm partners and less than 20% of all Supreme Court justices.

But does supporting equality for all make me a feminist law professor? If so, wouldn’t – in theory – most law professors be “feminist law professors?”

I realize that this blog post should be many paragraphs longer, to address the issues raised by my questions above. But even with a blog post five times the length of this one, I doubt I could do the questions justice. So I will end simply by observing that, while I am happy to be labeled a “feminist law professor,” it is interesting to me that the phrase is not easily defined.

My hope is to blog about at least the following topics while I am here: 1. Prostitution 2. Other People Who Have My Exact Name (Elizabeth A. Nowicki) 3. Corporate Governance, Shareholder Activism, and Boards of Directors 4. Delaware Jurists 5. New Orleans 6. Women in Legal Education

Note, however, that you should not expect me to blog with the speed and volume of someone like Blog Emperor Paul Caron, because my long-harbored reservations about the potential impact of blogging make me a [...]]]> Many thanks to Dan and all the folks here at Concurring Opinions for again inviting me to guest blog. I cut my teeth guest blogging here and at TruthontheMarket.com (where I am still a regular guest blogger) three years ago, and it is nice to be asked back. Thank you.

My hope is to blog about at least the following topics while I am here:
1. Prostitution
2. Other People Who Have My Exact Name (Elizabeth A. Nowicki)
3. Corporate Governance, Shareholder Activism, and Boards of Directors
4. Delaware Jurists
5. New Orleans
6. Women in Legal Education

Note, however, that you should not expect me to blog with the speed and volume of someone like Blog Emperor Paul Caron, because my long-harbored reservations about the potential impact of blogging make me a bit of a slow poster. Since my first blogging days, I have worried about whether I could accurately convey in a blog post things like tenor, nuance, and jest, and my concern about this and other blogging issues (such as typos, grammar mistakes, being impolitic, failing to link to others, etc.) tends to slow me down. Given that the readership of this blog is huge, I am cautious about posting something that I have not vetted, edited, and re-written.

Similarly, I remember when another academic blogger posted on his blog about not securing a particular consulting project due to a position he had articulated on his blog. I do a bit of consulting, expert witness, and media work, so I try to be mindful about not committing on a blog to positions I might want to reconsider if I were asked to be an expert witness or to comment for the media. The notion that I might articulate a view on this blog that I might want to disavow 15 years from now makes me squeamish.

Moreover, as a general matter, I try to avoid even the potential for offending large constituencies in the legal or academic communities with something I have posted on a legal blog. For example, for several days, I have stewed over what, if anything, to post about the former Villanova Law School Dean and the prostitution situation. I caught the “news” about the prostitution situation right when it broke, so I could have beaten Caron for the title of “First Mainstream Legal Academic Blogger To Post On The Topic.” But my worry about posting something that might offend my friends at Villanova or members of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, of which I am currently the Chair, or colleagues in my religious community kept me standing down, gnashing my teeth, while Caron blogged the news. To be sure, I have blogged before about prostitution, multiple times, so it would be natural for me to chime in, but the notion that I could, with a single post, offend a huge range of people gives me pause. The internet should be used with care.

That said, the fastest post I ever drafted and posted was my post on the Supreme Court’s opinion in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta. I read the Supreme Court’s opinion and drafted my post in the two-hour window I had between classes on the day the opinion was issued, and I did not have time to re-read my post and labor over editing because I had to rush off to teach my second class. Yet the post has been one of my most well-received posts, and people seem to think it is at least decent. So I suppose I need to revisit whether my reservations about blogging, which prevent me from becoming a prolific poster, are actually based in fact. (Then again, the fact that Heidi Hurd’s sarcastic e-mails have led to likely unappreciated press solidifies my belief that releasing words across the internet is dangerous business indeed.)

Regardless, I look forward to posting here.

What makes the brash and balding 38-year-old such a hot media property is Scotusblog.com, the Web site he founded six years ago to obsessively track the high court. At 7:34 a.m. last Tuesday, an hour before news of the nomination leaked, he posted an essay on the likely lines of attack if President Obama picked Sotomayor. Had he guessed wrong, Goldstein says, he would have looked like “the world’s biggest idiot. I was out there on a limb.”

Three years ago, Goldstein joined the blue-chip Washington firm of Akin Gump, which also agreed to take on Scotusblog and is listed as the site’s host. [...]]]> Today’s Washington Post has an interesting profile of SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump and founder of SCOTUSBlog. From the article:

What makes the brash and balding 38-year-old such a hot media property is Scotusblog.com, the Web site he founded six years ago to obsessively track the high court. At 7:34 a.m. last Tuesday, an hour before news of the nomination leaked, he posted an essay on the likely lines of attack if President Obama picked Sotomayor. Had he guessed wrong, Goldstein says, he would have looked like “the world’s biggest idiot. I was out there on a limb.”

Three years ago, Goldstein joined the blue-chip Washington firm of Akin Gump, which also agreed to take on Scotusblog and is listed as the site’s host. Despite the unorthodox arrangement, Goldstein says his staff, which includes veteran Supreme Court reporter Lyle Denniston, has complete independence. “Lyle could write that our clients are completely insane and evil and there’d be nothing to stop him,” Goldstein says in his 12th-floor office with a sweeping view of the Washington Monument. . . .

A graduate of American University’s law school, Goldstein founded a small firm — soon joined by his wife — in the third bedroom of their Northwest Washington home. He pursued his goal, to become a Supreme Court practitioner, by cold-calling lawyers in cases that might be headed for high court review. Goldstein was denigrated by more credentialed members of the bar as an overeager ambulance chaser, but the strategy worked: He has argued 21 cases before the Supreme Court. (Goldstein still finances his old firm, which includes his wife and remains at his home, now in Chevy Chase, a few doors down from Chief Justice John Roberts. The firm is an Akin Gump subcontractor.)

White House officials had asked to consult Goldstein on the court vacancy, but by the time he returned from a weekend in Paris, Obama had made his choice. Determined not to miss the action, Goldstein canceled a meeting in Los Angeles with a top producer about a reality series based on his life, the rights to which were bought by Sony Pictures Television. (”They must be smoking crack,” Goldstein says.) A poker fanatic who plays with pots as large as $100,000, he also delayed plans to compete in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

For more, read the article.

For most purposes, neither the story nor the interview that preceded it have anything to do with my academic life, though the Times gives me credit for being a professor at Pitt Law.  Instead, [...]]]> By popular request, I’m posting this link to my brief appearance in this morning’s New York Times.  (Well, the link is popular in certain quarters, and I did receive a request to post it!)   The story has to do with tomorrow’s mayoral primary, in which Pittsburgh’s young mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, front man for an emerging Democratic Party machine that someday may do the elder Daley proud, is certain to defeat his two challengers, Patrick Dowd, current darling of local progressives, and Carmen Robinson, a well-liked but under-funded African American lawyer and former police officer.

For most purposes, neither the story nor the interview that preceded it have anything to do with my academic life, though the Times gives me credit for being a professor at Pitt Law.  Instead, the Times piece, like a recent interview that I gave Dutch TV (watch for it!) and a piece earlier this Spring for CNN (teased here, then preempted by the tragic death of a certain skiing actress and replaced by this blog post) are the products of what one Burghosphere colleague (Burghosphere is the extravagant name that we Pittsburgh bloggers have given ourselves) calls my status as an “ambassador” for the city.  My five-year-old blog about the many futures of Pittsburgh, Pittsblog, was one of the first local blogs, and while it now has plenty of company, it is still one of the dozen or so that try to bring a little light to the heat generated by Steelers and Penguins fandom.  Media search for light-generating media; they find me; I become a momentary local celebrity because I’m in the paper of record.  Rinse and repeat.

Still, underneath the hood, there is a connection to my research interests, whether or not you care about the Steel City itself. 

I began writing Pittsblog in 2004 because I had discovered that (i) Pittsburgh is a really great place, with lots of engaging history (as a young British officer, George Washington lost a battle nearby and thereby earned a reputation!) and amazing current resources and potential (Pitt!  CMU!  UPMC! amazing philanthropic traditions and accumulations of private capital!), but (ii) Pittsburgh was stagnating.  None of its potential was being realized, and no one seemed to care.  Part of the problem was structural (Pittsburgh had long been always a big-company, top-down kind of place, economically, politically, and culturally); part of the problem was conceptual, or you might say psychological.  Pittsburgh has little recent experience with the kind of bottom-up, let’s-build-a-company-and-change-the-world mentality that flourishes in some other parts of the U.S.    Having moved to the area from the Silicon Valley, where I grew up and which is a leading domestic example of that alternative mindset, I wanted to be a cheerleader for different ways of thinking about economic development, technology development, and the continuing post-steel hoped-for revival of the Pittsburgh region.  Above all, I wanted to spread the idea that risk, and the risk of failure, which Pittsburghers have long loathed, could be a useful addition to the civic mix. 

As my conversations with local friends and colleagues had it, how do you change the psychology of a city?  That has been my Pittsblog theme for the last five years.  One short answer is that you can’t, really (the long answer requires sifting through my older posts).  But you can subtly help shift the frame of the conversation, both locally and nationally (thanks, CNN!), and you can push here and there indirectly on the idea that in-migration and “salmon” (native Pittsburghers returning from exile, or what some local wags call “gumbanders,” adopting a piece of Pittsburgh dialect) would really help move the local economic needle, because those folks have seen how it’s done in other parts of the world.  Failure is a lousy thing, but failure is something that healthy economies need, and it’s something that can be woven successfully into ways of thinking about prosperity.  Pittsburghers who have lived elsewhere have seen failure, and they’ve survived.  To map this on to my recent posts about law school faculties and institutional culture, getting individuals to see the path of the institution as something that is related to but distinct from their own work is — difficult, but essential.  Sometimes the best way to do it is not to retrain the existing population, but instead to import folks who know about different ways of seeing and thinking. 

A second answer is structural rather than cognitive, and it gets closer still to my ongoing interest in commons institutions.  I’ve blogged at Pittsblog about what I refer to as the “entrepreneurship commons,”  by which I mean that local economic development efforts need to focus not only on what I call “retail” development (for example, the incubator helps to find funding for one start-up at a time) but also on what I call “wholesale” development (for example, the legal profession assembles and makes available an array of firms and professionals who accessible to local technology developers, entrepreneurs, and investors at attractive prices).  One of my favorite examples of the latter is a technology fair that a local tech umbrella organization put together with the Pittsburgh Penguins, as part of the Pens’ planning of its new arena.   

It is still very much a work in progress (the city and the region, as well as the blog).  And a third answer is that for a city that is a sports-mad as Pittsburgh, winning a championship or two (or six!) certainly helps the psyche.  So, while I’m no ice hockey fan, I’ve learned to appreciate Sid the Kid (Crosby) and Geno (Malkin) and the rest of the Penguins, who just finished a magnificant NHL playoff series with the Washington Capitals and are now gearing up to face the Carolina Hurricanes in the conference championship.  Let’s go Pens.

I think something similar applies to the moderation of blog comments – moderation in the pursuit of good discussion is [...]]]> I read with interest a couple of weeks ago the discussion on this and other law professor blogs about comments policies – whether to allow comments, whether to moderate them, and when and whether to edit and/or delete them.  The discussion reminded me of Alexander Meiklejohn’s famous conception of free speech as a moderated town meeting, where the diversity and quality of discussion was more important than any individual right to speak.  Meiklejohn argued that “the First Amendment … is not the guardian of unregulated talkativeness” and that the free speech guarantee was “not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.”

I think something similar applies to the moderation of blog comments – moderation in the pursuit of good discussion is a healthy thing.   Of course, there is always the danger that thin-skinned or intellectually dishonest moderators might edit in order to come out better in an argument, but this risk is lessened by the fact that there are lots of blogs, and (at least in the case of law blogs) there is a fairly robust set of professional norms and reputational consequences operating in the background.  So I think blog comment policies (like the one on this blog) are perfectly fine (even though I there us some irony in that the blog comment policy having comments turned off!).  But like Meiklejohn’s moderator, as long as the discussion is being moderated constructively, there are real gains from numerous moderated discussions.  In fact, since different discussions can operate under different conditions of moderation, some discussions can be tightly moderated (ie, books and newspapers), others can have little or no moderation, and at the opposite extreme there is the wiki model, where even the statements of others are subject to revision and alteration.  A wide variety of discussions and forms of discussion is, I think, the key to a robust and healthy discourse.

One natural objection to this line of argument is that we’re not really talking about the First Amendment here, since all of the blogs and fora of discussion are private actors.  I’ve increasingly come to believe that the values of free discussion and debate are too important to be left to the First Amendment.  (I make a mild form of this argument here in a recent article).  Newspapers, blogs, email, water-cooler chats and other forms of relatively public and relatively private discussion are the building blocks of a vibrant expressive culture, and if we only think about free expression from the perspective of avoiding government anti-censorship, we are missing (at least) half of the world.  For this reason, I think discussions about issues like blog comment policies are centrally the concern of free expression, and such discussions can benefit immensely from a little First Amendment theory.

Blog comments are turned off from this post (just kidding!)

The other blogs?  In addition to madisonian.net, which is familiar to many law professors who work in IP (and which is the part-time home of Co-Op first teamers Frank Pasquale and Deven Desai), I [...]]]> Thanks to Deven for the generous introduction and to Dan and the Co-Op team for inviting me to spend some time here this month.  The introduction intentionally saves space by not including a couple of things that I’ll talk about during my stay:  My other blogs, and my appointment as Research Dean at Pitt.  Both have something to do with my current work on commons institutions.  Over the course of this guest stint I hope to explain some of the connections and to generate suggestions and feedback that might help me see others.

The other blogs?  In addition to madisonian.net, which is familiar to many law professors who work in IP (and which is the part-time home of Co-Op first teamers Frank Pasquale and Deven Desai), I write for and administer Pittsblog (on the futures of Pittsburgh, PA, with a special focus on economic development) and for Blog-Lebo (a community blog that challenges the traditional suburban orthodoxy of Mt. Lebanon, PA, where I live).  As Research Dean at Pitt, I write the Pitt Law Faculty Blog, which chronicles the scholarly activities of our faculty.  And because the IP field is bursting with conference activity, I use a blog platform to maintain a conference and workshop calendar for IP and IT law events for scholars in the US and, occasionally, elsewhere.

Each of these started in a distinct way and for distinct reasons, but over time I’ve come to see them as part of a pattern, as a set of informal institutions that serves different communities or groups in related ways.  Exploring that pattern and teasing out those relationships is the theme of my current scholarship, too, so while it might appear to some that I push myself in lots of disparate directions, I usually feel that I’m working on one big thing that has lots of specific payoffs.

For an illustration and lead-in to my next post, here’s a link to my most recent writing, which is a comment in the Virginia Law Review’s online “In Brief” that responds to Dotan Oliar’s and Chris Sprigman’s very interesting article in the Virginia Law Review, There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy. (My piece is called Of Coase and Comics, or the Comedy of Copyright.) I suggest that social norms alone can’t explain the apparent absence of formal copyright claims among modern stand-up comics. Comics’ “no plagiarism” norms emerged roughly around the same time that comedy LPs became million-sellers, in the early 1960s.   Is there a connection?  I suspect that there is, and I suspect that connections among record albums and comics’ norms are related in some way to connections among blogs and communities.

More shortly.  In the meantime, a bit of trivia:  Historians of comedy usually think of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce as pacesetting stand-up comics.  In researching Of Coase and Comics, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the first comedian to have a gold record was accountant-turned-comedian Bob Newhart, the same Bob Newhart who later acquired iconic status for communities of college students via the phrase “Hi, Bob” and who eventually uttered the immortal TV sitcom line, “You really should wear more sweaters.”

Florida-based [Mike] Morgan began a blog entitled “Facts about Goldman Sachs” – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago. . . . [M]any of the posts relate to other Wall Street firms and issues. According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, [Goldman] is rattled because the site “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property [...]]]> The Paulson-Geithner-Summers regime has been remarkably adept at stonewalling people like Elizabeth Warren and otherwise avoiding transparency in the bailout. Now one of its main beneficiaries, Goldman Sachs, appears to be targeting mere commentators. They’ve hired a prestigious law firm to menace a writer who collects facts & commentary about the company at this site. As the Daily Telegraph reports,

Florida-based [Mike] Morgan began a blog entitled “Facts about Goldman Sachs” – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago. . . . [M]any of the posts relate to other Wall Street firms and issues. According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, [Goldman] is rattled because the site “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights” and also “implies a relationship” with the bank itself.

How could anyone think Goldman itself would be affiliating with or authorizing a site that links it to devilry? Unfortunately, the strange range of results of UDRP decisions on similarly satiric sites mean that this is not an absurd legal argument. And given the apocalyptic consequences of the former investment bank’s “financial engineering,” perhaps a reasonable person would associate it with the “mark of the beast”–or guess that hellfire was just one more profitmaking angle for its partners.

Activity like this helps us understand why the wall of silence about the exact nature of and conditions (or lack thereof) on TARP/TALF funding are so important to Treasury. Imagine if we were able to track exactly how much more executives were being paid because of these funds than if they’d have been paid absent taxpayers’ subventions. What if we could track who was benefiting politically from donations by employees at the propped up firms? What if the firms in general start using their corporate welfare to silence more critics like Mr. Morgan? At what point does this become state action? And might we start asking whether the resistance to nationalization among policy elites might be due to a need to avoid state responsibility for what is essentially state-funded action by maintaining a fig leaf of “private ownership” over the banking system?

Saddest of all, none of this raises an eyebrow at much of the mainstream media inured to the revolving door atmosphere among banks, regulators, and legislators. As Glenn Greenwald puts it,

One might think it would be a big news story for the second most-powerful member of the U.S. Senate to baldly state that the Congress is “owned” by the bankers who spawned the financial crisis and continue to dictate the government’s actions. But it won’t be. The leading members of the media work for the very corporations that benefit most from this process. Establishment journalists are integral and well-rewarded members of the same system and thus cannot and will not see it as inherently corrupt . . . . [O]nly Unserious Shrill Fringe radicals, such as the IMF’s former chief economist, use that sort of language.

I expect to see more wins for the big banks in coming months, and less accountability. One of the few hopes for progress here is for those concerned about the public interest to take advantage of the occasional divisions within Wall Street, as in the current battle between banks and hedge funds over safe harbor provisions for mortgage modifications.

PS: Here’s a commentary from Elizabeth Warren on the bailout in general:

Implicit in this line of muttering is the notion that our blog ought to be thought of as a public space. It is certainly public in the sense of being widely visible. When I started blogging in 2002, I tended to think of controlling comments [...]]]> Yesterday, Dan posted a commenting policy for Concurring Opinions. Such things frequently bring forth muttered imprecations of speech control and the demise of the First Amendment. Of course the mutterers understand that Concurring Opinions, despite its obvious power and influence, is not a state actor, but still it seems like a public space. Shouldn’t we encourage the marketplace of ideas to let a thousand flowers bloom (to paraphrase Holmes and Mao)? Well no, not really.

Implicit in this line of muttering is the notion that our blog ought to be thought of as a public space. It is certainly public in the sense of being widely visible. When I started blogging in 2002, I tended to think of controlling comments in terms of free speech. I did a lot of libertarian hand-wringing and soul-searching the first time I zapped a comment. I now feel no guilt. I’ve become convinced that the best blogs are not like a public forum. Rather, they are like a really good cocktail party in public. A cocktail party is not a public space, even when the cocktail party is held in public. Everyone realizes that you have the right to kick boors and party crashers out of your cocktail party. Likewise, everyone realizes that a cocktail party isn’t meant as a general invitation for the world to step up with a megaphone and spout off their opinions in your living room. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily want to actively exclude people from your cocktail party. If someone brings a friend you didn’t invite, there’s no problem so long as the friend isn’t a jerk or a dolt. Of course, Concurring Opinions is more open than most cocktail parties. You don’t need an invitation. We do, however, reserve the right to throw our drink in your face and ask you to leave if you actively disrupt the festivities.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

Is the WSJ serious? Perhaps, the 452,000 people who blog as their primary source of income include any college or [...]]]> The Wall St. Journal cites a rather questionable statistic about the number of bloggers who blog for a living:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

Is the WSJ serious? Perhaps, the 452,000 people who blog as their primary source of income include any college or high school student who has a blog with Google Ads. Otherwise, the statistic seems quite dubious to me. According to a quote from the website where the WSJ cites as the source of the above statistic:

The average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000. However, this is skewed by the top 1% of bloggers who earn $200k+. Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

At Concurring Opinions, we get 100,000+ unique visitors per month, and sadly, our take home pay is far far south of $22,000. Where’s all the money? If it’s out there, it sure ain’t in our pockets, I’ll boldly state that we’re all keeping our day jobs!

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll

LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less

ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking

ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming

ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance

LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats

LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

On a slightly more serious note, check out the legal issues raised by D.T. Max’s moving profile of David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker.

For example, this vignette suggests the gulf between retribution and remedy:

[Wallace's] relationship with Mary Karr was volatile. Wallace got a tattoo of a heart with Mary’s name [...]]]> I’ve been a neglectful blogger, so I thought I might sign up for Robert Lanham’s “Internet Era Writing Course.” Despite my absence from Twitter, I’ve completed an embarrassing number of the prerequisites:

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll

LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less

ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking

ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming

ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance

LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats

LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

On a slightly more serious note, check out the legal issues raised by D.T. Max’s moving profile of David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker.

For example, this vignette suggests the gulf between retribution and remedy:

[Wallace's] relationship with Mary Karr was volatile. Wallace got a tattoo of a heart with Mary’s name on it. He signed his letters to her “Young Werther.” He proposed to her. They fought. . . . They split up. One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was “the brokenness.”

Anyone interested in the scholarship of footnotes should find this denoument to the story heartening:

Wallace’s literary frustrations contrasted with his growing personal happiness. In 2002, [years after his relationshp with Karr ended,] he began dating Karen Green, a visual artist. . . . They fell in love. Wallace put a strikeout through Mary’s name on his tattoo and an asterisk under the heart; farther down he added another asterisk and Karen’s name, turning his arm into a living footnote.

For various reasons, the story reminded me of Yeats’s great poem The Circus Animals’ Desertion. Like Yeats, Wallace found himself devoid of inspiration at various points in his career:

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart . . .

***

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Yeats can triumphantly describe his “masterful images” even as he stares at their ugly origins. Wallace was too self-deflating for that, and he struggled to turn his boredom into the topic of his last work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he turned to tax administration to find the quintessence of this emotion:

From 1997 on, Wallace worked on a third novel, which he never finished—the “Long Thing,” as he referred to it . . . . His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment. . . .

As Wallace noted at a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

I like this sage advice, because it leads to something like James Grimmelmann’s insightful tribute to Wallace here.

[Wallace saw our] choice as one between a retreat to pre-ironic sincerity, a soul-killing brain-numbing embrace of the Entertainment of irony, or oblivion. He vacillated between the first two while he tried to find some way of merging them for as long as he could, and then he gave in to the third.

But I think there’s another way—there has to be. Not backwards, away from irony. And not just forward into irony’s lotus garden. No, forward into irony and out the other side. There’s real political analysis in the Daily Show; there’s something improbably human in a lolcat. These are not media of resignation. There’s something vital and alive in a mashup; YouTube slash videos are not a surrender to the idiocy of the Image. These media are sincere; these media are ironic. They’re sincere in their acceptance of irony.

So perhaps there’s some rationale for a curriculum like that ironically proposed by Lanham. As Roger Scruton has argued, irony and forgiveness are the great gifts of our culture. You don’t have to have it all figured out to do a blog post, a status update, or a tweet. You may just be making noise. But however self-indulgent they seem, the new media consistently teach that we’re but small voices in a huge conversation. The “great conversation” of the great books fades into history, but we can hope to find new points of reference for our moral judgments and communities. . . .and forgive ourselves when we fail.

One of the major issues confronting the Obama Administration is how to fix the financial system and other industries that are reeling from the Panic of 2008. In several instances, firms that were deemed “too-big-to-fail” were nationalized to prevent a disorderly bankruptcy (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG) and in other cases the specter of nationalization looms (Citigroup, Bank of America, and General Motors). While I certainly hope that these takeovers will be few and brief, there is a real prospect that this will not be the case. And [...]]]> I want to thank Dan for inviting me to join the blog this month. My friends and family also thank him for relieving them of the exclusive burden of hearing my crazy ideas.

One of the major issues confronting the Obama Administration is how to fix the financial system and other industries that are reeling from the Panic of 2008. In several instances, firms that were deemed “too-big-to-fail” were nationalized to prevent a disorderly bankruptcy (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG) and in other cases the specter of nationalization looms (Citigroup, Bank of America, and General Motors). While I certainly hope that these takeovers will be few and brief, there is a real prospect that this will not be the case. And this presents a constitutional problem.

Put simply, there is almost no precedent for direct governmental ownership of private firms. The Populist Party of the 1890s, which is the subject of my next book, campaigned on a platform of nationalization, but that effort failed (or was just way ahead of its time). The Tennessee Valley Authority raised some questions about active state participation in the marketplace, but they were never really resolved. As a result, lawyers may be forced to think about some difficult issues over the next few years without much guidance. Here are some examples:

1. Is a nationalized firm a state actor?

One immediate concern is whether a company like AIG is now a state actor because the taxpayers own 80% of the shares. If not, then what is the standard for state actor status? This matters for employees of these firms, who might be entitled to constitutional protections akin to those held by municipal employees if they, for instance, are fired for exercising their First Amendment rights. It matters for the customers and trading partners of these firms, who may be entitled to some sort of due process protection against actions that harm their property interests. And the state action analysis also bears on the question of whether nationalized firms are shielded from some liabilities by sovereign immunity.

2. Does the United States have a conflict-of-interest under nationalization that is constitutionally suspect?

Suppose that the federal government takes over a single firm in an industry and then enacts policies that give that firm an advantage over its competitors. Absent nationalization, this would not present a problem so long as there was a rational basis for the distinction. Is that still true when the government has a direct ownership stake in the privileged firm? The answer might be yes, or yes if there was no intent to tilt the playing field in favor of the public company, which would provide for some heightened scrutiny over the challenged decision. Or maybe it means that the government has to nationalize all firms in a given industry to insulate its subsequent actions from judicial examination.

3. Are there constitutional limits on lawmaking undertaken through ownership?

The issue of “regulation-by-deal” is getting a lot of attention these days as we grapple with the implications of making policy choices through ad-hoc arrangements with firms that are on the brink of collapse. Less attention has been given to the limits, if any, on what the Executive Branch can do once it owns these firms. For example, if the federal government takes over the “Big Three” (or perhaps they should now be called the “Small Three”) and then mandates that they make nothing but electric cars, is that valid without congressional action? When the Bush Administration took unilateral decisions with respect to wireless surveillance, detainees, and coercive interrogation, that was greeted with howls of protest. But when the President announced on Monday that he can guaranty car warranties on his own authority, there was hardly any discussion. It is not obvious to me that Article Two authorizes the President to “take care” that your deal with GM should be “faithfully executed.”

I do not have the answers to these questions, but they may be coming soon to a court near you.

Doug Berman, at Sentencing Law & Policy, recently called for more people in the criminal justice world to take up blogging. Specifically, he explained that issue-focused, niche blogs serve the valuable function of expanding the debate about important topics. I have been a blogger for over two years in a very tiny niche: sex crimes. There are definitely positives and negatives to being a single-topic blogger.

For me, the negatives have not been too pronounced, but they do come up from time to time. A niche blog audience tends to be narrower and there are less regular [...]]]> I want to thank Dan and the rest of the Concurring Opinions bloggers for having me. I figured I would start by posting about something close to home for me.

Doug Berman, at Sentencing Law & Policy, recently called for more people in the criminal justice world to take up blogging. Specifically, he explained that issue-focused, niche blogs serve the valuable function of expanding the debate about important topics. I have been a blogger for over two years in a very tiny niche: sex crimes. There are definitely positives and negatives to being a single-topic blogger.

For me, the negatives have not been too pronounced, but they do come up from time to time. A niche blog audience tends to be narrower and there are less regular readers. Instead, narrow-focus blogs are consulted more often when a hot topic intersects with the blog’s subject matter. Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog is a good example of that trend as his traffic patterns substantially change during election season. That means that the niche blogger has to a lot more work during the off-peak times to draw attention to the blog. I am not one who revels in promoting my blog so that has been the toughest thing for me. The other significant negative is there are times when I see a post around the web unrelated to sex crimes to which I really want to respond, but I cannot justify it on my blog.

The positives have, so far, outweighed the negatives for me. Most importantly, the people who read my blog, regularly or irregularly, tend have much higher interest levels about the topics on which I blog. I would guess, for that reason, I get a much higher volume of email from blog readers than I would on a general topic blog. That has allowed me to get to know a lot of people with different perspectives about sex crime laws. Since that has been the primary focus of my scholarship, the reader feedback has served me well in enhancing my scholarly work. I also think there is tremendous value in the disciplinary nature of niche blogging. My blog forces me to read and think about the issues which interest me on a daily basis. While I think there are times when every blogger wonders if blogging is trading off with more productive activity, I think the net effect for me has been to increase my overall work rate.

So, I would extend Berman’s call for more single-issue bloggers beyond the criminal justice area. While I enjoy a lot of group and general interest blogs, there is an important place in the legal blogosphere for niche blogs.

Cross-posted at Sex Crimes.

I hope that SourceHub will add these posts to its apparent aggregation of my blogging at their site. (According to their metrics, I am a “highly opinionated, somewhat negative” writer–leading me to renewed skepticism of number-crunching!)

For those interested, my Balkinization posts have mainly followed up on these reflections on Google; I [...]]]> I just wanted to make a note that I’ll be posting less frequently than normal this month, for a few reasons. First, as many of our law prof readers know, the dreaded “March publishing cycle” is upon us. Second, I’m visiting at Yale this term, and it’s always a bit hard to “find your feet” at a new place. Finally, I’m posting at Balkinization and Law & Technology Theory this month.

I hope that SourceHub will add these posts to its apparent aggregation of my blogging at their site. (According to their metrics, I am a “highly opinionated, somewhat negative” writer–leading me to renewed skepticism of number-crunching!)

For those interested, my Balkinization posts have mainly followed up on these reflections on Google; I talk about the book settlement here, and conservative complaints that Google favors Obama here. The theme of Law & Tech Theory this year is technology and human autonomy; I’m concerned with performance-enhancing drugs, revising and updating some posts that first appeared here on Concurring Opinions.

Sometimes a blog audience wants to keep a blog clear of comments. For instance, Andrew Sullivan has surveyed his readers on whether they want comments on his very popular blog, and all the votes I’ve seen have been negative. One of his readers writes:

Readers of your blog could opt to not read the comments section, but in truth we would rarely opt not to read them — on [...]]]> I began drafting this series a few weeks ago, before the current controversy over blog comments brewed. I agree with much of what both Jack Balkin and Dan Solove have said on the matter, and it may be an exhausted topic at this point. But I thought I’d just add a few additional thoughts.

Sometimes a blog audience wants to keep a blog clear of comments. For instance, Andrew Sullivan has surveyed his readers on whether they want comments on his very popular blog, and all the votes I’ve seen have been negative. One of his readers writes:

Readers of your blog could opt to not read the comments section, but in truth we would rarely opt not to read them — on your blog or any other blog. Blog comments have the power to hammerlock one’s attention. I think, humans being highway rubberneckers, we’d be impotent to resist looking over the rantings and counter-rantings that would make their way into your Comments Section. Not only would comments be an incredible drain on one’s time . . . but it also exposes readers to the nasty underbelly of blogging.

While most of the current discussion focuses on what can go wrong with comments, there is much that can go right. The comment section allows readers to “glom on” and add a lot to the conversation. I am indebted to many terrific commenters who consistently alert me to interesting sources of information, flaws in my arguments, or material that supports the original post. Even just hearing someone say “great post!” can be really encouraging. Hence my Blackstone ratio of blog commenting: one positive or helpful comment is worth ten negative ones.

But what to do about negative, irrelevant, kvetching, or cavilling comments? I have a few approaches, depending on the identity of the commenter and the nature of the comments.

First, if somebody who frequently has constructive things to say finds something I write troubling or bad, I take it seriously. I try to respond as well as I can, given my time constraints. Just as I’ve been turned off bad article topics by critical conference audiences, I can be turned off a given line of blogging by a good criticism–or at least led to rethink it. To give but a few examples, commenter Daniel Goldberg has forced me to rethink the therapy/enhancement distinction in bioethics; A.J. Sutter’s reading suggestions have led me to European thought that requires me to rethink any sweeping critiques of economics as a discipline; and Patrick S. O’Donnell consistently demonstrates the ongoing relevance and vitality of thinkers frequently dismissed by the bien pensant majority as outside the mainstream. Vigorous debate can enliven many topics:

Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. … Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won’t replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

This type of conversation is to be treasured, especially because it is open to those outside the academy.

However, for those who always seem to have something negative to say, I have less patience. At one time I aspired to be a bodhisattva of the blogosphere, offering sweet reason to one and all. No longer. Some disputes are about fundamentally different values, not facts. As Mary Ann Case’s fascinating work Feminist Fundamentalism reveals, one of the key rhetorical tropes certain groups employ is to try to portray their own values as unquestionable, while dismissing those of others (or, sadly, the “othered”) as contingent, destructive, or trivial. When a blog commenter tries that move on me, I usually ignore it.

But I also realize that sparring can be fun. Any student of the American political system knows that many elections and changes in public opinion are based on pithy memes that capture the public imagination. Blog post sparring can be a great place to refine such messages for an increasingly ADD culture. Admittedly, you shouldn’t try to trash or perplex the comments of anyone you know (a mistake I’ve made a few times, and regretted.) But snappy, sassy, or sarcastic comebacks are the perfect antidote to a tiresome malcontent.

Links to Series on “Why Blog?”

Intro

Why Blog I: The Story

Why Blog II [above]

Why Blog III: The Audience (upcoming)

Why Blog IV: A Participatory Public Sphere (upcoming)