Category Archives: Blogs

I'm a regular reader of Eschaton, but I had a busy day, so it was something of a shock to discover this evening that he's gotten a cease-and-desist letter from some poor deluded soul who claims he's being libeled both by Atrios and by commentators on the Eschaton blog, and that half the blogs in the world have weighed in on it.

Plenty has been said about the merits, and I won't add to it. (See here for one roundup of links.)

But it might be useful to summarize some of the relevant cyber-law principles, which differ slightly from ordinary libel law. In what follows I treat the cyber-law aspects (only) of three issues: (1) Libel by a blogger; (2) libel by a commentator to a blog; (3) whether a lawsuit can force an ISP to reveal the name of an anonymous blogger.

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Joshua Micah Marshall writes a great political blog complete with actual original ideas and investigative reporting called Talking Points Memo. The other day he posted an item asking for financial support in order to take his blogging on the road to cover the New Hampshire primary. Readers responded so generously, that in less then 24 hours Mr. Marshall was saying “I never thought I’d say this, but: No More Contributions!”. Gentleman that he is, he then started describing how he'd give some of the money above what he actually need back to the later contributors.

Now, we're only talking about $4864.00 here; I don't think this is a sustainable business model for the starving artists of the world (although things like it have been suggested), nor is it the next shot (after open source?) in an ongoing transition towards a gift-exchange model amidst a culture of satisfaction and plenty.

But it's pretty cool whatever it is.

Ed Hasbrouck, aka the Practical Nomad, has taken his wonderful mailing list on travel and privacy issues and turned it into a blog. A must-read if you fly or if you care about privacy, and a double must if you fit both categories. There's also an online archive of the traffic from his mailing list.

Thanks to rc3, I found Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka, and its observations on “registers of conversations”. Which explains why rc3 is a good thing to read — it taps into pools I don't. Except that now I guess I'll be reading Danny O'Brien too…

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Daily Kos, the lively left-leaning political news and commentary site, is leaving Movable Type and switching to Scoop, which is the sort of community-building software I wrote about in the final section of my Habermas paper.

It's been suggested that blogs shouldn't have comments but that they should instead link to each other to make conversations more visible. The dKos move represents the radical counter to that view.

In the end, users will decide what they like best; in the interim there's plenty of room for both approaches, plus some arbitrage.