How to Duke it Out in the Blogosphere..and How NOT To

Two issues today provide great examples of how to duke it out in the blogosphere...and how to avoid the kind of duking that has the potential to backfire.

First is today's most-cited blog post from Juan Cole at Informed Comment, one of the blogosphere's most popular blogs (ranked No. 54 among BlogPulse profiles). The University of Michigan history professor consistently provides reasoned, contextual commentary on politics, current events, foreign policy and other issues. and yes, he's liberal. But he has a beef, because information that he posted in a private email discussion group has been made public by a conservative critic of his, so he does what people who have beefs with blog behavior do: he writes about it, exposes the critic, gives his side of the story and lets the readers decide. Rather eloquently, in fact.

Winds of Change calls the exchange "mouth-frothingly good." The blogger at Pacific Views takes a longer view the kind of slams that take place in the blogosphere, and does does Crooks and Liars. The result: open discussion on all sides of the issue.

Then there's this tactic...
The opposite side of the coin is provided by today's 16th-most-cited URL from Advertising Age magazine, the story of a New York ad agency that's suing a Maine blogger over his opinions, with which the agency doesn't agree. The agency is a contractor for Maine's tourism office; the blogger thinks the taxpayer money paid to the agency was ill-spent and he said so.

The blogger in question, Lance Dutson of the MaineWebReport, is already blogging about the various media outlets that have mentioned the big fish vs. little fish lawsuit.

Which is exactly why NOT to sue bloggers, points out Randy Charles Morin....because every Internet search for the New York ad agency for the coming months will turn up hits (already there) on the poor guy in Maine who got sued by the big overbearing Madison Avenue agency. Adds blogger KDPaine: "By suing the blogger, the New York ad agency guaranteed that the war would escalate out of the blogosphere and into the MSM (mainstream media)." And it has. Can anyone say, we could have told you so?