Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

What happens when multiple bloggers do multiple investigations of a currently hot blog topic? What happens when the hot topic is a human being? Does that human being become a public figure*, with the loss of legal rights that status entails?

After Kathryn Cramer blogged some (mistaken) speculation about the Fallujah killings–and after she took down the post and apologized for it–she got hate mail including death threats, some posted to her teenage daughter’s website.

Kathryn Cramer believed she was being attacked by conservative readers of the LGF blog. JD Guckert (better known by his professional name Jeff Gannon) believes that liberal blogreaders are harassing his family.

If you find that hard to believe, check out, for example, this collaborative investigative thread on Kos. What’s striking about it is not so much the occasional bit about “Don’t harass his mother, she’s probably a senior citizen,” but the thrill of the chase that unites participants as they compete to deliver new information of any kind about anyone named Guckert.

We bloggers think of ourselves as individuals. When we team up to report on a shared news story, we need to start thinking about the human impact of an possible swarm of people following our lead.

* public figure

n. in the law of defamation (libel and slander), a personage of great public interest or familiarity like a government official, politician, celebrity, business leader, movie star or sports hero. Incorrect harmful statements published about a public figure cannot be the basis of a lawsuit for defamation unless there is proof that the writer or publisher intentionally defamed the person with malice (hate).

Thanks to
Jay Rosen (PressThink) for a post on Blog Storm Troopers that made me start asking these questions.

Check out this user agreement from Google Alert:

“…This Agreement, your rights and obligations, and all actions contemplated by this agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Gibraltar, as if the Agreement was a contract wholly entered into and wholly performed within Gibraltar. This Agreement will not be governed by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.”

Excuse me, Google Alert, do I have to learn the Web laws of tiny Gibraltar before sending you my $10 for email updates?

Google Alert always seemed like good guys to me, but kissing off the United Nations standards for Gibraltar’s sounds unnervingly like one of those maritime “flags of convenience” …

The Inukitut have a word for it: “puijilittatuq.” Translation: “He does not know which way to turn because of the many seals he has seen come to the ice surface.”

That’s a good description (from this month’s issue of Ansible, the scifi newsletter from David Langford) of the blog-blockage typically caused by a fresh copy of Ansible.

Thank goodness, at least, that I’m not in Paris! Bloggers there will face the nightly temptation of being able to play mobile-phone-Tetris, using the lights on the Bibliotheque Nationale. (Thanks, Engadget!)

And check out Anil Dash’s piece on “Information Bankruptcy.” My favorite bit:

I learned that half of all bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills, courtesy of Rebecca’s link. I wish I had learned this from John Kerry about six months ago. This is the core of the health care debate in this country, not edge-case stem cell research. Modern political organizations have fantastic research resources available to them, but they squander these resources on finding weaknesses in their opponents…

…
And I linked to Jay McCarthy’s beautiful “Letter to Beatrice” from my del.icio.us linkblog, but never got around to pointing to it from here. Tiny sample:

In these paragraphs I will take Aristotle’s classification, if for no other reason then to impress those who are so impressed, on friends: those of interest, of love, and of contemplation. This division is not always perfect, and thus many components could easily be rearranged, but how many books are in the Bible is much less important than their complete message–so I press onward…

…
Now, you’ve got plenty to read, and I’m headed back to Thog’s Masterclass…

Check out the new kid in search–MSN search. Nice try, Microsoft, but you aren’t yet ready to knock little Google off the merrygoround.

I’m thrilled to be your number one “Betsy” (at least, the number one Betsy who isn’t an ad) … especially after your shocking treatment of Boing Boing…

…but don’t you think searchers will find it a little bit tacky that your top result for Linux is one of your own anti-Linux ads?

10) BloJoCred conference

Did somebody at Harvard finally pound a stake through the heart of “Blogs-versus-Journalists”? I’m waiting to see if the zombie will walk again.

9) Chocolate sushi

The fifteenth superfood!

8) Ninjafish

I just met Chris Whipple, and now I’m enjoying his blog (Free sample: “I’ll be the one snuggling up to the one with the British accent.”)

7) Real life surprises despite #joiito and ninjafish

I finally got to meet Suw Charman this weekend. Newsflash to my fellow-fans of Chocolate and Vodka–Suw has a British accent. It’s not something you notice in IRC…

6) Born to Be Wild

Suw and Chris and RedHead and AccordionGuy came to visit and accordion music occurred and was filmed by Suw!

5) Wikipedia page of unusual articles

Bat bomb, nucular, Wilhelm scream, and more…

4) Happy birthday to Robert Scoble

A great party should make it more bearable to be “forty-something.”

3) Happy birthday to Susan Mernit

And Susan, a Bloggies finalist, has even more wacky sushi links!

2) Dave Winer’s back in Cambridge!

Dave W threw a great blogger dinner where I met a bunch more bloggers, spent even more time with Suw, and got a great Tshirt from Technorati’s David Sifry.

And the number one item I would have blogged if not snowed under…

I’m still shoveling snow!!!!

Dang, what is it about January? I the days are short, but my previous January 20 posts are just so grumpy! Sparing you links to either of them, I’ll celebrate instead with my 10 favorite posts from 2003. (My favorites from 2004 are already out there.)

Oh, yes, and some of my favorite 2003 graphics–which one doesn’t match up with one of the posts?

• What’s next, a-fay izzle-shay?
• So, what do you look like, really?
• Rated ahrrrrrrrr….*
• Segway versus Vespa: A2O or AOS?
• Immortality by proxy: Alice in Wonderland
• Beauty and mystery of snow
• Immortality by proxy, part 2
• To be thankful for…
• At least our visitors didn’t have bolts in their necks…
• Email to the universe

• Return to Normandy
• Thoughts on Passing By…
• Scenes from an American Election
• A Final Reunion
• Takhuna Memorial
• Scenes from the Baltic xxx
• Give Me Liberty xxx
• News From Ukraine
• xxx
• Public Education and Human Rights

Amazing 2004–never before has any year been described by so many different top ten lists!

Now, as for the top ten events in cryptozoology–that would probably be among the top ten things I know nothing about. Still, I can’t help wanting to jump in the game, if only by picking out my ten favorite blogposts from 2004. In chronological order, that would be:

1. Return of the King: The absolute best moment (January 11)
2. Re-thinking the virtues of fire-engine red (April 3)
3. The fog of Robert McNamara (April 6)
4. Look–up in the sky–it’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a … journalist? (April 25)
5. Bullied by bullet points (May 2)
6. Garlic salt and bacon grease (May 27)
7. The broken internal clock of Gerald Jay Sussman (June 3)
8. Travel broadens the…something (June 15)
9. Dramatic theory with mosquito continuo (July 23 — this is my favorite of all, being mostly Frank)
10. Angst of a modern Hamlet (November 11)

After whittling down all my posts to a favorite ten, I suddenly realized–I’d forgotten to check the entire Nobel category. Drat, and now it’s after midnight. Well, here are my five favorite Nobel-related posts.

• The Nobel Prize from our dog’s point of view (October 6)
• We are in a metastable state (November 30)
• 1,000,000,000 seconds ago (December 4)
• Up to and including the Nobel Prize ceremony (December 10)
• Food presentation that will be hard to live up to (December 11)

Am I egotistical, picking out ten favorite blogposts? Go thou and do likewise, if you haven’t already…

Wow, thanks to the brilliant and sweet-natured Kevin Lawver for nominating this blog for a “Best Writing” Bloggie!

In January of 2004 I spent time trying to get Blogger blogs to yield RSS. That is, Scott Johnson did the actual geekery while I wrote some toy blogs with Rube-Goldberg templates–often with 4 or 5 posts in the space of an hour.

One of my favorites was blogged in the persona of Terry Pratchett’s giant world-supporting space-turtle A’Tuin:

A’Tuin tries to figure out what to put in his brand new weblog. A few millennia pass as he reasons it out, distracted briefly by drips from the Discworld above as an Ice Age ends. Finally the words come to him. Hesitantly, he pecks them out:

“Helllllo werld.”

So I hope you will all be more inclined to join Kevin Lawver in voting for my blog’s good writing when you compare it to much weirder blogs from my past such as “Giant Martian kittens make good friends” and “boat drinks r us.” (Hey, if anyone wants to vote for my boat drinks’ tagline–“The blog of tall blue libations with tiny umbrellas”–that would make my New Year even more fun and surprising…)

Anyway, thanks, Kevin!