War of words | Bloggers have taken off the gloves

The entrepreneur was not one to pass up a marketing opportunity. But when Jason Calacanis went on a bit too long about his latest product at a technology conference in August — at least in some eyes — pioneering software developer Dave Winer had had enough.

Winer, of Berkeley, jeered Calacanis from the crowd as a shill. Almost immediately, he took his criticism online and onto his blog, casting the issue into the open seas of the Internet.

Calacanis, of Santa Monica, responded on his own blog. Before long, like a fight scene out of a Jackie Chan film, the scuffle had tumbled onto Twitter.com, a social networking site popular among tech bloggers. It had become a blog war, the kind of exchange that regularly lights up the blogosphere in varying degrees of nastiness. Feuds spill into vast corners of typo-ridden cyberspace as bloggers post and repost passages for paint-by-number demolition and incendiary comments fan the flames.

You can't help but think that Thomas Jefferson himself would be pleased to know that out there in the awesome equalizing social force that is the Internet, people armed with the power of free-flowing ideas are busy pummeling the crap out of each other.

More than that, they're doing it in public, with an often participatory audience. Blog fights are verbal steel-cage smackdowns with a revolving door. Says Ariel Meadow Stallings, a Seattle writer who posts her random musings at Electrolicious.com: "Bloggers are an inflammatory bunch."

University of Washington communications professor Malcolm Parks calls it a "cowboy commentary" environment where individual bloggers, through their words, proclaim themselves "the Lone Ranger of truth."

"There's a culture of confrontation that has grown in the blog world," Parks says. As in 'I'm the commentator. I'm the person with the sharp insight that's going to shape the discussion.' "

You might expect to find feathers flying in the political blogosphere, where wingnuts (as right-wing bloggers are called) and moonbats (left-wing bloggers) regularly tussle. But you might be surprised to see the way tech bloggers yank each other's cables, and maybe downright shocked to know the icky chest-thumping that surrounds so-called "mommy bloggers," who blog about life as parents.

In cyberspace, the Calacanis-Winer debate raged: Did Calacanis abuse his conference-speaker privilege by promoting his product? Did Winer overstep his bounds by interrupting Calacanis' talk?

"I love aggressive and challenging questions and conversations," entrepreneur Calacanis wrote on his self-titled blog. "Getting heckled from the back row in the first 10 minutes of a presentation? Well, not so much."

"If he wants to succeed," Winer responded, " ... he's going to have to get past his feelings and listen to what we were saying."

And so on and so on, until the two were no longer on speaking terms at all.

A level cyber field

To review: The World Wide Web is the great equalizer, opening doors to a bottomless cup of information and opinions. Anyone can blog — about politics, about software, about nothing at all.

Seattle journalist David Niewert, who writes a blog called Orcinus, says the blogosphere is what you get when you mix an information-deprived public, an irresponsible mainstream media and the common-man power of the Internet.

Done well, blogs and public forums can influence real-world politics: Blogs from the right and left played a role in the fall of Sen. Trent Lott, for example.

Done not so well — well, you get anarchy. On a local blog in August, conservative Northwest blogger Stefan Sharkansky was assailed for his meager tipping and child-management skills by a waitress at a Fremont-area restaurant.

That the story was apparently false — the waitress has since recanted — made the fight unusual among blog conflicts, says Dylan Wilbanks, among the contributors to Metroblogging Seattle (http://seattle.metblogs.com).

But he says Sharkansky's reaction, as reported in The Stranger and throughout the blogosphere, was even odder. While celebrity bloggers typically ignore dogs nipping at their heels, Sharkansky pursued the issue on his own blog, posting or linking to personal information about his nemesis until she retracted her story, apologized and left her waitressing job.

"He had the moral high ground, and he frittered it away with very aggressive tactics you typically see in revenge movies," Wilbanks says. " ... He made himself to look like a big bully swinging his club and his loyal readership around. You felt sorry for the woman, just because the punishment was so disproportional to the crime."

A mom and a blog

Then there's Dooce.com, a blog enterprise so successful for Salt Lake City mother Heather Armstrong that, as she notes, it's now a self-supporting operation for her and her husband. That, coupled with her perky posts about life with a young daughter, have garnered "no shortage of people who hate her," Stallings says, placing her in the C-list of celebrities.

Among the detractors is ViolentAcres.com, an anonymous, quasi-anti-mommy blog that skewers Dooce and other mommy blogs. "You're [sic] identity is so wrapped up in what the Internet thinks of your child, that you've all lost a piece of yourselves," a Violent Acres' author wrote. " ... You've got to have the confidence to separate your identity from that of your child and develop the drive and passion to go it alone."

Global battles

Not even the notoriously well-behaved British are immune. Early this year, blogger Iain Dale called for a cease-fire after online tussles with other bloggers escalated into incivility. (Justin McKeating, another blogger caught in the fray, finally advised readers not into "hot blogger-on-blogger action" to just move on.)

"Over the last few weeks, a huge amount of damage has been done to the British blogosphere," Dale wrote. "Blog wars have broken out between various parties which have made us all appear like obsessive schoolschildren [sic] who have nothing better to do with our time than flame each other. ... It's time to call a halt to this before it all gets out of hand and writs are issued."

Singapore's Claire Khoo summarized it bluntly with a 2005 post on her blog, Minishorts.net, illustrating her point with links to various cyber-spats in her circle: "You can't expect very intelligent stuff from a bunch of nobodies, you know ... . We're just tiny little nobodies making little mountains out of molehills."

Undeterred, one foe replied: "I don't really care. I like fighting online, that's that."

No-name bravery

Why all the testiness? Metroblogging Seattle's Wilbanks says the Web offers a one-two punch — an unlimited supply of sparring partners (bloggers and the people who read them) and the padding of near or total anonymity. As, say, RudyGiuliani4Ever, you can jab and pick fights like a rowdy street fighter and no one will ever know you're a middle-aged pencil-pusher from Bothell. "When people know they can hide, they feel free to say and do things that are beyond the pale of polite society," he says.

UW's Parks says that while bloggers aren't usually anonymous, the electronic distance of the Internet nevertheless provides a "perception of anonymity." In other words, not having to see the look of anger or pain prompted by their comments unleashes the force of blunt honesty.

"Online settings make it easy to ignore that," Parks says. " ... There are things that people will say to one another that they would never say in person."

Still, as long as they don't plumb the depths of name-calling, even heated discussions can produce positive results, says Israeli consultant and blogger Oren Eini. Why fight in public at all? To expose others to the issue and allow them to weigh in, he says.

The trick is to focus on the message and not the messenger. The goal is not victory but greater awareness and understanding. If each side can convey its viewpoint well, Eini says, "usually this is later incorporated into what they are doing, improving things as a whole."

"No blog fight has ever ended with a radical realignment of global paradigms," Wilbanks says. "Just because you got the last word in on the argument doesn't mean that a billion people now agree with you."

And anyway, certain arguments — religion, the viaduct, breastfeeding vs. formula — never die: They live on as the all-you-can-eat hash browns of the Internet, slurped up by other bloggers in an endless kilobyte buffet.

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com