Big Blogger Is Watching You

For some time there has seemed (and I use the word 'seemed' quite consciously) to be a skewing of power away from blogs, in that someone who makes a stray offending comment might, say, be summarily dismissed from their jobs. In this misperception it is easy to assume that a blog is actually an achilles heel, it's a useful device to sabotage someone you don't like. And we're all aware of those unfortunate names in the Hall Of Fired Bloggers. This sort of thing has happened here and there, with a lot of bloggers tucking their tails between their legs, making silent oaths to behave. When I say a lot, I mean a lockeroom at your average gym. Meanwhile, outside these groups of civilised cyberspecimens, the blog lynchmob has just begun to congregate and flex their muscles. Can you hear them baying for blood? It's a loud, but silent internet sizzle bursting invisibly and across broders to planetwide PC's.

Like money, sex and any other powerful...let's call it 'mechanism', blogging can be used for good or ill. But make no mistake, a megaphone that can broadcast a citizen's manifesto to the far reaches of the planet has astounding power at his or her fingertips. It can be used to turn yourself into a famous scriptwriter (a la Diablo Cody), or it can be harnessed into activism (this blog ventures into that area quite often), or it can simply be a device for mischief. Of course when you're blogging about your poodle's puppy's poofy hairdo, people in Poland aren't going to turn off the 9 'o clock news to care... Actually, even that is changing. But, I digress.

Increasingly it is becoming far more risky to antagonise a blogger and thereby risk a deluge of bad publicity. I suppose one has to weigh up the blogger's salt, if you're going to mess with him or her. So if it's a random once a monther you're talking about, or someone who can't really string too many sentences together, you might as well take a swing. But you've also got to know which communities these netizens are part of. And do they have any support from the big blogospheres like Korea's Daum, and American networks. Chances are, it's a risk either way. There's no knowing who these people are connected to...as Dan Rather's call centre nemesis - Edward Morrissey - can attest. And of course, there is no knowing what they know that you do not.