Turn and face the strange... Jeneane Sessum posts some worthwhile thoughts about how the maturing (or is it the corporatizing?) of the blogosphere will require new codes of etiquette. As corporations and organizations embrace blogging, the rest of us "are expected to qualify our statements, to be fair and balanced, to temper our tempers."
As blogging becomes professionalized, expectations around conversational ettiquette have changed. It's no longer okay to 'talk off the top of your head,' you are supposed to fact-check. It's not okay to call someone an idiot, especially if you only half mean it, because if you utter such claims Google will decide that you are the everknowing, everloving authority on idiocy, something you never intended when you wrote: Dude, stop being such an idiot. But nonetheless, you become Google's Dr. Phil of Idiocy.
Early in blogging, we did nothing but talk off the top of our heads. That was the point--the whole medium was specifically tailored for talking off the top of our heads. Then, most of what we did was riff, and a good dose of name calling turned handshake was all the proof we needed that we cared about the other folks here.