Simon Owens at the lively Bloggasm has asked for views from the two US lawyers at odds in the controversy over one ‘outing’ the other whose anonymous comments had annoyed him (see my earlier posting here).

The good result is here.

I posted a gloss in a comment on his piece:

Having never read anything by either of them and stumbling by chance on the subject, it seems to me that Whelan did nothing at all unreasonable.

Most of the stridency surrounding the criticism of Whelan seems to come from the fact that he is ‘Right’ (ie a priori bad) and Blevins is ‘Left.

If there is a compelling reason for choosing anonymity in sounding off on the Web, why should that not come with a dose of extra responsibility and generosity of spirit towards opponents? After all, if one anonymous professor has a go at a known professor, using arguments which s/he otherwise would be loath to use publicly, is that not in some sense abusing the expected self-restraint of the known professor for unprofessional purposes?

Plus in law there is the famous egg-shell skull doctrine. If you thump someone and it just happens that that person for medical reasons is prone to suffer serious injury from blows which would be painful but harmless to 99.9% of the population, the law expects you to accept the consequences. That incentives less thumping.

Likewise if you pester or annoy someone through anonymous blogging, you might just hit upon a person who is so vexed by such behaviour that s/he breaches your anonymity. It’s a risk, the effect of which might be seen as keeping incentivising anonymous bloggers to err on the side of being fair and courteous. And, if you do provoke someone into ‘outing’ you, grow up and put it down to experience.

In short, Whelan has nothing at all to apologise about. Blevins should think a bit more about professional ethics and good manners – as he appears to be doing from the last line in the Bloggasm posting?

On the subject of anonymous and other blogging, Simon separately links to this:

“Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew…

 

“The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”

 

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.”

He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

Hmm. My entries are a bit long.

Am I heading to join the 95% of blogs which are quietly left … to die?