Miss Manners on Blogging

Someone wrote to her saying:

One friend recently commented in her blog that she hadn't enjoyed the novel she'd just read. To her surprise, the novel's author found the post after searching the Web for his own name and responded angrily to her "review."

Although we are all aware that blogs can be read by any friend or stranger who passes by, our own blogs are so mundane that they are usually read only by our own friends, and we like it that way. We tend to think of blogs as being akin to conversations with friends at a public cafe -- while they might be overheard by strangers, we don't really expect it, or expect strangers to get involved.

Should we instead be thinking of blogs as something more like letters published in the newspaper? Or simply refrain from keeping blogs and put more effort into writing letters? Letters sound good in theory, but in practice I have trouble deriving the same sense of community from them.

For my part, I'd say we've had more interaction on the last year and a half of the blog than we've had in the previous 30 years of letter writing. By the same token, I think it pisses AJ off to hear on the phone, "I already blogged about that, but oh well, I will repeat it for you." Since I was never good at writing letters, I will also say that blogging has cut down on my EMail to family members.

Finally, Miss Manners clearly should have just told her reader to set things up so only contributers can comment on her blog. That just helps people who would probably normally have good manners to keep their opinions to themselves.