I'm really quite ashamed to make a post about the 'skank' blogger incident but at the heart of the issue is a confounding prospect. In the name of completeness I guess I better paraphrase the back story in order to kindle any debate.
Put simply it is a little name calling between a pair of young ladies that don't particularly like one another, however the precedents set are far more noteworthy. A professional writer summaries everything here, here and here - but read on for my amateur hour version of events.
Way back in January Liskula sued Google under the guise of alleging defamatory comments after somehow coming across a blog that was bad mouthing her on the popular Blogger service hosted by Google.
Liskula then recently won the right by court order to discover the identity of the anonymous blogger who had allegedly posted derogative remarks on the Google hosted blog titled "Shanks in NYC".
Upon discovering that the blogger was an irrelevant person in her life and not a friend or family member Liskula after a little song and dance with the media, dropped her defamation charges.
Now Rosemary, yeah you guessed it the not so anonymous blogger plans to sue Google for $US15 million for breaching her privacy.
First of all I feel a little sad for anyone who suspected family or friends be behind the negative comments but the real issue is around whether or not we should be allowed to remain anonymous. Personally I think the entire anonymity of the web is its current shortfall.
I've been and are a member of a number of online communities in varying capacities and typically the more you know about the participants the more civil people behave. Xbox Live is a perfect example of an excellent service that suffers a snide underside due to the foolishness of a small percentage protected by an epic blanket of anonymity.
Rosemary had an interesting argument though it does dull her original actions in the first place. She claims that before Liskula took the issue to the courts the number of visitors to the allegedly offending blog was likely to be two people - herself and Liskula. Obviously with world media taking an interest in the case the words 'skank' and 'Liskula' are common matches now.
I'd argue that if you are placing it in the public domain that everyone has access to then you should assume that everyone has viewed it. I guess my bugbear is that while the tiff is essentially between Liskula and Rosemary Google have somehow been blamed for the entire fiasco.
I guess its classic tall poppy syndrome and if you are trying to take over the world one web click ad at a time, you're going to get lots of odd ball challenges ...
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