The Sanctity of Blogs
From time to time, there has been some debate in the blogging community about the need to protect blog content and its underlying links. Various bloggers have argued long and hard (and well, I believe) that:
- The intellectual content of blogs belong to the blogger who wrote it and not to the blogging site which happened to host it. Therefore, blogs should be written to open standards and rules and methods should be in place for bloggers to move their content for any reason.
- Blog site owners should not remove blogs except for good reason (breaking a well-known rule, such as including sexually explicit material) and even then, with reasonable notice, considering the problem..
- Link owners should be mindful of the blogs they are attached to and make every effort to keep links stable and enduring.
On the other hand, bloggers should be sensible. They need to keep their own copies of their blog (back-up is, after all, a good idea). And they need to be mindful of the rules and common sense.
So there was a great deal of consternation last week when the COO of Userland left his post (under less than well described circumstances) and his very well-known blog (which was, of course, hosted by Userland) disappeared.
I will leave it to others to sort out what happened and why. What is available on the net seems to be collected at www.Feedster.com.
In the meantime, I did manage to successfully email John and he assures me that all is well and that he expects to get his weblog back up this week. He's hoping that he will find a sponsor for Weblog Network, whiile doing some consulting around K-logs, his other interest.
Of course, we wish him well and hope to hear more about what he's doing soon. [amywohl News]