When you threaten bloggers, and and other bloggers notice and speak up, what are you going to do in response?

Maybe as Warren Kinsella muses there were hundreds and hundreds of posts, in response to his threats, but I doubt the numbers. He isn’t that important to the average blogger. His legal threats directed at four people on line understandably promped others to speak out.
This is his conclusion.

Last night, someone at the office told me that my recent insolence (cf. objecting to family members being called “retarded,” objecting to being accused of murder) continues to have all sorts of blogging types in a spit-flecked frenzy of hate. When I got home, I went poking in the Internet ether and eventually saw what he meant. I’m a “nigger hater,” I should be disbarred, my children are apes. Hundreds and hundreds of posts like that. One woman has even put together a huge, detailed essay analyzing what I write (some of it was actually kind of interesting, if totally weird). You’ll understand, I think, if I don’t provide links.

Anyway - the woman’s essay got a couple things right. One, I don’t give a rat’s ass about obtaining, and keeping, a charter membership in the “blogging community.”

I still feel sorry for the guy. I don’t know anyone who has a charter membership in the blogosphere - that isn’t how the medium works.
He’s a former political insider, maybe they have charter memberships. I think if groups are looking for speakers on bloggers (like Trent U) there are many excellent writers/ bloggers who grasp Shirkey’s Law, are well versed on business, history, technology, interaction, politics and media, their larger social and cultural impact, linking out, and can intelligently move well past the ‘it’s all about me!’ and just politics mentality.
Mr. Kinsella has now decided bloggers are not the readers he is aiming at. Let’s hope he stops legalling threatening too.

When I gave that speech at Trent last week about blogging and politics, I was asked by a couple students if I thought blogging was a fad, or whether it would last. My suspicion, increasingly, is that it will eventually fade away, bogged down - blogged down, you might say - by solipsism and incoherence.

I’ve been wrong before, of course, but you can bet I’ll be sure to reprint some of the hate mail this post elicits. The haters will prove my point better than I ever could.

Canadian bloggers could all do him a favour and not email him. Let him fade. I doubt hate mail will be from bloggers, (a few perhaps) and I doubt the vast majority of mail he got when these threats initially came to light were from bloggers either. He isn’t being held against his will in blogging, there is no ‘charter membership’, or leading a ‘fad’ in the blogosphere or ‘keeping’ his place.
If bloggers are his new scapegoat, I think most of us are smart enough not to behave like trolls and react the way he predicts.
Blogging won’t fade away because the Warren Kinsella’s predicts it will.
Looking at The List, other groups of blogs, EatonWeb, Blogs Canada, blogs continue to grow as predicted, and many bloggers that have been criticized by Mr. Kinsella have been online quite some time.

Jay Currie made this observation in the comment section last week.

The evolution of Canadian blogging is going to be controlled by many of the factors you cite as well as the differences in things like media concentraton.

Cracking the “Annex mind” (and Flea points out he blogs from the heart of the Annex) is going to be tough. Largely because there are not the cable networks, talk radio shows, and sheer variety of political journals (think TNR, The Atlantic, Harpers, Utne, Slate, Salon….) Americans enjoy.

On the other hand, because our community is relatively small we enjoy the ability to keep track of what is going on. We are not yet overwhelmed with choice.

I think the Kinsella kerfuffle will turn out to be very important within the blogging community. It brought us together in important ways. But I would be astonished if it was picked up in the Mainstream Media. Coyne may write a bit,Wells might drop a paragraph; but that will be about it.

Critical mass has not yet been achieved; but we are tickling the dragon’s tail.

Perhaps Canadain bloggers will need to remain vigilent to threats from a site owner who doesn’t give a rats’ a**.

Here are his Technorati links. Draw your own conclusions.The links jumped as word spead. They will die down very soon And here is an E Group post at Blogs Canada, that looks at how this has issue has been spun.

I get the impression that Kinsella’s using self-generated blogcidents to see just where the pay-off is in manipulating blogdom. Sure, in the long run, he’s likely burned a few blogger bridges, for now, but everyone knows in politics that it’s not the long run that really matters. It’s the moment-by-moment grind, the next scrum, the insightful new blogpost that really makes the difference.

Does long memory win out over moment-to-moment alliances? I’ll say no, not unless somebody breaches some basic tenet of humanity, and that is what makes the blogosphere so political, not unlike Ottawa, itself. Sure we have archives and long memories, but we also have shifting alliances and grand chaos which can change on a moment’s notice, and what, my bloggy friends, could be more appealing to a grandmaster spin-doctor than that?

Canadian bloggers would do well not be be manipulated or give the spin-doctor his payoff.

Look at links at Technorati for Blogs Canada, Colby Cosh, Andrew Coyne, Daimnation, Off Wing Opinion, Jordon Cooper, relapsed catholic, David Warren, Bene Diction; Warren Kinsella is not in a class by himself in the blogosphere. And many more intelligent and newer Canadian pundit bloggers are in the process of building strong readership bases. As are other bloggers from Canada.
There are many more portals you add your blog to.
Blogstreet, Popdex, blogdex, daypop, Radioland, Blog Pulse, Yahoo, Truth Laid Bear…

Update: (Thank you Simon) All things Canadian checks out the source of the hate mail discussed at Mr. Kinsella’s site. But it get’s wierder. Odd and childish.
Comments coming from the IP of a Kinsella company. There is some strange projection going on. My quick and unsolicited advice to Don…keep your sense of humour eh?