{"id":174,"date":"2005-12-08T11:30:07","date_gmt":"2005-12-08T18:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=174"},"modified":"2015-02-26T08:24:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T15:24:28","slug":"be_civil_asshol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"Be civil, asshole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The reason the battles are so bitter,&#8221; someone once said about academia, &#8220;is because the stakes are so low.&#8221; It was hard not to be reminded of that famous quote when reading about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.podcastingnews.com\/archives\/2005\/12\/wikipedia_caugh_1.html\">Currygate<\/a> and the attendant controversy over who played what role in the invention of podcasting. At least, I thought, this brouhaha will mark the pinnacle of Web 2.0 farce: Aging MTV star anonymously rewrites Wikipedia podcast entry to give himself more prominence in the community-written history of the creation of the latest overhyped online medium. What could possibly top that?<\/p>\n<p>I was wrong, of course. Just days later, a new peak was conquered, in Paris at the Les Blogs conference. Mena Trott, cofounder of blog-software-maker Six Apart, gave <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sixapart.com\/about\/corner\/2005\/12\/mena_trott_impl.html\">a speech<\/a> chiding bloggers for their nastiness. &#8220;Can we as bloggers be more civil?&#8221; she asked, echoing the great California philosopher Rodney King. &#8220;We need to create an environment where people feel welcomed.&#8221; To which <a href=\"http:\/\/benmetcalfe.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/12\/07\/les-blogs-me-mena\/\">audience member Ben Metcalfe<\/a>, writing on the conference&#8217;s real-time, streaming message board, responded: &#8220;Bullshit.&#8221; Trott, still at the podium, then demanded that Metcalfe stand up and, when he obliged, called him &#8220;an asshole.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In a perfect coda to the event, one of the stars of Currygate, Dave Winer, waded into this affair as well, calling Metcalfe &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/benmetcalfe.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/12\/07\/dave-winer-wades-in\/\">a coward<\/a>&#8221; in a comment on Metcalfe&#8217;s blog and questioning the poor guy&#8217;s manhood: &#8220;If you were the tough guy you said you were, you would have stood up to Mena and said it was bullshit to her face.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/archives\/2005\/10\/the_amorality_o.php\">Utopias<\/a> are great &#8211; until people start moving in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The reason the battles are so bitter,&#8221; someone once said about academia, &#8220;is because the stakes are so low.&#8221; It was hard not to be reminded of that famous quote when reading about Currygate and the attendant controversy over who played what role in the invention of podcasting. At least, I thought, this brouhaha will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5651,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/5651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}