The Internet: Serious Business

So let's say you're a PEI business or politico type, and you've been getting away with some allegedly shady dealings for quite some time, so much so that Islanders start to think of such connection-mongering as just part of the charm of this little sandbar.

Now, let's say someone started calling you on your practices in an anonymous weblog. What do you do? Well, if you're smart, you would maybe pay attention, see if there are any factual accusations being brought up, and if so, know that the jig is up and that you should try and do a better job at your business / political post.

Of course, if you got an 'F' in 'how to avoid blowback, you idiot', you offer a reward for his identity, and cause a huge stink in the media about it, and suddenly a page that was getting 700 or so hits a day is now posted on MetaFilter, one of the world's biggest group weblogs, and now tens of thousands of people get to read about your business deals and backscratching. (alleged. hee.) And of course the MeFi post was diligent enough to include the Google Caches of PEI Liberal and the blog about the Guardian. (now if the Guardian thinks it has a case that people would confuse that little blog for their own paper then I'm going to sue them for causing me to confuse them for a worthwhile British paper.)

This guy was lamenting that bloggers weren't coming out in support of Mr. ANonymous, And goes on to do the usual bitching about why PEI is a backwater that will eventually sink in to the ocean, which is a phase I go through sometimes before I realize that other people's bad behaviour that doesn't affect me shouldn't prevent me from enjoying my life. All I can say is that, though the writing was next to incoherent, and I had trouble connecting the dots to any kind of coherent narrative at all, and that it read like a Tory getting his digs in whikle the other guy is on the mat, the posts about the Liberal Party and the Guardian were full of publicly verifiable facts and figures, and that the truth is the best weapon against a libel suit, so if the local powers-that-were do manage to convince Google to give up this guy's identity (they should let the US Department of Justice know how to get to Google if they manage this.) then the legal fight wouldn't be in their best interests anyway. But I don't know enough about the events to personally say anything about them, so I will stick to commenting about the embarrassment this has become for those involved.