Revolutionary Moderation

Better late than never



I've been reading and reviewing the heat generated on the blogs by a cease and desist letter mailed to Jim Elve, operator of the BlogsCanada website. For those of you who never leave this page, here's the short version: someone working for the government didn't appreciate the design similarities between the BlogsCanada page and Canada's government pages, and so a lawyer wrote a letter asking him to stop. Well, telling him to stop. And the blog world rushed to Jim's defense, from InstaHack on down.



Oddly, I'm going to have to take the side of the government here. God help me if you ever find me echoing and quoting David Mader on this blog again (though God help David Mader for finding himself taking the side of "Government"), but in this case, right is right:

... though the Liberals have been doing their best to erase the line, I think we should still differentiate (where applicable) between the government and the Government. And the above certainly appears to be a reasonable act of the Government.

I think Jim designed the site originally as a bit of a laugh related to the directory - it's not just a directory, it's Canada's Directory!(tm). Jim's own blog shifted to be more political over time, and the e-group blog was a later add-on. I think those caused the trouble, but not because of the particular opinions.



I think so long as the domain was mostly directory and little or no political opinion, the "G"overnment (in the Mader parlance) left well-enough alone. Once opinion started being the main traffic-inducing feature of the domain, well, the Government is bound to be more sensitive to that. It isn't being anti-Martin in particular, or talking a lot about AdScam in particular, that would induce that reaction. It's giving opinion pages the stylistic look and feel of a domain (gc.ca) that stays well-clear of opinion.



It may be too late, but I wonder if Jim had made the changes on the two opinion blog pages, if the government would have left the directory be. I'm still a fan, Jim, but I think you need to let it go, because it's the right thing to do.