Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW

A South by Southwest attendee at a panel discussion. As you can tell from the uniform, not a blogger.

Blogging is definitely entering a surly, complex middle age. What started out as a frisky means of self-expression, a way to comment on the news of the day, and a highlight reel of the World Wide Web has become a business. And some folks think that the business of blogging is in the business of getting away with whatever it can.

Or they're just...dealing with the fact that blogging-as-business has developed a hyperactive metabolism that provokes infractions.

Take for example Henry Blodget's mea culpa after pasting the Wikipedia entry on the My Lai massacre into a recent blog post at Business Insider. It's no longer pasted in. Because, as Blodget puts it, Gawker freaked out. Maybe Gawker was right to freak out. But then again Blodget does write plenty of posts that are fairly dense with real business analysis, so it's hardly his pattern. 

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Dave Winer/Flickr

Nick Denton is the man who founded Gawker Media. He doesn't much like commenters anymore.

Nick Denton is one of those Blog Lords whom, if you blog at all seriously, you have to pay attention to. But you also have to expect Denton to routinely exasperate. Such as when Gawker Media redesigned its blogs to be far more iPad friendly — and reader unfriendly. Or just today, when CNN reported on some comments that the Great Provocateur made at South by Southwest:

In the early days of the Internet, there was hope that the unprecedented tool for global communication would lead to thoughtful sharing and discussion on its most popular sites.

A decade and a half later, the very idea is laughable, says Gawker Media founder Nick Denton.

"It didn't happen," said Denton, whose properties include the blogs Gawker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, io9 and Lifehacker. "It's a promise that has so not happened that people don't even have that ambition anymore.

"The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership -- that's a joke."

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