Your Girlfriend Reads Tim Bray’s Blog
Tim Bray is speculating about how you could use your blog to interfere with a person’s chances at employment or procreation:
?Suppose I posted a piece here whose title was that person?s name, laying out in succinct but forceful detail the nature of the bad behavior, solidly illustrated by pointers to online examples. Suppose I offered a calmly-worded opinion that nobody in their right mind should consider hiring, or doing business with, or dating, this person.?
If you set aside the emotional aspect for now, you’ll see that Tim is basically talking about how the web enables everyone to have a voice, and we all can gossip on one another. I want to have this ability to gossip about restaurants that I like and dislike, products, and more. When you follow this idea, you run into some interesting problems. For example, how do people find the review (the low-tech solution Tim proposesis to use the identifier as the title of the blog post). How do you avoid hurting business at restaurants that are named the same as one you are panning? How do you disambiguate posts which are about personal fitness from those which simply cite the person? And so on. One starts to think that Tim would be best to just use RDF. 
Now, if you consider the specific case of using blogs as weapons of personal destruction, the idea has been tried. Tim may have forgotten about Winerlog, which was an entire blog dedicated to nothing more than criticizing Dave Winer. Winerlog still ranks high on Google, although it’s been shut down since before Tim discovered blogging. More than one ?A-list? blogger have tried to ?take down? Dave Winer through the power of their blogs. But as Tim seems to have concluded, personalizing things is corrosive to the soul and rarely accomplish the intended goals.