Civility

Mena Trott 1, Ben Metcalfe 0

Last December, Six Apart founder Mena Trott gave an infamous speech about online civility where she called out one of her critics in the event's IRC backchannel, an audience member using the pseudonym dotBen: Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you've been an ------- to the people who've been in this town and I want to know why don't you, why, what the ----? DotBen turned out to be Ben Metcalfe, at the time a technologist at the BBC, who stood up and said that candor is more important than ... (read more)

2006/10/27

Mena Trott Declares Civil War

In a keynote address at the Les Blogs conference yesterday, Six Apart founder Mena Trott cut short her call for blogger civility to put a bleep in his place: Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you've been an ------- to the people who've been in this town and I want to know why don't you, why, what the ----? It's hard to fairly judge the situation without seeing the events that led up to it, but that's never stopped me before. Trott showed courage giving a speech at the Six Apart-organized ... (read more)

2005/12/07