Wow. Mark just viciously attacked Kevin. Its the sort of think you expect from certain bloggers, but coming from Mark Pilgrim rocks you back on your heels. Blogging is a strange world. You read people’s daily lives, and you feel like you know them, your qualified to have expectations about their behaviour, and then something happens that reminds you that your knowledge is false, based on a very narrow, window. Blogging is the ultimate performative act, identity creation distilled.

I’ve been reading Mark for a long time. Must have been late 2001, maybe early 2002, when I was still at Palm, and struggling with the Free/Busy engine, and desperate for distraction. I actually mourned when he started “Dive Into Accessibility” because I missed his daily insights, though in the end it was an excellent resource that has affected much of my thinking (though unfortunately not much of my practice) about web development.

I guess the reasonable thing to do would be go on, and simply ignore it,
but I find this cognitive dissonance strange, and intriguing, a pointer to the failure of our current system of online communication. Besides I’ve
written favorably about both

Smarter Parsing, and mod_link on this website, and continue to think them a good idea.

Is there some rule, or natural force that hits a blogger after a while? Does everybody become as wizened and angry as Winer or Jorn? Celebrity without the protective barriers society normally erects around celebrities?