Given this evil situation, the lawyers themselves are getting careful. You won't find a better analysis of the rules that lawyers themselves follow when blogging within their firm than this. But those won't help you. Nothing can. If you're a blogger, here are a lot of things you really must read:

You won't find a more poignant proof of the utter incompatibility of medieval 'libel' law and the Internet than this. Nor a worse challenge to the weak and inconsistent rules that protect anonymity for persons "expressing their free speech rights and for using the Internet to communicate about democracy and human rights matters," which in the US is actually required by law of service providers, but which, as in the UK or Canada, can be broken by simple court orders in a bogus (and reverse onus) 'libel' case, even on ridiculous grounds, especially Wikipedia, which seems to have become the new McDonald's.

Oh, but we can just use anonymizers and P2P for our political debate, right? Why not? Because that doesn't leave us any way to deal with spam, lies, hate speech, terror or death threats like what happened to Kathy Sierra. But the reaction is even more dangerous.

Oh, but more technology to let people choose who reads what will help, right? More secure friend-to-friend networks? Well, beware the bedfellows you'll meet in the support groups. You won't find a more readable account of how terror groups that oppose democracy and open debate use the same tools as the rest of us, and benefit every time we legitimate commentators re forced to use more secure or anonymized tools: "Hey, I can't figure out this anonymizer relay or these bittorrent rules." "I'll help you my friend I just used those to swap IED designs with a Pashtun warlord and post a bomb threat to the London tube." "Hey thanks man!" "Yes the next release will be easier to use." "Good, I need this for GreenCompostHeap, it's been scoured off the net." "I know, so has my Wahabist apocalyptic manifesto and my death fatwa against mini skirt wearers."

And worse, the ease with which an innocent person could be framed and their lives destroyed if the present patchwork of laws and old technology assumptions is not unified. Framed perhaps by the authorities themselves. Why not? They'll have your fingerprints, and those can be printed onto gloves...

Oh, but we can talk about that, right? No. You won't find a more chilling comment on political freedoms in Canada than this, in which the blog host, a lawyer, feels forced to delete a comment that is "very well argued, and passionately made, and in a world that made sense would in unedited form clearly be legitimate and necessary political commentary" and even points out the chill itself. Sadly we do not know what it said. So what Rob Hyndman says is "legitimate and necessary" and even "very well argued" cannot be read. This is not political freedom. This is fascism, creeping in via blogs.

The root of the problem is legal cowardice. The UK House of Lords, in Reynolds v. Times Newspapers Limited and Others, noted that the Supreme Court of Canada, in "Church of Scientology of Toronto (1995) 126 D.L.R. (4th) 129, rejected a Sullivan style defence, although that case did not concern political discussion." This critical distinction is apparently lost on Canadian legal scholars like Michael Geist, who can't see fit to even mention that political speech requires more protection than any other kind. This in contrast to a recent Israeli decision that specifically raised the bar for disclosure and court orders regarding political speech. The casual assumption that protesting political actions deserves no more protection than some interpersonal dispute that affects only the two parties involved, is at least a substantial step down the path to disenfranchising all citizens, and the very idea of citizenship, replacing it with much weaker ideas. Even ad hominem argument is necessary in politics - democracy relies on the basic assumption that the incumbent may not be fit for the job, that parties may be corrupt, that shadowy insiders may be subverting policies.

Yet we permit those extraordinary rights not granted to anyone else, not victims of violent crime, nor theft, nor fraud. We do that only because of an ancient assumption that the rich and powerful are better people and that they deserve benefit of the doubt to an extraordinary degree. This too is anti-democratic. Reverse onus libel law is nowhere more clearly oppressive than in politics, and nowhere is it more necessary to uproot.

We have better ways to do things now. You won't find a more rational explanation of why wikis work, and why suing them never works as well as just using them, than this.

And, finally, you won't find a more complete analysis of the defense factors for a publisher who hosts a wiki outside the US, though any day now, practice will overtake any analysis, and we'll end up with a patchwork of unprincipled unarchitected useless intimidation-prone drivel that passes for law, and a body of code that doesn't implement democracy or responsible editorial limits on freedom of political speech, but instead resembles the USSR as much as ICANN does.

In fact, the Internet is beginning to look like a place ruled not just by lawyers and spammers, but by bullies. And not "cyberbullies" who call people names, but real torturers and killers and liars and thugs who file BC libel suits to get your IP number without violating American laws preventing exposure of political dissidents. It's a loophole that must be closed immediately and decisively. Not by broad speeches nor just talking about it but by defensible working examples that are multi-national to begin with. That's the first and last line of defense. And blogs won't hold. So that line's a wiki.

With things like aboutus.org getting started to replace DMOZ, and Wikipedia as the world's number one reference, and China letting it through in every language but Chinese, it appears that wikis have won the war.

Blogs will be used for specialized purposes like travel journals, personal diaries, and so on. But the ability to edit old pages and create complex pages will be ultimately irresistible, I'm sure. I think the kids learning how to use Wikipedia in high school are going to come out in a few years and they're going to demand that organizations be using software that works like they now think.

Very interesting also that the ease of creating credible written reports from open content, and the ubiquity of plagiarism or shallow cut-and-paste editing, has led some schools to require that students do live presentations and answer questions about the material. So the oral examination comes down a few degrees... and we are back to the practices of the bards...

At the same time, search engines seem to be winning the arms race to cut out content copycats including spam, and to spot meaningless text (sadly common now in spam) as well. Here's hoping the AIs learn to tell who has actually had an original thought and expressed it via a coherent argument.

When faking originality in text no longer has a payoff, I think there'll be fewer people blogging. And spamming. Thank God.