Sometimes I blog about blogging and it's not just because I like to hear myself think (though it is nice to be reminded my brain still works enough to write coherent sentences). Developers of social software can learn a lot from blogging about how online communities can respond very quickly and not always rationally. These kinds of responses can affect your bottom line, so it can matter to you.

The latest blogging story revolves around O'Reilly/CMP and CMP's cease and desist (C&D) letter to a company called IT@Cork about the use of the "Web 2.0" trademark for events. To make matters worse the head of O'Reilly, Tim O'Reilly, was on vacation while this issue blew up in the blogosphere. It happens: people vacation in May (just ask France).

If you really want to catch up, here's the original blog post by IT@Cork, a blog post by O'Reilly while Tim was away and Tim's blog post when he finally caught up to the situation. I'm personally satisfied with Tim's response but that's hardly the point of this blog post.

If you want my opinion on the whole mess, it's more of an indirect commentary on the broken intellectual property (IP) system the software industry (and modern business) has to deal with AND a commentary on the meaning of the term "Web 2.0" in the first place.

IANAL so I'm not going to comment more on the former except to say that the software industry is clearly stepping into areas that current IP laws and processes were never meant to deal with and some careful thought and reform is necessary. There are great lawyers doing work in this area including the University of Ottawa's Michael Geist. Given the current state of trademark law, I have no problem with CMP's due diligence with respect to their marks.

As for the latter, I think I'll leave my minor frustrations with the term "Web 2.0" to another blog post. There are a variety of reasons why I do and don't like the term but none of those reasons affect the quote-unquote Web 2.0 work I do every single day. It's the kind of thing almost not worth blogging about -- but I feel someday I'll have to just get it over with.

But I digress, the real news was the blogosphere's premature and mostly negative reaction to the whole unfortunate incident. Bloggers didn't even bother to wait until Tim O'Reilly got back from vacation (even though early on it was obvious he was incommunicado) to respond to the situation, the bloggers just piled on.

While we could deal out a hefty bit of criticism to each blogger involved, why bother? The main lesson I learned here is that each blog has an individual level of credibility, which is built up by the author(s). Blog readers (and subsequent bloggers) need to take into account the sources, the real facts and everything else.

I don't have much of a problem with bloggers saying anything they please within the law so long as I don't have to read the crap. Bloggers should be free to blow their credibility if they never want to be taken seriously or read by serious people. Lots of blogs are opinionated, biased and informal. That's great. I'm probably one of the few people who think that those kinds of blogs actually add something to the blogosphere. That something is simple freedom.

Given that traditional mainstream media (MSM) has such relative high quality compared to the average blog, this is something blog readers (and companies with employees that write blogs) are going to have to get used to. We can't just take things we read on a blog at face value, we need to think while we read. Just like you have to think (and check sources) when you read Wikipedia because anyone can post anything they like and you could read it before it's fixed.

The collective Internet isn't always telling the objective truth to you. Watch out. I didn't cite many sources in this post, should you believe me? Probably not.