Expelled for blogging

Christian Crumlish

Metafilter is all over the "blogger expelled from school" story. Quoting Danelope:

This is all due to every paranoid school administrator's fear that their school will be the next Columbine. Harris and Klebold had a Web site where they posted their hate-filled screeds against, well, just about everything, and as a result, any site the administrators discover is scoured for clues into what they see as a potential-future-mass-murderer's twisted mind.

From his weblog: Remember that entry the other day when I said "UPDATE: fjdsfjdslkfjklsdjf" (a bunch of letters)? Well, one of the people at the school thinks it's "secret code"...what in the hell? hahahahaha.

I can't argue with the school's position that the kid shouldn't be blogging from class — even though everyone in every school, including the teachers and admins, uses school machines for non-school-related activities — but their threats of expulsion are wholly indefensible (and, if the rest of his story is true, little more than intimidation tactics.)

The student's blog appears to be down today.

Looks like I'm trickling memes down and not up today.

At some point I need to think and write about linking to higher-profile sites. On the one hand, what's the point? Does anyone ever need to point to Mefi, Dave Mark, RCB, etc.?

On the other hand, it seems weird to avoid linking to popular sites and you can still assume that you may have readers who don't read all the most popular blogs and news sites, or you can take a completist attitude toward the material, trying to make your own archive as useful as possible.

As with most such things, I probably wiggle through the middle between extremes. I feel less compelled to link to a popular site unless the source material is a strong fit for the purpose of this blog. Then when I do I want to give via credit.

Lastly, it's a two-way web and there's something to be said to sending traffic to anyone (and showing up in their referrer logs), regardless of whether it's just more "rain on the ocean" (quotation courtesy of new father Scot Hacker—congratulations, Scot!—from a slightly different context).

These same issues apply to blogrolling, only moreso.