There’s a small piece worth larger consideration on Salon, co-written by a SMITH contributing editor Alex “The Kid” Koppelman and Rebecca “I heart hate mail” Traister, about a couple of bloggers who were just fired by the Edwards campaign. It seems that
Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, felt the wrath of right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective own blogs. According to Salon:

A statement by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign. This isn’t the first Internet-related misstep for the Edwards campaign, which had been making an effort to reach out to the netroots but has found its popularity dropping in a straw poll done on the landmark liberal blog Daily Kos.

When everything is public, and so often personal, it seems inevitable that your words will come back and haunt you (somehow) if you’re around long enough. And if you’re a blogger who doesn’t have much in your archive that’s got spunk and spirit and a touch of controversy, who, really, is going to keep reading you? Says Koppelman: “I was talking to one prominent blogger today who believes that in the Facebook generation, 80 percent of people will be unemployable if you judge them based on what they’ve got online.”

Speaking of Facebook, the site’s charging a buck for little virtual gifts you can award to your friends. TechCrunch predicts it’ll be a huge moneymaker. I say social networking is going to the dogs.

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