Les Blogs: Me + Mena
(Health Warning: this is a rant) — Mena Trott (co-founder and president of Six Apart) gave, in my opinion, a badly toned and way-off-base speech at the Les Blogs conference in which she requested for more civility in the blogosphere.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mena Trott used the Les Blogs stage to ask for a more civil blogosphere — a notable request from the co-founder of Six Apart, whose hosted TypePad service had spent weeks running below expected performance levels just over a month earlier, leaving paying customers vocal and unsatisfied.
Her appeal lands in a blogosphere already testing its own limits of criticism: only days before, the GourmetStation affair became a textbook case study in damage control when a brand misread how bloggers police marketing, so 'civility' reads to some as a plea from the vendor side to soften exactly that kind of scrutiny. Ben Metcalfe's sharp rebuttal — calling the speech badly toned and way-off-base — is the reaction crystallizing into a public argument between platform executives and the critic class their products serve.
First-order effects
- Trott's civility call immediately puts Six Apart's own standing on trial: with TypePad's recent reliability complaints still fresh, any executive asking bloggers to soften their tone hands critics an easy counterargument about whose behavior actually needs correcting.
- Metcalfe's public dressing-down forces the Les Blogs organizers and attendees into the argument itself, turning a keynote into a referendum on whether the conference exists for industry consensus or open criticism.
Second-order effects
- Other blogging-platform vendors watch how Six Apart absorbs the backlash, since their own customer relationships run through the same comment-and-criticism channels — mishandling this sets the template every vendor must respond to.
- Conference circuit speakers gain a live example that audiences will push back publicly on stage, raising the perceived risk of moral appeals from corporate principals and pushing event formats toward more adversarial panel structures.
Third-order effects
- The exchange is an early articulation of the split that will define blogosphere governance: whether the medium's norm is polite communal conversation or unvarnished accountability aimed at companies — and which side platform owners get to set when they also host the conversation.
- If the pattern holds, vendor participation in blogging events becomes conditional on tolerating criticism they cannot moderate, structurally separating the industry's commercial voice from the independent blogs that review it.
The trend: The blogosphere is moving from a shared communal ethos toward contested speech norms, with platform companies discovering they host the very criticism culture their executives would prefer to temper.