Kinsella's Game of Blog

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada E-Group

Like it or not, Warren Kinsella won his recent spat with the Canadian blogosphere. Now, if you're reading this and you're a blogger, read through to the end before you become completely apoplectic. The simple fact is, Kinsella won, although he took some enormous risks and could have made some serious errors in strategy. In the end, however, we're all still talking about him and that constitutes a win in the media -- even in the blogosphere -- by any spinner's standards, and he knows it. Even this article scores points for him.

Think about what happened, for a minute. Kinsella allegedly threatened to sue bloggers over the kind of statements that Kinsella writes on his blog on a regular basis. The man's not stupid, and he could have used his own blog to battle back quite handily, especially given that he doesn't allow commenters, who might counterspin his effect. Kinsella's world is constructed very carefully, I think.

Kinsella reacted to the kind of blogger comment that insults but does not overtly accuse. The question regarding his parents, for example, amounted to a kind of "yo mamma" statement that anyone with any savvy in current affairs would have seen right through. Instead, Kinsella used that opportunity, as well as others, to provoke the blogosphere. He laid down the gautlet in a way that directly focused scrutiny at his blogsite and kept his name spinning at center ice for days beyond the life of a normal blog-yarn. The thread went on and on. Then, just as discussion was waning and becoming somewhat ridiculous, he gave the blogosphere another proverbial poke, claiming self-righteous victory over his detractors in a way that he must have known would inflame them all over again.

The second poke scored Kinsella an even greater victory than the first because he succeeded not only in keeping his brand front and center; he also appears to have leaked a story to the blogosphere that he perhaps tried to leak earlier but that, ultimately, wasn't picked up very well. In order to show his more seemingly machiavellian side, bloggers jumped on a post that showed Kinsella at his simultaneous worst and best, as a Gritty spin-doctor, political strategist, par excellence.

You've gotta hand it to Kinsella, really. He's not a very good blogger, in my opinion. He hasn't really mastered the etiquette of blogdom, and his blog reads like a jar full of random buttons -- you have to pick through to find consistency and value. In fact, if you really want to understand his blog, you have to read it nearly daily, because trying to find any one topic later on is nearly impossible, due to what I would describe as a strategic lack of permalinks to his posts. To do this article, I had to slog through every month of his archives. After about five months, honestly, I could hardly endure it.

In terms of blogging etiquette, he prints entire news stories like he's the gateway to the subscription-less masses. Does he reprint entire blog posts from other bloggers' sites? I hope not *shudder* but I've heard an unsubstantiated rumor that he has done that, instead of excerpting and linking. He links to news stories without describing the links or giving them a meaningful link-word, rendering many of his posts useless once the original sources move the stories to archives or delete them altogether. Plus, he's kind of vengeful, it seems: he'll post private e-mails sent to him without having a warning on his site that he'll do this, at least not one I could find. He'll even stoop to the most heinous of all blogger acts: publishing a person's private e-mail address on line, while inciting people to send their opinions to the person about some, usually derided, opinion they e-mailed to him or published.

Yes, Kinsella really is the self-admitted irritating smart-aleck who says "I told you so" a lot and claims to value readers' opinions but never allows public feedback on his blog. He name drops, a lot -- whom he knows, gets to interview, met on the street, and whether the PMO is reading his blog. He'll even name drop whom family members have met. It's all shameless self-aggrandizing, if you ask my opinion. He can be downright churlish.

The thing of it, though, is that Kinsella really does know a lot of people, and he's fully networked into the Canadian political scene. Yes, he claims he's a Liberal in exile, but everyone knows that it's just political hibernation, and, trust me, when political spin-doctors hibernate, they don't sleep very much. In all likelihood, that's probably one reason he started his blog: can't let the brand name disappear, and I don't mean the Liberal brand. I mean the Kinsella brand.

His blog is a mix of the political and the personal. It gets smarmy sometimes and shows off a boyish, endearing side that cleverly contradicts the cut-throat political know-how that lurks just under the surface. This man's a thinker, no doubt. So you have to ask yourself, if you're a blogger, why Kinsella would freak out at a insult to himself or his parents or any other accusation, especially given the horrific ones he dishes out himself.

I think a one-word answer will suffice: strategy.

Last April, Kinsella posted a power-point file, which he used during a presentation at a media relations summit in Toronto. He had posted some of the material on his blog the previous February, in the form of Kinsella's Four New Rules of Media Management™. In a nutshell, he has a party leader/protect the boss rule, a crisis mangement rule, a 'don't do stupid things' rule, and a public servants rule, later adding a 'be nice' rule, plus a bunch of suggestions regarding being credible, counterpunching instead of hugging the hangman, landing your punch hard on the first swing, managing dialogue and communications, as well as sticking to your story. The man knows what he's talking about.

The question is whether (1) he followed his own rules in launching an attack on the blogosphere and (2) whether his rules play out in the blogosphere like they do in the mainstream media. I think he did a pretty good job, by his own rules, but the spin won't play out in the long run like he might have expected. He counterpunched -- hard -- and didn't foment the crisis at its peak. He managed his own communications on his blog well and stuck to his story. A couple of the rules don't apply well to the blogcidents in question, such as protecting your leader, and he used the 'be nice' rule very creatively. Just when the blogosphere was in a rabid froth over his actions, he relented and made a gentleblogger's gesture in the interests of peace.

However, perhaps just to show how easily the blogosphere can be provoked, he violated his own 'be nice' rule nearly immediately, posting a kind of "nya, nya, I won" post, which only served to stir up blogger indignance yet again. You'd think he was doing this as a political experiment to demonstrate just how to manipulate the blogosphere come election time. Very clever, but not clever enough.

Like I said earlier, his rules won't play out in the long run in the blogosphere principally because bloggers have something that the mainstream media and the Canadian public, in general, don't seem to have: long memories. Long, long memories. And archives. And more transparency than exists in any senior bureaucrat's worst nightmare. Seeded spins can backfire easily, and networks of information can be confirmed or disconfirmed nationally, even internationally, in less time that it takes to say Wiz Bang Blog. For example, Kinsella's alleged seeded spin about Gomery's family connection to the sponsorship inquiry raised the kind of ire that could result in official complaints outside blogdom, in the real world of Canuckistan, as Kinsella affectionately calls it.

Although some bloggers claim that they can, quite effectively, silence another blogger by delinking and refusing to comment on that blogger's posts, it's never quite that simple. Organizational chaos in the blogosphere rivals the order Mad Max's world, so these kinds of situations can change rapidly. In Kinsella's own words from his January 19, 2004 post, "Today's heroes are easily transformed into tomorrow's zeroes" and vice versa, I'll add, when it comes to blogdom. In that respect, the blogosphere is just as fickle as the mainstream media, and it can be manipulated.

Sure, blogger alliances of sorts exist, but they're fluid. Besides, if someone in blogdom keeps poking at you, it's pretty hard to ignore them, even if you have successfully refuted and delinked them. You can ignore them and get put down/smeared without defence, or you can reply and put even more focus on them. It's the blogger's catch-22. On top of that, small bloggers, if they work their links and stories right, can be as effective as large bloggers on the occasional post, especially if they succeed in getting Insta-lanched or Slashdotted, and, for Kinsella, it's all about telling the right story, making it real.

I get the impression that Kinsella's using self-generated blogcidents to see just where the pay-off is in manipulating blogdom. Sure, in the long run, he's likely burned a few blogger bridges, for now, but everyone knows in politics that it's not the long run that really matters. It's the moment-by-moment grind, the next scrum, the insightful new blogpost that really makes the difference.

Does long memory win out over moment-to-moment alliances? I'll say no, not unless somebody breaches some basic tenet of humanity, and that is what makes the blogosphere so political, not unlike Ottawa, itself. Sure we have archives and long memories, but we also have shifting alliances and grand chaos which can change on moment's notice, and what, my bloggy friends, could be more appealing to a grandmaster spin-doctor than that?