Want to see a dead blog?

Blogs may fade away. Blogs may go the cardiac-arrest way: sudden. This was one of the leading blogs in South Florida, and it went suddenly in a fight over anonymous blogging. I’ve got to wonder what this country is coming to if anonymous blogging is a big problem, but there you are. And I blog with my full real name, with hardly a thought about it.

Bye bye to Stuck on the Palmetto. Take a look at the valedictory post, titled “The Off Ramp,” click on the snowy vista and hear a little Western guitar embellish the mood. A passed-away blog.

Wednesday’s Miami Herald stunned me with the news back in the Metro section, p. 3B. The link.

“Online fight ends blog” was the headline. Reason given:

“Its author worried he’d be outed by a fellow blogger who knows his full name and job.”

The two who posted on Stuck on the Palmetto were Rick and Alex, no last names, and otherwise not much identified. As it happened, I had met Alex a few times as I was getting into blogging for the Miami-Dade Democratic Party early this year, so I called him and commiserated a little and confirmed that the Herald’s view was correct, at least as to Rick: Its author feared he’d be outed. Alex was not so worried and was more public, but he remained anonymous, too, since it would look odd if one of the two authors had a name and the other went unnamed.

Now let’s go to the side that may have been willing to out the Stuck bloggers. The Miami Herald says it’s a journalist from the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, Bob Norman, who writes a blog called The Daily Pulp for that weekly paper.

There are some posts there to explain: a bare paragraph in yesterday’s roundup (no link found to the individual item, so scroll down to the headline "Palmetto Shutdown"), and a longer post last Wednesday Dec. 12. Seems to suspect that Rick was a cop and that one could wonder how he did his job and had time to blog prolifically. Here’s that link.

Bloggers must worry what will happen when “people” get after them. As someone told me today, a blogger who works for a newspaper has a company for defense, while independent bloggers, like Rick and Alex, could get sued and have to pony up a lot for defense. Could be enough to make a blogger feel the pressure and take cover.

I would usually read Stuck on the Palmetto a few times a week, but unfortunately I missed the final battle entirely and am left wondering what is in the detail of the posts.

Note: For those not familiar with Miami’s geography, the blog’s title is a reference to the Palmetto Expressway, a beltway that veers straight west from I-95 north of Miami and then after a few miles turns south and eventually provides connection to the Turnpike and on to US 1 and Key West. Being stuck on it is a regular feature of a commuter’s day. Time to think and fume.