THE UNKINDEST CUT, BLOG VERSION: Writers curious about what bloggers say about their work now can search the web’s 80 kabillion (or so) blogs through sites such as Technorati, IceRocket, and Feedster. The comments may please you -- or make you want to jump off a building. In a Dec. 18 New York Times article, Amy Tan talked about a friend sending her a web link that led to an anti-Tan web site. One comment read, “Amy Tan must die.” She e-mailed her friends and told them not to send any more links to sites that critique her work. “You might hear some good things about yourself, but you may also hear something devastating," said told Times reporter Pamela Paul. David Marcus, author of What it Takes to Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out, discovered a blog insinuating he had been paid off by one of the schools he profiled. "My gut was to dash out a denial, but then I checked myself," he recalled. "I realized that all a response would do is spread this untruth from one electronic forum to another and give substance to the accusation." Some authors' interactions with bloggers prove fruitful. Cass Sunstein read a discussion of one of his articles about conservative judicial radicalism on The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog organized by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, in which Sunstein was invited to respond. "We had an interesting exchange and there were a lot of comments," said Sunstein, a law prof at University of Chicago. The discussion caused him to make changes to his book Radicals in Robes. "There's no question that Radicals in Robes was affected by a kind of pre-publication review on a blog," he said. Inspired by these experiences, I searched Technorati for “wyolitmail.” I found seven hits from the last four months, none of which seemed related. I searched for WYO Poet Laureate David Romtvedt’s name and found a half-dozen listings, all but one from wyolitmail. While it feels good to have your blog noticed, I’m not clear on what gets listed and what doesn’t. Any thoughts from wyolitmailers?

- posted by Michael Shay @ 4:00 PM