Lance Arthur just insulted me. And he was nasty, too. He described Metafilter as, among other things, the follwing:

It's a police state of myopic, loud-mouthed idiots proclaiming themselves the cultural police while the rest of us sit back and laugh at them.

I like Metafilter more than the bulk of personal weblogs. It isn't perfect, and sometimes the discussions are vacuous or unpleasant, like the McVeigh thread yesterday. But what I learn from the site, and the entertainment I receive from it, makes up for this.

I don't think of Metafilter as an "online community." In fact, I believe that term to be an oxymoron. Metafilter is a discussion forum that people choose to visit and to contribute to. Like a lot of online situations, Metafilter allows people to do things socially that they would most likely not do in real life, and that includes yelling, baiting, and insulting. That shouldn't surprise anyone.

On the other hand, it seems easy to find webloggers who are insufferable, almost overbearing, egoists. They write like newspaper columnists, intent on kicking up shit and gaining notoriety, and believe traffic to their site means something.

Most of their sites are not interesting or useful. Among the better known, I probably check out Camworld weekly because he and I are both concerned about Web content management issues. I liked Lemon Yellow for different reasons. There are others sites I like -- Magnificent Melting Object, mikel.org, and Rebecca's pocket -- but don't visit very often. That's about it.

A few weblogs, especially among the so-called "a-list," are rather crass attempts at creating a brand of the personal. On top of being overwritten and over-designed, one gets the sense that the online identity is much more important to the author that what they do in the real world.