I’ve invested my daily word count off-site, lately, into a productive e-mail exchange with Clay Burell, one which spread itself across issues of civil online discourse and the significance of membership in an online community where the only membership requirement is diligent self-regulationOne which stands in direct opposition to the pointlessness of our online exchange, both my original jab and his rejoinder, which was so far over the top it wasn’t difficult to dismiss..

To make a long summary short, I intend to step my diligence up.

To keep that short summary long, my liability here in this community is that I am extremely disinterested in your emotional attachment to your own ideas. I am very interested in the merits and demerits of your ideas but I find it very easy – too easy, I realize – to consider them apart from the fact that you have built a career or a family around them.

This attitude has made for a very focused first year of blogging but it has also earned me a table setting as the edublogosphere’s enfant terrible, a reputation for being confrontational and abrasive, one which I am uninterested in perpetuating.

So I raise a glass here to the inseparable bond between emotion and ideas and apologize sincerely for having tried to address one without respect to the other, repeatedly, over a year, with a lot of people. Membership in this esteemed crowd demands greater understanding than that.

This whole Diigo thing cracked me up, everyone claiming they’d been pushing it for years, like me and my friends claim lifelong allegiance to bands the second they get signed. It seemed funny enough for remark but, wow, did I ever miss the mark with that one.

It’s tough to tell if Clay is genuinely wounded or, rather, really really really happy for the opportunity to thwack me with his 9-iron but, regardless, my editorials aren’t worth anything to me if they bother hard-working bloggers that much and blotch up the edublogosphere.

My fault, Clay.

Updated:

I have no idea how seriously to take Clay Burell’s umbrage now that he’s deleted his poison pen letter [cached]. Apparently, with his full-bodied rant, he was just trying to teach us all that bullying is bad. Astonishing.