Blog beef

I’ll get to the blog-part, don’t worry – but first, let me tell you the story about why I like good, eloquent arguments:

I love hip hop music – always have, always will… at the core of hip hop, there is the rap battle – combatants get it on, doing the best to put each other down, while never forgetting the form. The one with the best flow, punchline, rhyme and the one who does the best at involving the audience wins the battle…

From battles spring beefs. Recording artists take turns dissing each other on their albums (I’m really too old to use the word ‘dissing’, but anyway) and on stage. To name one example, I recently saw The Game at Vega in Copenhagen, and he had quite a few nasty things to say about Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent and the rest of G-unit.

But what does all this have to do with blogs, you may rightfully wonder.

Well, not unlike the battles and beefs of the hip hop world, the blogosphere often acts as a battlefield for opinionated wordsmiths, who engage in more or less friendly disputes.

Many of the same rules seem to apply:

• Can you argue eloquently and engage the ‘audience’?
• Can you even do it with a sense of humor?
• And who decides the winner? The audience of course.

Wired points to the very best of 2006′s beefs in Best Blogfights of 2006 highly entertaining stuff.