Forbes recently had a piece about how blog mobs attack brands -- and people -- and actually do a great deal of harm using only gossip and innuendo, which many readers who happen upon the posts take as gospel.

This echoed my letter in Salon responding to Almond's piece: there are naive readers/web surfers out there whose opinions can be tainted by litbloggers who try to pass themselves off as authoritative, when, in fact they are no more qualified to judge a work than anyone else.

Almond knew what he was doing with the article. Not to lean too heavily on the Forbes piece, but one of the tricks of those who want to wreck a reputation of a brand or pundit is to barrage their target with negativity posts on blogs and sites (fact based or totally questionable) until search engines will have overwhelmingly negative results for the subject. Sarvas was existing in a bubble of yes-bloggers (like corporate yes-men) who never took him to task for his over the top and nearly irrational critiques of writers. So in my opinion he may have deserved what he got from Almond. But Almond was acting alone, so there was no conspiracy to ruin Sarvas' rep.

But as one whose writing was trashed by the litblogger, who later, in an email to me implied he was at least twice the writer I was -- although the only real credit I could find in the non-academic world for him was an appearance in Pindeldyboz, which I have also appeared in -- I was quite pleased with Almond's take-down. And I was actually impressed with the level of his reserve, his verbal sexual slapstick notwithstanding.