I’m not sure sending the Hamptons’ 12-year-olds off to Helmand and Basra would be quite the right approach.

It’s all very well saying “wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get along,” but honestly, is it ever likely to happen?! We’re all as bad as each other, the ‘good people’ and the ‘bad’.

Many ‘kids’ don’t have respect and discipline like they used to - perhaps enforced national service should be brought back?!

How did you get from the fact that sometimes some people misbehave themselves to the conclusion that no-one can be trusted?

We tried the “lets all live in harmony” bit, and it didn’t work. Now we need to clean up Britain with some overdue discipline!

At the same time, I rub elbows with archivists, one of whose primary principles is preserving the integrity of a collection: that is, you don’t redact individual photos or documents merely because you find them offensive or irrelevant; rather, you house collections relevant to your institution and let them speak for themselves.

Come to think of it, the rest of librarianship shares the principle of resource integrity. We will usually not exclude one volume of a set because it seems less valuable or relevant than the other volumes. Nor do we provide our patrons with multiple options to take the content of a book out of its context. Surely, they are at liberty to photocopy or scan portions, but that happens only once they have the whole book in their hands and it’s out of our control. We recognize that authors (including publishers) have intent in presenting their materials in the way they do. They seek a certain experience for their readers.

I also seek an experience for my readers. Perhaps it is not the most graphically exciting experience; perhaps the links to further resources are not the best to be found on the Internet; perhaps the comments left by other readers are not the most insightful. But the layout and the content are selected all the same, and the comments are solicited — and they are all part of what I would like to share with my readers. Granted, some may be using a cell phone or a personal digital assistant incapable of rendering content as well as a graphical browser; that is one reason I’ve chosen WordPress, which publishes in XHTML readable by a number of non-graphical devices.

When you say, “It’s more important that your material gets read than it gets read in the way that you dictate”, I wonder if you employ a needless distinction between content and presentation. To some degree, the presentation is content, and anybody who strips it out by means of an aggregator is cheated of that content. (One of my archivist colleagues, who reads my blog, actually refuses to use a feed aggregator, exactly because it strips the text of its intended context.)

All that said… I’m really not dogmatic about the integrity of my blog — or anybody else’s; I use Bloglines myself — and could be persuaded in time.