Blog off, you spiteful nerds.

Byline: Stuart Maconie

ALEXEI SAYLE once said that anyone who uses the word "workshop" who's not actually involved in light engineering was a... well, I won't use the actual word as it's a bit strong even for the most broad-minded among you.

I have similar feelings about the word "blogosphere". It means that funny little world inhabited by bloggers - someone who spends their life writing a "blog" or online diary containing their thoughts on celebrities, asylum-seekers, the NHS, the war in Iraq, Jordan, the lack of parking facilities in Penrith or anything else they happen to have a bee in their bonnet about. Sorry if I sound cynical. Yes, some bloggers like Stephen Fry have some interesting things to say that you might conceivably want to read.

But let's face it, most of the time blogger is a fancy name for a selfobsessed bore who can't get their stuff published any other way.

They read like green-ink rants to the local paper or the virginal diaries of a teenage boy. Except with added nastiness and pomposity. And the potential to be read by millions. And that's where the real problem starts, as a court case in the States this week reveals. A blogger called Rosemary Port created a charming little blog called Skanks in NYC. Basically false insults about a model called Liskula Cohen, a skank being a whore.

Rosemary thought Cohen had badmouthed her boyfriend and decided to get her own back by posting nasty, anonymous jibes about Cohen. Well, anonymous until the Supreme Court forced Google to reveal who the author of these malicious slurs was.

Now online privacy groups and Port herself are bleating about freedom of speech and their right to defame under cover of secrecy.

Port says blogs "serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting" and shouldn't be regarded as fact.

Well, tough. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to falsely shout fire in a crowded theatre. I'm a great believer in freedom of speech. It's one of the reasons men and women from this country have shed blood on foreign soil.

But freedom of speech doesn't mean a licence to spread vile untruths or settle scores or bring down those happier, more talented or prettier than themselves.

In other words, it's too precious to waste on a few weirdos playing silly bloggers.

They are rants by bores