So, Wasn't That Whole Jerid-Paul Ackerman Blow Up Last Week Fun?

Just like the golden days of the Ohio blogosphere, right? Har har har. Good times. Yeehaw. FIGHT. Yay for blog drama.

Well, believe it or not, but I'm not the biggest fan of the fights from yesteryear. I'd love for all this business to disappear quietly into the night, and go back to talking solely about Ohio politics. However, plenty has gone on behind the scenes since Friday. First, a little background.

BSB started as the BuckeyeSenateBlog, formed by Russell around the same time that I was blogging my congressional district OH-3, at livefromdayton.com under the moniker BlueCollarBaby. Aided by an insane chair's race and divisive senate primary battle, Russell's traffic took off through the roof and soon thereafter he was regularly hitting his bandwidth limit for his moveable type blog account. In response, the big man sought out a real hosting plan and decided to move to GoDaddy Webhosting on a community blog platform. I know all this because I used to speak with Russell regularly while the two of us were blogging.

Somewhere in that decision, Russell got involved with Paul Ackerman of linwood campaign services. Paul worked for many state house candidates and had recently put together a blog himself called ReclaimOhio on a drupal community platform. Well, someone or other didn't like the fact that the linwood boys were managing a blog platform and contracting their services out to statehouse candidates for webservices. So ReclaimOhio got nixed. However, Paul just having performed a drupal install himself, collaborated with Russell to install the software to run the Buckeye State Blog. During that install, Paul set himself up as the original administrator of BSB.

Flash forward some months later. Blog battleships are blasting other blogs in an all out BLOGWAR during the 2006 cycle. Why? Sometimes for turf, sometimes for an issue, sometimes because a drop down drag out fight on a blog is just as fun now as it was in middle school. I digress. Anyway, during this period several bloggers and Paul contemplated entering into a business agreement for a new consulting group, Pear Squared. However, due to reasons unbeknown to me, that fell through (I've heard it had to do with interpersonal issues concerning, well...). From then on, relations were strained between Paul and BSB, and things only got worse as the cycle went on. By the end of 2006 I believe that mutual contempt existed.

Back to December of 2006 when I inherited BSB with Russell's blessing. Little did I know that I was also inheriting the Ackerman baggage. To put it into perspective, it's sort of like the typical evil step mom scenario...I'm associated with the former administrator so I've got to be a prick in Paul's eyes too (and there were, of course, two rather heated email exchanges between myself and Paul which Bill Sloat now has access to too; but more on that in a minute). The big problem with all of this is that wayback when drupal was first installed, Paul set himself as an administrator with all access levels that come with that. Whether he still has that access to this day, I'm not sure (however, he did mess with the administration of the site last week when he reinstated his account after I removed it). Long story short, Paul may be able to cause some trouble with the administration and access at BSB (he may be able to shut the site down for all I know) until I'm able to fix that issue. Here's hoping he does not.

Last week folks saw the feelings that Paul holds bubble out, and now they have a little context (trust me, there's more). However, things did not end on Friday. Over the weekend I corresponded with Ryan, and I don't think we'll be airing our argument any longer. However, this afternoon I got an email from Paul with a very clear threat.

You *will* retract the charge that I was trying to shake you down.

An annoying disagreement went red in my eyes when you crossed the line and
accused me of extorting money from you, for that is what shaking down
means. I wasn’t going to stand for that and believe me I will not stand
for that. The concept is laughable as I approached you to actually spend
a client’s money on your site.

That comment from you, followed by your denial of my “word description” of
our email conversation from March is what led to my posting of the actual
emails. Failure to retract the charge will lead me to send the emails to
Bill Sloat of The Daily Bellwether with a statement to him concerning this
incident. I will not stand for by and watch you defame me in this
community.

The "shake down" remark? It was meant as an expression that Paul was riding my ass for information about site statistics (which he lost his privileges to during the bruhaha I described earlier in 2006). He interpreted it as an extortion. While I never meant to imply Paul was extorting me for money in our previous exchanges, he certainly has engaged in a little bit of extortion since then with his decision to tamper with the administration of BSB and his threat today to send emails to Bill Sloat.

In response I've sent those emails to Sloat myself, we'll see what he thinks is newsworthy (so be sure to check out the bellwhether). And sorry to air this stuff on the blog; however, since I'm concerned about the site's administration, and since Paul's now issuing threats, I figured it'd be worthwhile to put this stuff out there. Hopefully this will be the last of all this.