The free-wheeling world of blogging appears to be too much for the Washington Post. After getting all "tech-no-logical" with their constellation of blogs, it only took one serious flaming of Deborah Howell for the Post to cave like the stone age media behemoth it is.

"At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue about this site, the events of the day, the journalism of The Washington Post Company and other related issues. Among the things that we knew would be part of that discussion would be the news and opinion coming from the pages of The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com. We knew a lot of that discussion would be critical in nature. And we were fine with that. Great journalism companies need feedback from readers to stay sharp," WP.com editor Jim Brady wrote yesterday.

"But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being."

Wusses.

> Brady didn't miss a beat, emailing: "You guys do a nice job with your blog, but your post this morning was pretty ironic. Am I just missing something ot does DC Fishbowl not allow comments on any of its posts? Instead of criticizing us for not allowing comments on one of our 30 blogs, maybe you could explain to your readers why you don't allow ANY comments on posts. Would seem all the more important since criticism of others is pretty central to your site."