"Blog fights are stupid, airing personal grievances in public is stupid, picking troll wars is stupid," wrote Boing Boinger Xeni Jardin today, in that site's explanation of removing its posts about a sex blogger (and California court trademark litigant). But are they? Aren't they actually awesome?

In 1999, wrote Rebecca Blood, something happened: "Cults of personality sprung up as new blogs appeared." More blogs were being born as diaries, instead of link-oriented lists. And that's when the stupid troll wars began.

Not long after, Dan Hartung started a feud with the anti-change crowd:

For blog critics, writing from your point of view is considered egotism. I even saw someone quit weblogging because he felt there was something wrong with writing statements that were not immediately challenged, an interesting social phenomenon born perhaps of chat rooms and newsgroups.

I see these potshots and I'm flabbergasted. We're to bury ourselves? We're to wait until we have something Important(tm) to say before speaking? Until our design is an award-winner?

I say, Go to hell. I mean it.

So yes, that happened. And what no one remembers from this era also is the proliferation of web-based reality shows. There was Puppetmaster, Survivorblog, and much, much worse. The entire point of these games was feuding. All of the details escape me now as this was basically the 1940s.

Some notable feuding since:

• 2001 and 2002: With the emergence of "the warbloggers" post-9/11, as they were called, everyone feuded with everyone. Seriously. Everyone! (N.B. that account includes some serious misreading.) It was sheer chaos, a mass freakout that distended psychoanalytic space and time. There were even Denial of Service attacks. Dave Winer, the feudiest of all internetters, took on the world, briefly.

• 2003: Everyone feuded with RSS-pusher Dave Winer. Dave Winer feuded with everyone. Someone somewhere hated on Salon.

Redhead aficionado Joe Clark started and/or finished a million feuds.

This and every year to follow: what was the first weblog? Fight, fight, fight!

• 2004: Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin and blog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis go apeshit on each other. Previously, the Silicon Alley internet feud system basically looked like this handy diagram. In the latest case of Calacanis v. ____, Jake apologized, for some reason, after a transcript of their IM session became public, in which Calacanis asked "how dare you say shit about my mother" and "you are fucking asshole piece of shit." Wrote a commenter: "This is like two kids in prep school having an editor's war in their own self-published student newsletters."

Nick Denton, Maer Roshan, a pie.

Jonah Goldberg et al versus Andrew Sullivan. Apparently Sullivan did not make clear his reservations about George Bush on his blog before writing about them in The Advocate! And then Jonah promptly retracted it, because in fact Sullivan had already blogged about his "feelings." Still, conservative bloggers freaked out.

• 2006: Lee Siegel utilized sockpuppetry in his feud with the evils of blog commenters.

Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the LA Times, was canned from his blog and suspended after leaving anonymous comments on the blog of a Los Angeles assistant district attorney; the two were feuding over something or other.

David Sirota and Dan Gerstein, two Democratic operatives, went head to head and then took their enmity into the feud that was the Lieberman-Lamont race, which was a headlong descent into the gutter for everyone involved.

• 2007: Jason Calacanis phoned in his third or eighth blog feud, this time with likely suspect Dave Winer. Winer, amazingly, semi-apologized.

Mickey Kaus v. Ezra Klein zzzzzz....

The strange case of Andrew Wright versus Andrew Wright: a comedian and a painter of the same name squabbled it out over domain names.

Cathy Seipp takes on Nikki Finke: "I haven't seen Nikki in years, probably because these days she looks like Jabba the Hut, if you can imagine Jabba after he's said to hell with the diets already."

Why don't web conferences represent women? (See also: every year previously.)

In a slightly more harrowing conflict, Eric Alterman and Ana Marie Cox went head-to-head over why Time magazine can't have a liberal columnist.

• 2008: Keith Gessen posted some pictures of puppies.