A big issue in the blogosphere lately, or at least big-media coverage of it, has been behavior. What's appropriate in online discourse? Who decides? Who enforces?

It's looking more and more likely that we've been in a real-estate bubble - and that things are going to get mighty ugly as it deflates.

As a frequent traveler, I've come to appreciate something that United Airlines, alone in the airline industry, offers its passengers. It is a small, but valuable bit of transparency.

Two respected organizations, one, a publicly traded corporation, and the other, a famous nonprofit, recently faced some ugly issues. That they are both still widely respected is testament to their responses when their integrity was on the line.

The university where I'm co-teaching a course this semester is one of several in the nation currently engaged in a ritual that comes around to all such institutions from time to time: finding and hiring a new journalism dean. These searches will, I hope, engender some even broader discussions.

Did free speech dodge a bullet in January?

An honorable tradition among lawyers is representing defendants whom they strongly suspect to be guilty, especially people with little or no ability to pay for their defense.

Several weeks ago, UCLA acknowledged that some of its computers had been hacked. Obeying a state law, it notified more than 800,000 people that their personal data, including Social Security numbers, might have ended up in the wrong hands.

As I write this, scores of employees at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, are sitting by their phones at home. They're waiting to learn, as pre-announced layoffs loom, whether they still have jobs.

The VNR mini-scandal took a sadly predictable turn earlier this month.