Nick of The Rat Sass is never shy of taking his fellow bloggers to task, and he calls more than a few to the mat in his latest post.

There has been an awful lot of meta-mastication on the state of blogging and its place in the theatre of late, and Nick addresses a number of these questions, including, but not limited to:

Is a blog-post about a preview a review?
Do bloggers apply their rage even-handedly, or choose their targets specifically?
How are bloggers and critics different?
What happens when a critic becomes a blogger and vice versa?
If a producer gives you a "blogger comp" are you required to write about the show?
Are you expected to be kind?
Are you being exploited?
Why are there more bloggers reviewing reviews than bloggers reviewing shows?
Can the farmer and the cowboy ever be friends?

Here's a choice paragraph:

The blogosphere throws these two different styles of discourse into the same Ultimate Fighting PR amphitheater. Where the writer (reviewer) has a developed proficiency at broadcasting an opinion or argument, the talker (word-of-mouth representative) is proficient at commenting and finding holes in the argument. The blogger has developed a whole genre of writing out of this "letter to the editor" or contra-review mode of theatre talk. There are more reviews of reviews than actual reviews of productions in blogs.