There’s a lot of advice for email users about not hitting send when you’re angry.

Maybe Jason blamed you for the “mob effect” and by the appearance that you supported humiliating him.

What you have done in response shares a similar pattern. He hurt your feelings and you sensed a mob response based upon a negative image you’ve labored for years to put to rest. Sisyphus and that damned rock come to mind.

Forgive: Jason over reacted. He is the same man he was before the blog post. Same flaws… same strengths… Don’t carry this negative energy for 10 years. You’ll rub up against Jason forever and make you’re mutual friends tense for no good reason other than an old injury that should heal with some personal soul searching.

Forget: Like bad software… a memory leak can make normal operations of a program unreliable.

Forgive and forget… That’s the benefit of an apology. Re-set the relationship by caring enough to see Jason’s sensitivity in this situation.

Do you remember your start-ups? Would you have sold the ideas and benefits as hard as Jason did? Of course. Cut a friend some slack. He needs all the friends he can get right now. A campaign of “I will never trust the guy again” is pointless.

He’s terrified of failure. And the odds are not good.

It’s not the day I’d like to replay, I already apologized for interrupting Jason, wish I hadn’t done it. Nothing else to be done.

And while I didn’t like the headline, correct, there were many other things in that post that were over the line, and the whole idea that I was somehow responsible for his troubled talk. Anyone who was there in the room listening heard other people talking out loud at him, and in the chat and on Twitter. He singled me out, but very quickly was informed that it was not only me, but glided right by that. He decided to use me, and that’s what he did. In lots of places in lots of ways.

That’s what I object to, and I would object as strenuously if he did it to someone else. Mob gangups are one of the worst features of blogs, and people who lead mobs are especially bad. Even if Jason retracts, there’s no way I will ever trust the guy again. Been too badly burnt here.

But is WAS a non-moment in that sense. But Jason did react and wrote about Dave’s comment on his blog. Then Dave reacted because of the verb “Winered” and how had he has labored to overcome that label at conferences.

So, Dave opened up on Jason and we’re off to the races… with charge and counter charge and two “friends” who now won’t respect each other.

Very sad because they are both good people who tend to see criticism as being highly personal. How many of us haven’t had such experiences in life. It’s just sad when such grievances become fodder for public discussion but there IS a lesson for us all in this pattern.

Cut any presenter a little slack. If you embarass them during their speech they may not like it and may retaliate.

I’ll bet both parties wish they could re-play the day. But they can’t. Can they forgive and forget? Time will tell. The internet never forgets. It documents poor judgement. And sometimes it takes sides. There are no sides in such a dispute… only more damage to be leveled.