There’s a fascinating dispute in the blogosphere right now that is worth talking about beyond the emotions of the personalities involved, because it touches on a substantive issue: What is the public record of the Web and of blogs?

Dave Winer writes Scripting News, has developed some key blogging software tools (including Radio Userland, which I use for this blog and which Salon Blogs uses), and is now a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. Scripting News is a widely read and influential blog — partly because Dave’s been at it a really long time, partly because he updates it a lot, but mostly, I think, because he is adept at letting the full span of his professional and personal worlds spill out into his blogging. Dave’s life really is an open book, and in demonstrating how to do that he has contributed enormously to all of our understanding of what we do here on the Web.

Dave and a number of other high-profile software developers have recently been engaged in a very public and (to outsiders) arcane dispute over the future of RSS, the protocol most blogs use to syndicate their content. I’m not going to weigh in on that issue, partly because I have neither the expertise nor the time to figure out exactly what I think but mostly because I don’t wish to add to the noise.

Meanwhile, however — whether as a result of that dispute or for other reasons, I don’t know — Mark Pilgrim, who has a highly regarded site that focuses on Web design issues, has begun a site called “Winer Watcher,” subtitled, “What did Dave edit today?” He’s written a script that grabs Scripting News every five minutes, and he’s posting the revisions that Dave makes to his blogs, so that you can see successive versions of Dave’s posts. Dave has asked Mark to stop, and as far as I can see, as I write this, Mark has refused.

The whole thing is now turning to the question of whether Mark is using too much of Dave’s bandwidth, and whether Mark’s republishing of Dave’s writing is fair use or not, but neither of these questions is what interests me here.

To me, this disagreement highlights one of the continuing, unresolved questions about Web publishing. We know that a Web page is simply a file on a server, and that files are totally mutable. The only thing that keeps something “published” on the Web once it is first published is the publisher’s continued choice to leave the file, unchanged, on his server. Some people view their sites as the bits-and-pixels equivalent to paper publishing, and try to keep as fixed a record as they can of how pages looked and read at the moment they were first published (at Salon we maintain an archive server that allows you to find the original, often creative designs of our earlier issues). Other people view their sites as the Webly equivalent of live improv — the site is an everchanging thing; you can’t step in the same river twice (yes Google has a cache, but it expires; and yes, there’s the Internet Archive, but it doesn’t scrape any site every five minutes!).

As a journalistic enterprise, at Salon we’ve always understood that there is a temptation to futz with what you’ve published, particularly to cover your tracks if you’ve goofed. We’ve tried to resist this temptation; if we make a tiny error that does not bear on the substance of an article (misspell a word or a name) we will simply correct it; but if we fix a substantive error after a story has been published, we will post a correction notice, note that the story has been corrected on the story itself, and link the story to the correction notice.

But Salon is a newsroom: we edit everything we publish and we behave like a journalistic organization. A personal blog is another kind of beast. There is no editor. There is — at least as blogging is most widely practiced today — mostly opinion, not fact. Corrections are less of an issue.

As I understand the way Dave Winer blogs, he posts constantly through the day and revises quite a bit; by the end of the day he’s finished the product, it gets sent out to those who receive it by e-mail, and that’s that. So he’s exposing his editing process to his readers, by choice. I don’t begrudge him this method of working.

In traditional journalism, we produce a piece of writing, get it edited, assure ourselves that it’s ready to be published, and then we release it to the world. Part of what makes blogging different is that it’s more impulsive, less polished, less filtered. This is fundamentally a good thing. But as a result it’s only natural that some bloggers may feel a desire to keep re-editing their stuff even after it’s live.

In my blog, I prefer to post and then, if I need to fix something, fix it by posting a new item making reference to the old one, rather than by outright revisions. But my style of working has been shaped by 20 years in newsrooms. Dave has a different modus operandi; he’s open about it, and it seems to work for him.

I’m not sure why we’re supposed to be upset by the revisions that the “Winer Watcher” exposes. So what if Winer sometimes makes a statement that he later chooses to retract? This isn’t presidential diplomacy. Yes, blogs are creating a public record, but they are also highly personal records. And we’re each going to approach the recording process in our own way.

If a blogger made a practice of going back deep into his archives and messing around with old posts, I’d consider that a shame — not because he’d somehow betrayed his public but because he was in a sense betraying himself. But if Dave Winer wants to view each day’s Weblog posts as works-in-progress for the day, it seems like a reasonable practice, and one that doesn’t deserve to be pursued with an obsessive eye.