Last year the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman launched a withering attack on General Motors. GM demanded the right of response, but found itself embroiled in an e-mail dispute with the paper over the words it could use. So it gave up, and published the entire e-mail thread on its blog, FYI.

Where previously it might have resorted to big gun lawyers, it went the other way – deciding to behave like an aggrieved individual and letting the world (or at least its blog readers) know how badly done by it was. Goliath was behaving like David.