You know, sometimes by reading a persons blog you think you get a fairly good picture of the person, and until today I had a pretty good impression of Fred Wilson. Admitedly, the guy isn’t in my Bloglines subs, but I do fairly regularly visit his blog. I’ve always thought of him as being an upfront sort of guy, totally honest and fair, totally into disclosure and discourse.
And then I made the mistake of commenting on his blog.
You see, I read this post where Fred talks about the issue with tracking statistics on sites. It’s a topic I’ve been following for years, so naturally it was of interest to me. He also mentioned that he’d put his money behind comScores stats over Alexa’s. Well personally I think both a flawed to be honest, and indeed I used an entire column at The Blogging Times to say so. At this stage, having read a number of other comments on the post, including a number of comments from comScore representatives/ employees defending their product I thought I might chime in, again, only because it’s a topic that I’ve had a long standing interest in, and one I’ve actually researched fairly heavily as well.
F*ck.
It turns out that Fred is not only a comScore chearleader, he’s also an investor and a director in the company.
Mind you, not that you’d find it in this post. Maybe I should have known from past posts, but even Mike Arrington would have disclosed in a post such as this if he was a shareholder, investor, or even god bless, a director as well.
Suffice to say, I’ve received an email from Fred tonight that reads as follows (warning, unedited language ahead):
That is a bullshit assertion
Comscore is no way malware
It’s opt in for one, and its easy to remove.
That would be like calling the nielsen people meter spyware.
I replied on both your blog and my blog
fred
Now take another look at my Blogging Times article. I’m didn’t make this stuff up, reputable leaders in the field including symantic and CA (computer associates) have labelled comScores “internet accelerator” as being Spyware and Trackware in that order. There’s also other sites out there that say similar and even worse things about the program. Indeed, PC World itself talks about how this software in bundled in with other programs.
A guess the lesson learned is you can’t really judge a persons character by their blog…most of the time…and I won’t be reading Fred Wilsons blog again in the future.
Tags: Fred Wilson
