Category: General

Dave Winer points to the effort to save the Mecury News. My problem. I went to the site that aims to save it as part of the employee buyout. No way to invest. The Mercury News is a daily read for me, be it via Google. These guys write good stuff. And yet they’ve got the potential of getting thousands of ppl to invest in the idea, and they aren’t facilitating it. Take notes from Firefox. They got thousands to invest in the NY Times ad at $20 a pop. I was one of them. It was easy to do. If they make it easy ppl will come. I’ll quite happily put a little money towards a share in the Mecury News, as I know others will. But if its too hard, it will be lost for ever.

Shaun Carney, pay attention!: Yaro Starak vs Tim Blair. It’s not even Darren you need to consider.

Maybe I’m just tired, but we’ve just gone through an outage at b5media, our first big outage with our current webhosts, and it was within a week of duncanriley.com joining the server. It seems every time this site joins a server I kill the web host. I’ve nearly lost count at how many web hosts I’ve gone through now 🙂 (insert mysterious music here).

You know, you’d think after talking to Darren the other week The Fairfax Media would get it right, but here we go again with Shaun Carney

The emergence of Crikey and Australia’s most popular ?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Ǩ¬ù or, to be accurate, most frequently visited ?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Ǩ¬ù blogger, Tim Blair, who reportedly makes a small sum from his efforts, conforms to the “long tail” theory advanced by champions of the new digital media.

On what planet I may well ask. Sure, now I don’t own The Blog Herald I’m no longer really in the mix any more in terms of numbers, but lets take a look shall we:

Bzzzzzz. Try Problogger.net Shaun.

This is mean.

I suppose the sites title says it all, doesn’t it.

Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have been rallying against what they see as a rise of snarkiness amongst bloggers lately. Scoble’s most recent post here takes the argument he’s been making lately and calls it a lynch mob. Now as much as he makes a valid point in relation to the way Dave Winer has been treated over the Winer v Conehead legal stoush, I can’t help that feel that Scoble is being a little bit disingenuous over the whole matter.

Although Scoble is now a corporate mouthpiece for Microsoft these days who still pretends to be the free, unfiltered voice of blogging tech (and he’ll argue that he isn’t, but a bit like Calacanis and AOL, there has to be some restraint in such a position, and even if its not vocal or written it’s something that will naturally occur) take a dig through the Scoble archives and take a look at some of the criticism Scoble has dished out in the past. Indeed it could be argued that although he’s trying to take the high moral ground in the Winer/ Lynch mob case, he’s still being critical of others. Indeed, if a similar rant had come from someone else, say about his criticism of someone else, he would most likely label it as snark, and this is where Scoble becomes disingenuous, because one mans snark is another mans valid criticism. Of course, we’re maybe not quite at the level of Mena Trott abusing an audience member during a speech on civility here in the Irony stakes, but if Scoble is really serious about snark being a problem then he’ll need to tone it down himself.

As for the other concurrent argument, that we are seeing snark for the sake of snark, and snark to boost traffic, I’d argue that whilst there is little doubt that some people are pursuing this strategy, it’s not a strategy in blogging that will deliver long term benefits, because contrived snark will eventually be seen for what it is. I’ve been accused of being a snarky blogger in the past, indeed many people thought that The Blog Herald was nothing more than my personal outlet for snark. It of course wasn’t but when I was snarky it did get noticed. But I’d note when I was snarky, or critical, or even scathing, I was doing so because I believed what I was writing. I was never snarky for the sake of it, I was always honest in my views of things. Sometimes I got it right, other times I got it totally wrong. Either way though, it was honest. Dishonesty and blogging never mix. What we are seeing now, to some extent, is people becoming bolder in their blogging. Once upon a time, when bloggers were fired from their jobs, people were very weary of what they wrote online. Now, with more and more people blogging as a full time job, and well written blogs being seen as an asset for any would-be employer, people are being themselves more and more. And guess what Robert Scoble, real people can be snarky. As long as it’s honest snark, I see no problem with it at all.

And as much as I can’t help than feel sorry for Dave Winer in the current blogstorm, Im sure many of the people writing what they are writing feel that way. Dave’s that sort of guy, you either love him or hate him. I’ve been in both camps over the years, but I suppose there comes a time when you come to respect your elders, those that have come before you, and despite being an Alpha grumpy old man, Winer now holds this position for me.

Apparently only 1% of young Singaporeans believe blogs, but 88% of them read newspapers and it would seem, believe them more than blogs. This from a country well known for it repressive control of free speech.

Winston Smith need not apply for residency in Singapore.

Spotted this Adsense ad here at duncanriley.com

I’d think putting your mobile number in an Adsense ad would be cheating, wouldn’t it, because you’d no longer have to click on the ad?

Lots of buzz about running XP on a Mac, but I don’t get it. I’d rather run Mac OSX on a PC, for starters the hardware is cheaper, it runs faster, and it isn’t white. Now I know there are a lot of Mac users reading this, but at the end of the day I don’t have the luxury to buy a Mac, running a blog network sort of limits you flexibilty and income 🙂

Caught a little bit of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony last night, only a little bit, and what did I see? dancing Koala’s. God, the cultural cringe…. as the ad should go, Where the f*ck in the world are you, and then I’d add, hopefully not in Melbourne during the Commonwealth Games 🙂

More at The Spin Starts Here.