Category: Weblogging

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Shel Israel, in comments to Robert Scoble’s post, where he mentions he’s being paid to be keynote speaker at the PayPerPost conference (yes, that PayPerPost):

Robert,
I am personally disappointed that you have chosen to do this. To me Pay for Post represents everything that the book you and I wrote opposes. I wish you would change your mind. This will not help your reputation.
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One more thought, Robert. You taught me the standards for blogging that I adhere to. It is what you taught me that makes me so passionately oppose Pay per Post, who have shown themselves to be the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere. Robert, I really hope you cancel. In the long run, you will be doing PodTech a service.

Now what was it Robert said, back in October about PayPerPost?

To hear that one of the illuminati is taking filthy lucre from the despised PayPerPost, after all such sneered at the little people who earned bucks to do things like, oh, pay rent or buy food, does demonstrate that too many people are quite willing to define rules they can’t live by themselves.

Speaking of which, there’s the Techcruch 20 conference, being billed as a humanitarian act to help the poor, financially burdened startups, being hosted by Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis. Oh if only someone will donate some space–I’m sure that neither Arrington nor Calacanis is going to benefit, personally, from such generosity.

They asked Dave Winer to be on the planning committee. Yup, three mentos sitting on a stick, just waiting for the diet coke.

Then there’s the Nick Denton and Gawker playfulness, where Gawker ads were sandwiched around copyrighted material and then uploaded to YouTube: probably one of the acts that triggered so much anger against YouTube and a mass DCMA take down effort:

For the past three months, an employee at Gawker Media has posted copyright videos sandwiched between ads for Gawker-owned properties such as Valleywag and Gizmodo.
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At least 50 videos were uploaded by the Gawker employee since October from such shows as ABC’s Good Morning America and Inside Edition and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.

Perhaps Mr. Denton will have to resort to scrawling his ads on his own forehead, eh?

I know this is little interest for most of you, and I hope you’ll forgive me as I indulge in a spate of unseemly gloating as the White Boys with the Most tear themselves apart in front of our very eyes.

You guys are a real work of art, you know that?

And that’s enough of that.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A piece of good news, Dare Obasanjo has decided not to pack in his weblog and proceeded to demonstrate such by posting several very helpful posts on the recent GMail scandal (which, all things considered, wasn’t that much of a scary situation–oh, we’ll get more spam, horrors.)

As an aside, sometimes when I write something that I somewhat regret writing, because it’s too sentimental or exposes too much, I write several blog posts, one right after the other, to ‘push’ the vulnerable post down and out of the page. I wonder if other people do this?

Anyway, Dare wrote some useful stuff on the vulnerability of GETs mixed with JSON, especially for Ajax developers.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I find it humorous that after the Blogger meeting with Bill Gates–where he walked into a room of bloggers, all of whom were using Apple laptops–Microsoft works with Acer to send out Windows laptops to webloggers. As Jeneane notes, primarily male webloggers (and I’ve not seen anything among the ASP.NET webloggers about them receiving anything from the company).

It was a foolish move if, for no other reason, they sent laptops to many people who can easily afford to buy a laptop. More, the same people who get offered so much anyway, creating a strong divide between the tiny haves and the many have-nots. A better approach would have been to provide a random drawing, a contest, or some other event if they wanted to provide webloggers with Windows laptops. Then the event would have generated attention without the acrimony.

That’s that not the point, though. Microsoft wanted to influence the influencers, tossing a few machines to some on the edges more as distraction (“See? Not everyone we gave one to is an A Lister.”) It was a rather amateurish act, and I have to wonder about these PR companies and their inability to get things right.

I don’t begrudge the folks getting one who could not afford such, and more power to them. I hope they keep the machines, because it would cruel to make them give up something that has become a real and unexpected treat. If you know such, then back off and let them enjoy something delightfully unexpected.

I do wonder, though, at those who have so much already who continue to take and take. The words “gluttony” and “greed” come to mind, but I’m sure that such surfacing is purely coincidence, webloggers being the selfless bunch that we are.

I did get a kick out of the Slashdot comment, This is typical MS behaviour – entirely immoral and calculating … and where do I sign up?