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DaveNet: Is it marketing or journalism?  Follow-up to today's piece. Steve Zellers: "The problem I have with SOAP and web services right now is that too much is being shoehorned into what should be a fairly trivial spec. We should be done by now, but we never will be because the cost to implement the spec will be too great." Rob Fahrni: "Read Scripting News, or the cactus gets it!"   Talking with a British friend a few minutes ago, he told me of a recent story, where US President George Bush asked Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the President of Brazil, if there were blacks in Brazil. He was quickly set straight by Condoleeza Rice. "Brazil probably has more blacks than the USA. Some say it's the Country with the most blacks outside Africa," she said. The story appeared in Der Spiegel, and quite a few weblogs, but appears to have not been carried by US publications. Why? Lawrence Lee sent a pointer to a Washington Post article about Bush's remark, dated yesterday. Steve Outing comments on today's piece, and links to a response from Knight-Ridder's Rajiv Pant. Major kudos to Craig Newmark, who is suing Hollywood! Glenn Fleishman is a co-litigant. Bill Kearney: "What would happen if simple RSS started supporting namespaces?" Sean Gallagher: "I often find myself feeling like I just walked in on someone in the bathroom or bedroom at an awkward moment, getting way more information than I expected or needed." Triangulation in action. Over the last few hours I've seen three or four comments from Mac OS X users saying that Silk is a good thing. Now I thought I should pass that along. Jeroen Bekkers: "I'm sure better onramps from Radio to Groove from will appear soon." Wired: "One of the country's most respected training grounds for professional reporters has become the first school to offer a class on the 21st century symbol of do-it-yourself journalism." Dan Bricklin: "If Disney or Yahoo! had all you wanted, why would you need Google?" About today's DaveNet  Today's mail page includes comments from Dan Bricklin, Dave Carlick, Peter Rutten, Jacob Levy. BTW, in case it's not clear, I spent months writing today's DaveNet. I wrote the initial draft almost two weeks ago. I spent a lot of time considering it. I've known Mr X for many years, and am concerned that our friendship may end with this piece. There's another possible outcome. His employer may read the story and re-think the kind of journalism they want to do, and tell Mr X he made a mistake. We need journalists we can trust. Esp when a mistake is so obvious, and so easily corrected, there should never be any doubt about reporting it. API had an outage. Mr X writes about other companies' flaws, some far less significant than this one. There is a fundamental problem at API, much deeper than the technical issue. The correct approach is to first acknowledge the problem, then fix it, and not prevent critics from talking about it. Daniel Berlinger tunes into this line: "Some of them wrote articles that were critical of the major players, without regard to the business interests of their employers. I saw them do it, and get away with it." He was struck by the "get away with it" part. In a lot of conversations with pros they seem to assume that readers know that they can't take shots at their publishers or advertisers. None of it ever gets documented. But there are some publishing companies, in our midst, that play this game with abandon. Their stuff is pure marketing literature, paid for by sponsors, but usually not directly, presumably so they can deny that there's a connection. There's a new generation of professional reporters, in their 20s and 30s now, who say directly, but not for attribution, that if they get paid for a piece it's got to pass through the publisher before it gets out. Some of them are now taking up blogging, as a creative outlet, I hope. In other words, the people may be good, but the system is corrupt." |
 
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