Friday, January 28, 2005

John Robb on the solution to The Yahoo Problem. 

Phil Windley weighs in as well. 

Dan Bricklin: "Within a few months, hopefully, I'll have 15Mb down/2Mb up for about $45/month." 

Lance Knobel on Davos and its counterpart, un-Davos. 

More CNN feeds on money and sports. More problematic Yahoo icons. 

Scott Rosenberg: "But the ecosystem is flourishing now!" 

Yesterday's movie: Hotel Rwanda. Another winner. A couple of days ago, Aviator. Too Hollywood. Thumb down. 

HG Frankfurt: On Bullshit. 

Naming reporters 

Jay McCarthy liked my line about not naming reporters until they start naming the bloggers they write about. Of course it was just a joke. It would be disrespectful to generalize about all reporters based on the work of just one or two.

The mail list for the BloJouCreCon continues to be active, as the reporters file their stories about the conference, many of them have the kinds of gross inaccuracies that bloggers have been talking about, and it's made for a fascinating discussion.

The reporters' defenses go up. One says: "I'm sure you wouldn't be accusing me of cherrypicking if I had slathered a conference moment in praise." Good show, in that one sentence he attacked the integrity of every person on the mail list. In fact, I have questioned reporters about articles that were generally positive. In that case, the response is "Boy this guy is something, we praise him and he wants more." In either case, he assumes that all we want is "good" press, we don't care about the facts.

Just because we come from a young medium, doesn't mean we're young. There are certain things you learn in life, and one of them is to accept criticism, and maybe learn from it. If you deflect all criticism, it's hard to know how your work is received by others.

Anyway here's an important idea you may not have heard before: The pros defend their own integrity, but by misrepresenting what we say, changing the order of things, they can make us appear to be something that we're not. Happens so often it can't be an accident. But it's not just their integrity that counts, ours counts too. The reporters only stand up for their own integrity, while assaulting ours. Well, maybe what's happening, maybe what bloggers are saying to the pros is that we got tired of that system.

Davos on C-SPAN 

Last night C-SPAN broadcast the WEF session with Clinton, Gates, Blair, Bono, Obasanjo, Mbeki, and I gotta say if I had been there I would have been bored out of my mind. I've been spoiled by un-conferences. I wouldn't have liked that I had to listen to all that boring BS before the "audience" got a chance to speak, and guess what -- they think they're on a panel too, and they give speeches as if they were. It's the preening of the idiocy, soundbites on stage. Makes for really shitty conference-going. 2000 was a very long time ago.