Saturday, February 11, 2006

Jeff Jarvis: "Big advertisers and agencies are chickenshit." 

Truth be told, I'm chickenshit too. When the highest bid was $15K I seriously thought of entering the contest, to promote Scripting News, my role in podcasting, and the upcoming release of the NewsRiver aggregator. $15K wouldn't have met their reserve, and I wasn't comfortable telling them that I was interested in advertising (not sure why), and $40K might have been too much to pay. But I suspect Jarvis is right that the publicity would easily be worth that much. Plus I really like the idea of supporting Rocketboom. So maybe I'll buy some ads there after the first rush. I wonder who else, like me, thought about doing it but in the end was too chickenshit to give it a try? 

A new method of updating for OPML Editor users. 

My four answers to the famous questions, but not really cause I fudge it. Sorry. 

On this day in 1999, a preview of what Scripting News looked like as a "channel" in My.Netscape.Com.  

There's a blizzard moving into the northeast. Don't want to rub it in or anything, but the weather in Berkeley is idyllic. Hey I like a good blizzard as much as the next guy. For a day or so, then I'll take idyllic. 

Check out the discussion of 3Bubbles over on TechCrunch. 

Reminder, once again you can comment on Scripting News. One big post for every day. It's an experiment. WordPress has some good comment moderation tools, so maybe we can keep out the paranoid and childish. Comments like "You suck" and "This is why everyone hates you" are pretty useless. Stick to discussing issues and not people and everything will be cool.  

I also added a link in the right margin. If it works it should always point to the page for comments for the most recent day. By the way all this comment goodness is brought to you by the MetaWeblog API. It's a mashup of blogging tools. How about that!  

BTW, while we're on the topic of APIs, here's something you might not know. When I put things like the MetaWeblog API up for review, the flamer-fans almost immediately drown out the discussion, so we're left with a spec that's not complete (but pretty good in the end). Then the very same people criticize the spec because it's not complete. Isn't that special. Since the blogosphere seems to be looking at how fucked up the blogosphere is (a good thing, btw) let's add this to the list. Be circumspect, the flamers aren't that clever, but they don't have to be, because so few people are really paying attention. This is why when people like Doc Searls automatically jump to the defense of bloggers I want to call him up and say You know Doc, it's isn't always so black and white. Sometimes the pros are right and the bloggers are wrong. Even David Weinberger is wrong sometimes. (Perish the thought.) 

On the other hand, Doc has the best headlines, and sometimes his metaphors are so right it hurts. Like the one about the dogs after Hurricane Andrew in Florida. The house they lived in was destroyed, but the back door was left standing. They were found barking and whining at the back door, wanting to be let in. He uses that metaphor to describe people whining about A-list bloggers. What exactly do they want us to do? It's hard to imagine. I've been passed by so many bloggers, I'm not even in the Technorati Top-100 anymore. Yet they whine about me being a gatekeeper. I just think they like to whine. 

Now I should get some good comments today. Heh. If anyone wants to admit to being one of the people I'm talking about.  

PS: if Danny Sullivan actually was adding a link to his own site to Wikipedia, he was spamming them and the editor was right to tell him to stop.