Nick Bergus transcribed a bit from Rebooting the News #44.

I said this to Jay about the execs in the news industry.

"It's like in football. When the quarterback gets the ball, the quarterback always turns back and runs a few yards back before even thinking about passing the ball. And you think, 'Why is the quarterback doing that? He's giving up yardage. I mean, he's running the wrong way.' Well he does it to find some little bit of room so he can see what's out there. So, in the news industry, they're never willing to do that. They're always standing right at the scrimmage line, not budging an inch. And of course what happens -- they get tackled every goddamn time and they can never throw the ball."

Yup.

 3/28/2010; 3:57:09 PM.   .

Fred Wilson says you should vigorously defend your reputation on the Internet.

This is something I gave up on long ago.

There are too many people with too many axes to grind.

When competitors make public and personal accusations, how are you going to respond, when customers are watching? It's a very low-road way to compete. Not much you can but weather the storm, keep offering the best service you can, figuring the smart customers will ignore the personal stuff.

Anyway, there's an ancient Chinese proverb that goes something like this.

If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.

It works! As your competitors rise, eventually they have done to them what they did to you, and if you sit there a while, you don't have to do a thing -- nature takes care of it.

BTW, for some reason I love metaphors that involve watching the river. ">

I have a river a few blocks from my house, with lots of benches, but this far south it isn't really a river, it's more of a bay.

 3/28/2010; 7:56:31 AM.   .

Rudolf Ammann went to the trouble to figure out that April 1, 1997 is not actually the day a blog first appeared on the home page of scripting.com.

As he says, the real beginning of Scripting News is on February 19 of that year. And if you want to really have fun with it, Scripting News began a year before that with Frontier News (which I restarted earlier this year, 2010).

If you really want to mess with your mind, you'd have to go back to October 7, 1994 -- the day I started writing on the net -- when DaveNet started because that's also the beginning of Scripting News. The archive of that site was reverse chronologic, and in every way that matters, was a blog. When Scripting News got started, DaveNet were the long form pieces, otherwise my idea of a blog was a collection of short snips with a link, very much like what we do on Twitter today. DaveNet was more like what we think of as a blog.

I choose April 1 as the beginning of Scripting News because that's the day the archive begins.

Anyway...

13 years! That's a lot of bloggin. ">

 3/28/2010; 5:48:44 AM.   .