One of the professional news orgs I like getting quoted by is the Guardian. They have an excellent piece today, by John Naughton, that explains why France wasn't clueless as so many people said they were, in establishing a rule that news organizations could only mention Twitter and Facebook if there was actual news about the companies or their products. As so many American news orgs do -- and the US govt -- they were treating these for-profit companies and their services as if they were non-commercial open systems. I like that I'm quoted in the piece, not based on a soundbite from an exclusive interview, rather from a blog post where I had a chance to express my thoughts in a careful way. Their quote was not taken out of context, and reflects what I actually believe. And they included a link in case you wanted to find out more. I wish the tech bloggers in the US were so careful and thoughtful, and my local hometown paper, the NY Times. But I'm afraid they don't even read my blog (if they do, it never shows up in their stories, or on their What We're Reading pages). And for the most, the tech bloggers either ignore me, or say nasty personal things about me. Pointless. I'm sure their readers don't care. I don't. I think it reflects poorly on them. (There are exceptions, GigaOm and PaidContent come to mind.) Of course I don't agree with everything the Guardian says, but I'm finding the back-and-forth to be quite good and thought I should say so, since I'm pretty generous with the criticism when I don't like the way things are going. |