Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

3/05/2006


Blogospat II: When Geeks Attack

So Dave Winer says there are too many blogospats and calls out Nick Carr for being snarky. I don't know what snarky means and I'm not interested enough in learning an unnecessary synonym to go look it up, but I don't think it's a compliment.

I seem to either wildly disagree or wildly agree with whatever Nick writes, and he may be as smart as his bio. Once again, I'm not interested enough to try to figure it out. I find smartness for smartness sake profoundly boring. But clearly he got under Dave's skin like an imaginary advisory board.

Dave then goes on to dump on Memeorandum because there are too many stupid people posting there. So Dave is mad at Nick who might be really smart for posting stupid things on a site that used to be the exclusive realm of smart people until all the newbies "arrived (and arrived and arrived and on and on)."

It's very confusing, but then I'm one of the stupid newbies, so that's not surprising. But I jumped to Scoble's defense in yesterday's blogospat, so I guess Dave needs one of those shirts that says "I'm with Stupid."

Then Scoble reads Dave's words of wisdom and decides to take a Memeorandum break in favor of RSS feeds because reading feeds from smart people lets you learn about the Hubble telescope and get smarter.

And then Scoble says smart people in his RSS feeds "could give a f**k about all the traffic." I need to get to Bloglines quick because I'm feeling stupider by the minute. Fish don't care about water either, at least until it dries up.

By my count most of the bloggers who wrote about yesterday's blogospat were solidly on Scoble's side. I don't think you can avoid people who use the so called "Dvorak approach" (though proving for the third time in one post that I'm stupid, I like to read John's stuff). That sort exists in the real world and perhaps in even greater quantities in the remote blogosphere. If you have any sort of a profile, unfair and unfounded criticism comes with the territory. But as long as you believe you're doing the right thing and as long as you have people (even stupid ones) in your corner, you just ignore all the foolishness.

Smart is like pretty- it is as it does.

I think all this fighting over who knows more about tech, or whose nerd camp is better or whose IQ is only 145 is silly- and I'm a geek. I can't imagine how it looks to a regular person who happens by.

But look on the bright side. If someone wanted to kick it old school, without being bothered by all these newbies, a few more blogospats ought to do the trick.


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6 Comment(s):

In fairness, there are couple of sociological issues under the surface. Not relevant unless you're living the lifestyles of the geek and flamacious. But it's a bit provincial to derogate tribal rites just on the basis that you don't understand them so they must be stupid.

By Blogger Seth Finkelstein, at 3/05/2006 6:54 PM  
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In that sense, Megite does better:

1) Megite auto discovers new blogs, not just A-list

2) Megite doesn't require the link analysis, it ranks the story based on text analysis too.

3) Megite can be customized with your OPML file (or personal feeds).

By Blogger What's Happening Right Now, at 3/05/2006 7:03 PM  
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Dave used vacuous. I just used the working man's synonym.

Granted, I don't understand them.

By Blogger Kent, at 3/05/2006 7:53 PM  
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"Fish don't care about water either, at least until it dries up." I love this :-)

To the Megite comment above: TailRank is also worth looking at.

By Anonymous Zoli Erdos, at 3/05/2006 7:56 PM  
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As someone outside of the whole fray, I've found the whole thing pretty hilarious to watch. My coworker Robert defined HSML--HyperSnark Markup Language--in order to give people the ability to more clearly indicate their level of snarkiness.

By Blogger Dan Ciruli, at 3/06/2006 10:57 PM  
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Sorry, I wrote that wrong. Robert defined "HyperText Snarkup Language." It's much funnier that way.

By Blogger Dan Ciruli, at 3/06/2006 11:13 PM  
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