Alan Meckler - unsubscribed!
I admit, I am way behind reading this huge blogroll you can see on the right column of the blog. Usually I just scroll fast through the pile of useless wonders posted by Scoble, feeling eased by the sudden decrease of unread posts, from 2000 to 1900, in only one minute.
On the other hand, I take the expression "A-class bloggers" literally. When my PC is busy with OCR or TV recording, I use my last cycles for Bloglines. After 1-2 minutes, more than enough for the Romanian blogs, I take the challenge of the "Techies" blogroll. I take it from the beginning, with the appeased Aaron Skonnard, the provocative GoogleWeblog of Aaron Schwarz, the noisy Adam Barr. For me, these are the A-bloggers. Although I do wonder what Tim Bray had said lately, I get to his blog only once in 2-3 months. That’s because, for me, these guys have pretty equal importance.
And that’s because there’s not a Techie that slept into long stories about movies, politics, wives, religion and moral values without being removed from my blogroll. I also don’t give a damn about blog revolution, year of blogging, blogging software (What, people, can’t write something, you have to write about how you write? Then, please, stop writing!). I care about my unread posts as I care about spam. Raise the signal / noise ratio. Stop wasting my time. Teach me something.
Of course I care about learning the news. We already have stuff written by guys like Thurrot, which is usually meaningless , uninteresting or unprofessional (yes, that kind that really doesn’t look better). A enormous trail of blurbs since Mac unveiled MiniMac reached me even through Yahoo! Messenger. I couldn’t care less about Six Apart doing dirty things with LiveJournal (A Perl template buying a PHP template and then failing to provide CPU and/or bandwidth? Wouldn’t it be better for Mena if she goes back to her English teaching or if she buys a pub and hires her husband as waiter?).
I prefer the news in the language of Dan Appleman, a man, not a boy, and a guy who surely know about he’s writing.
I always hoped that reading Alan Meckler gems about search engines I would find the magic recipe for PageRank 10. Turned out he didn’t knew it or he still kept it secret. But today he made me waste 10 minutes. He posted a link to a SF short movie which describes the world in 2014 as conquered by "alternative journalism". News would be offered by an alliance Google-Amazon, selected by their algorithms from Blogger posts. Algorithms would create new stories from disparate posts and people would read those fictions rather than NYT real news. For a while, Microsoft keeps the same pace with glorious moves, such as buying Friendster (wtf is Friendster and what is the importance of this new generation, post-IRC addiction, on the world market anyway?). Anyway, Microsoft lost the competition (perhaps Office became obsolete) and AOL or eBay didn’t qualified for the race that starts in 2005.
How many times did anyone managed to replace news agencies with blogs? How many times did Google News posted Reuters news before Reuters posted them?
Resolution: do yourself a favor and stop reading the "gems" of Alan Meckler, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompsons. Stop believing that blogs count and that peripheral phenomena like giving invitations for bloggers at the parties national conventions in USA or Bloggercon will replace (or, for that matter, will reach the magnitude order of) the influence of BBC, CNN or Murdoch’s empire. Think about the most blogged US nominee, Dean, and his influence at this moment. Think about who’s ruling at the AOL-Time Warner HQ.