I’m getting tired of these “anti-blog screed so please, bloggers, all link to me” pseudcontrarian protobacklash articles. Most of them are as glib and boring as the worst blogs and they don’t tend to even get the facts right.
For example in, Blog eats blog, the author talks about ETCon and A List bloggers, writing
Howard Rheingold, Tim O’Reilly, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and Ben Hammersley (no, I’m not going to promote them even more by linking to them) are all what Register reporter Andrew Orlowski calls ‘the A-list bloggers’, the people whose regular musings on their personal websites can shape debate and make reputations (5). (Shirky may not have a conventional blog, preferring instead to post essays that are then linked to by others – but since his importance derives entirely from others’ blogs, I feel justified in including him in the list.)
Can you count the errors? Winer wasn’t at the conference. Rheingold made his reputation on the Well, at HotWired, and in other virtual communities pre-blogging. Shirky, likewise, built his reputation in the early “old school” days of the web, long before the blog wave.
Plus, neither his shortlist nor the other prominent-ish attendees of the conference are all “economic libertarians.” Then there’s the Orlowskian notion that Google is carefully censoring out all non-bloggish points of view. Doy.
The cleverest part of the article was the neoblogism, “blogeoisie.” Points for cuteness (and for including a pronunciation guide). Now let’s get our minions at Google to wipe all memory of this article from the face of the noosphere. MUAHAHAHAHA.