DISQUS

I agree with the first two paragraphs of Cynthia's comment. The third feels like a cop-out.

I'm also wondering whether fuckingaroundwithtextallday.com is still available, because it would be a great name for a blog.

Nick

A pay wall for the Post or the Times or any other paper simply blocks people out who then go elsewhere

This is, simply, an overstatement. You assume that all the news and comments that newspapers publish are fungible. That may, sadly, be the world the web will ultimately create, but it is not the world we have today.

What the research shows is that readers often value a particular newspaper, so if they can't get the stories online they will be more likely to purchase the print edition (or vice versa).

I find it odd that you, a newspaper writer, are so quick to assume that your own work is a fungible commodity. Perhaps you should give yourself - and your colleagues - more credit.

Nick

Technorati's hyperactive bugginess used to annoy me, but I've kind of grown fond of it.

You're getting very retro, Mathew. You're also right, even if I have trouble picturing Scoble as Achilles.

To put that in context, by the way, #26 is "the proliferation of AJAX pop-up boxes" and #28 is "Canada." Nick

Mathew, when it comes to my writing, you are one of the most creative inferers (inferrers?) that I've come across. I think it's called "reading with your imagination." Anyway, I don't remember saying, or implying, that numbskulls were "Web 2.0’s biggest problem." Just to be sure, though, I went and checked my list of "The 100 Biggest Problems with Web 2.0" (I keep it under my pillow), and I found that, actually, "numbskulls" comes in at #27. Nick

I don’t know Nick, but whenever I come across stuff like that I picture a guy sitting in a wing chair in some university library somewhere, muttering to himself about how he can’t concentrate on Aristotle’s Poetics (in the original Greek, of course) because those damn kids won’t turn down their boogie-woogie music.

Nope, you don't know Nick, but I'm happy to have inspired your imagination. And now that I've roused myself from my library wingchair, emptied my pipe and staightened my bow tie, let me qualify the elitist qualifications you've so generously bestowed on me. I was an editor at HBR, not the editor, and I have written but one slender volume, though, as Johnny Thunders might have said, it was a motherfucker.

I'm not saying that Robert Scoble or Brian Bailey (or anyone else) lacks "moral sensibility." I'm saying the web lacks moral sensibility, and we can't assume that it will make the world a better place.