DISQUS

Stephen Hawking

To each his own, but how can the ability to get DMs from people you don't know be more beneficial than the primary use case for Twitter -- the ability to get real-time updates from people you are legitimately interested in?

Your occasional toe dip into that 102,000-user torrent is not going to show you anything that you couldn't get from random Twitter updates. And you're undoubtedly getting an unbelievable amount of auto-generated junk from people you follow who are just bots gaming Twitter.

To my thinking, building ridiculously enormous friend counts on social media sites is "anti-community." Twitter's follower count is a terrible metric that just encourages gamesmanship and discourages real relationships. It should be counting how many people have taken action -- retweets, DMs, and the like -- not followers. Otherwise, it's just another way to play a game of mine's bigger, just like the TechMeme LeaderBoard, Share Your OPML, Technorati Leaderboard, and so on.

Regarding your complaint about gaming these systems, isn't that exactly what you've done by following more than 102,000 people on Twitter?

It's not even remotely possible for you to follow the updates of that many people. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. If everyone on your list made just one Twitter update a day, you'd have less than a second to devote to each.

The only reason to follow that many is to increase your own follower count.

Congratulations on the Nieman gig. You're pushing a giant boulder up a tall hill, but I admire the effort.

Wales appointed Jordan to Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee -- the group that has final say on contentious matters -- *after* he knew that he concocted fake academic credentials and lied to the New Yorker. The hubris is staggering.

When I was digging around to compile that list, the story that I'd most like to see told is how Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ's homebrew, Lulu-published magazine JPG became a newstand publication. Throw in The Fray, Mirror Project and their other efforts, and that'd be a great videocast.

"David: the point is that Duncan linked to someone else, who linked to someone else, who linked to someone else, who did the original reporting. Yet the guy who did the original reporting is NOT on TechMeme."

If you want news as judged by humans, read a human. TechMeme's just trying to grab new stuff that gets the most links in a short window of time. As a beneficiary of that system for so long, you're a weird person to be complaining about it now.

I agree with your recommendation to publish full-text feeds. Feed readers are a loyal bunch, and getting them is essential to a successful site.

My big concern with that approach is whether a bunch of spammers are duplicating my text and making Google wrongly conclude that I'm spamming all over the web.

"I interpret Niall’s behavior not as a prank or a childish response, but as an honest, passionate (and possibly angry) reaction to someone disrespecting his rights."

What about goat man's rights? His picture was copyrighted too. I'll bet he's feeling violated right now.

"Scoble (no offense) seems to be taking the role of the nagging father figure by warning us to bend over or, god forbid, risk 10% of getting hired in the future."

It's a lot easier to say "to hell with 10 percent of my future job prospects" when you're young. Scoble's paternal instinct is something you crazy kids with your "F the Man" tattoos and your hip-hop music and low-rider jeans with the butt flosser underwear sticking out the top should think about every once in a while. You'll thank me when you have kids and a mortgage.

Niall: "Nothing pornographic was shown in the picture, just a guy's back with a big CC logo covering his rear."

Were there two hands on the sides of the CC logo pulling it open?

It's interesting that you think TechCrunch's role is "about building companies and people up." So if Michael Arrington thinks some Web 2.0 play is an overhyped pile of crap, you wouldn't expect him to say that?

"as did Rogers Cadenhead, who admittedly has a somewhat fractious past involving Mr. Winer and some lawyers and so forth"

Your use of the word "somewhat" made me laugh out loud. Thanks!

When you don't link to something you are criticizing, you're punishing your audience. It also implies some doubt about what you're writing, as if you don't want your readers to look at the source and decide for themselves.

Need anyone point out that if maybe RSS was an actual SPEC, there would be a concrete definition for the way that the feeds should look? That’s probably why the ATOM feed worked better.

WordPress corrected the problem and now produces valid RSS 2.0 feeds. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Atom vs. RSS, and is simply a matter of something invalid that needed to be corrected.

Before you had a “weblogs.com” url. good thing you were friends with Dave when he shut off that server. (not that he didn’t have good reasons, but if you weren’ Doc or Scoble you were pretty bad off and had to move quick).

No one was bad off. Weblogs.Com sites moved to Buzzword.Com after a couple of days. Sheesh.