DISQUS

Not to be all Nick Carr-ish about this, but I'm totally fine with AP's decision. It's their content, and they should feel free to coop it up however they see fit.

Do I think it's smart though? No.

Hey, random Big Lebowski quotes in otherwise-unrelated blog posts is my character note.

I'd still call this a poison pill. After all, from Craiglist's point of view Ebay definitely meets the criteria for being a hostile would-be acquirer.

Fred -- Have seen that at a number of conferences, most amusingly at one of Tony Perkins' event in Palo Alto. The on-stage speakers were savaged by the "back-channel", was truly something to behold. Only way to make it work was to eliminate anonymity. Otherwise was cluster-f**k.

Howard, my friend, you need to stop holding back so much in these posts. No-one will know what you mean :-)

You Canadians are sooo darn nice and even-handed.

Surprised you tumbled for this one, my friend. As I pointed out earlier today on my site, the headline writers have the story backwards. Murdoch says he is he is greatly _expanding_ the free parts of the WSJ. sure, some things will remain premium and become more expensive, which is just another way of saying that the Dow wire, DJNR, and some data services won't be free. Zero surprise.

I'm tempted to add it just out of spite :-)

More seriously, this kind of thing can be highly useful if done tastefully and with fine-grained control over which things get tagged --but I don't get that sense yet on this one.

Hey Robert

As the surprised originator of the "You don't need a business plan" meme, I sort of feel like I should insert myself in here on this Twitter biz plan thing.

My point wasn't that business plans are a complete waste. That's silly. I was making two other points. First, you can get away with having a considerably less crisp plan if you have something else to put on the table with VCs, like boffo traffic/growth numbers. Second, in dealing with VCs keep in mind that they are professional nitpickers, so treat initial discussions with them as a dance of many information veils.

I now return folks to their regularly scheduled Scoble-ing.

Leaving aside the merits of the decision, you Canadians need to get out more. Temecula is commuter country for San Diego, a mere 90-minute drive north-northeast.

Why does your site keep forgetting who I am? It has a URL remembering problem.

I have about 80 feeds in Netvibes, and it works great. I actually use both Netvibes and GReader: I use Greader mobile from my Treo in "river of news" form; I use Netvibes as my home page.

Would I go all Greader, all the time? I'm not there yet -- I like being able to scan a bunch of stuff really quickly in Netvibes, which is much harder to do in GReader. But I do like a mingled headline format (I hate the phrase "river of news") -- it reminds me of my broker days -- and I find myself doing that more and more.

Repeat after me: My Name is Mathew Ingram, and I am a recovering Widget Junkie.

You forgot to say, "And friend of Paul's". You have to love Jim. He's a flamethrower....

Mathew -- No, I'm the one buddies with Paris, and with the platinum album. I didn't want to say anything though. Too shy and retiring.

I must be getting old or something. While Nick has gotten under many people's skin, including Mike Arrington's over on Crunchnotes, I can't even work up a lick of outrage at Nick's comments. Does that make me an "M-prime" lister?

I hate to rain on this billion-dollar parade, but the $2-billion valuation is pretty dubious stuff. Dan Primack says that insiders tell him there is a big disconnect between the equity buy, the ad spending, and Facebook's valuation. How big? Dan's insider says the valuation is still sitting around $550m, where it was earlier this year.

Mathew -- I've never thought of you as a troll -- too pale a Toronto complexiion -- so it can't possibly be you that Winer is talking about. Gosh, there must be _more_ people who think his silly comment about Dvorak is asinine. Hard to imagine.

Yup, I'm still with Netvibes too, and the main things keeping me there are the tabs and the four-column layout. As you say, not much of a barrier, but it'll do.

And Microsoft is getting better? Darn, just when I had written them off ... !

You know what though? This is a fun story, but as I say over on my site in response to this NYT story, the self-congratulatory sorts leaving oodles of money on the table are being foolish. While leaving excess profits on the table may get you a little free publicity today, it guarantees tomorrow competitors who ape your model and do it faster, cheaper, and better.

Unfortunately, none of this is new. Go back over the annals of Dave Winer and you'll find he's done this sort of pity-me posturing before. Sad stuff.

Mathew -- I'm assuming your question was rhetorical. Because the reason why people are down on Digg [Ed. Cheap alliteration!] is the obvious one: It's easy to be down on Digg.

Technologists don't like it because the underlying code is a hack (I get coders sending me sniffingly dismissive notes weekly about how easy it would be to do a Digg); and media sorts think Digg is declasse. After all, it's .... incoherent ... overly broad ... full of shock schlock ... and so on.

Put the two together, and you have duelling constituencies of noisy Digg dissers [Ed. Enough with the "ds" already!].

Yeah, I was sort of interested as well, but the pre-release comments I've seen all make the point that this guy was a bystander. He was neither one of the criminal telecom analysts sorts, nor was he really privy to all that much good, juicy venality. Where's the fun in reading that?