Hidden in plain sight
I'm having a surprising amount of fun writing this blog given that no one is reading it. It's like the pleasure I get being told by Fred Wilson, who I admire tremendously, that my no link theory is crap. He's basing this on a response to Robert Scoble's account of a conversation he had with me over dinner a few nights ago. Of course Robert didn't link to Fred, so how he entered the conversation is one interesting datapoint, as is his assertion about me, which is embedded in the comments where no link is even possible.
Speaking of comments, I notice one in the penultimate InfoRouter post from Matthew Rothenberg calling me out for a cheap shot I took at a former colleague at eWEEK.com. In turn this comment generated a post by someone (apparently a friend of Matt's) that explicitly names the editor in question while supporting Matt's thesis that I was fired because I stopped producing enough content. Since Matt is the guy that fired me, he should know.
But the irony again is that I am being called out for a cheap shot against another editor (guilty) who I specifically did not name but identified as being in the San Francisco office to make clear it wasn't anyone else such as Matt or Jim Lauderback or Eric Lundquist or any of the other fine people at Ziff Davis. Then through this trail of crocodile tears by Matt some other guy directly identifies the guy who I called out as lecturing me about journalism. (Pausing for breath)
All this, and nowhere does it seem that Matt gets the point that by personifying this he is demonstrating my point (in the original post) that certain folks at the time at Ziff didn't and don't get how pathetic the page view model is, and how poisonous to the creation of content. Simply put, one more time: writing that values people's time will eventually push out older models that operate by attracting, extending, teasing, breaking it up into multiple page views, capturing yesterday's headline with a two-graf supplement to "keep the audience informed" and other tricks of the trade that ultimately converge on meaningless as competitors raise the noise level above the value of each individual "news" piece.
Again, the irony is that not linking, or not naming, or not denigrating personally but rather professionally ends up producing a shitstream of the exact opposite. Vive la Internet.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:54 am
If people are interested in what you write they can find you. I am sure there other readers…
August 4th, 2006 at 10:16 am
I don’t know about no one.
August 4th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
whaddaya mean nobody is reading…Oh, you mean nobody that matters…the irony.
August 4th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
I am reading your blog Gillmor.
August 5th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Steve,
One more time, with feeling:
1. Nobody fired you because you weren’t producing enough page views.
2. We fired you because you weren’t updating the blog we’d contracted you to produce.
The rest of your argument is a big stream of smoke, and citing others for your failures is unworthy.
m.
August 5th, 2006 at 10:56 am
speaking of linkage…Mathew, why does clicking your name fling me to caranddriver.com?
August 5th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Steve - It appears that gestures of the past will follow. How will this affect our behavior in a gesture economy?
BTW - I’m reading. Love the gang.
-HB
August 6th, 2006 at 7:34 am
Ha! It was really stupid of me to fill in that field without explanation, Jeff.
I’m actually out of this whole Ziff fray anyway now — in May, I became online editorial director for Hachette-Filipacchi’s Men’s Enthusiast Network, of which the biggest brand is Car and Driver. (Other brands include Road & Track, Popular Photography and Premiere.)
I’m working overtime to make these sites look and behave better and (ironically or not, Steve), to leaven HFM’s focus on page views with some other approaches.
Sorry about that bait-and-switch, Mr. Schwartz!
m.
August 12th, 2006 at 8:05 am
I’m here because Hugh Macleod claims to have been bribed to send people here.
But I still wouldn’t be here unless I’d experienced a couple of ‘Identity Gang’ recordings. Great stuff.
August 13th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Is it me or is the writing here absolutely microscopic? That puts me off reading anything, although I imagine the RSS feed works just great (a great benefit of RSS :)).
August 14th, 2006 at 2:22 am
Hah! You’ve got a lot of gall bitching about websites that make readers wade through crap, then you split up your podcast into multiple sections so your listeners have to wade through the ads three or four times, instead of just once.
Pot. Kettle. Black. (I’m still a faithful listener, despite your gesture of contempt for my time.)
August 20th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Eric: You’ll notice that the content of the podcasts always starts with that music and then the talking, so you can just fast forward past the commercials till you hear the music, then walk it back a few seconds.
I assume that’s why Steve tolerates the way he puts commercials in is that he assumes we all just fast forward past them anyway.
August 21st, 2006 at 5:43 am
I am not reading your blog