Crikey.
Andrew Orlowski, writing from San Francisco for the UK’s The Register, weighs in on the Dvorak/Cluetrain smackdown, and sends a link this way.
Andrew’s been writing good stuff for publications I admire for years. Before I left the UK, I used to enjoy following his New Statesman and Private Eye work and the occasional piece in the Independent.
This prompts a confusing layering of emotional responses that I’m trying to grok as I write. I dislike some of his remarks on the Dvorak/Cluetrain thing, even where he’s clearly right. But I really, really like other parts of the piece, even if it’s sometimes hard to figure out exactly what he’s saying (comments like: “what we've seen is that the style of the Manifesto is perceived as an attack on the substance of the book itself”, seem to have been tortured and stripped of their original meaning by a sleepy sub-ed).
One of the tricky things about blogging, as Andrew points out, is that the whole phenom is necessarily fuelled by ego octane. And, sad but true: it’s taken me a good 40 minutes to get over the rush of having my blog referenced by a tenured journalist in the esteemed pages of The Register - a site that's been high on my essentials list for a good while. Together with their sister site, The Inquirer, the Reg' should be mandatory reading for anyone in PR.
Soon as I managed to get over myself, I went back and re-read Andrew’s piece. There’s some smart, balanced commentary in here. He does a good job of trying to get past Cluetrain’s self-conscious, deliberately tub-thumping tone to think about the end behind the means. There’s useful contributions to the ongoing self-examination of the blog explosion too – I love the fact that he oscillates between the “blogs are a blip” and “blogs really matter” camps, then ends up admitting that he’s about to participate in the Register’s forthcoming Editors' Blog project at the US version of the site.
Anyway... it’s Saturday morning, I should be playing with the kids. Read Andrew’s piece for yerself – this one’s sure to stir the pot some more.
BTW: Andrew also coins the utterly perfect word for what’s going on here: It's all a load of “Bollogs”. Damn, damn, damn – wish I’d thought of that one as the title for this blog in the first place.
Andrew Orlowski, writing from San Francisco for the UK’s The Register, weighs in on the Dvorak/Cluetrain smackdown, and sends a link this way.
Andrew’s been writing good stuff for publications I admire for years. Before I left the UK, I used to enjoy following his New Statesman and Private Eye work and the occasional piece in the Independent.
This prompts a confusing layering of emotional responses that I’m trying to grok as I write. I dislike some of his remarks on the Dvorak/Cluetrain thing, even where he’s clearly right. But I really, really like other parts of the piece, even if it’s sometimes hard to figure out exactly what he’s saying (comments like: “what we've seen is that the style of the Manifesto is perceived as an attack on the substance of the book itself”, seem to have been tortured and stripped of their original meaning by a sleepy sub-ed).
One of the tricky things about blogging, as Andrew points out, is that the whole phenom is necessarily fuelled by ego octane. And, sad but true: it’s taken me a good 40 minutes to get over the rush of having my blog referenced by a tenured journalist in the esteemed pages of The Register - a site that's been high on my essentials list for a good while. Together with their sister site, The Inquirer, the Reg' should be mandatory reading for anyone in PR.
Soon as I managed to get over myself, I went back and re-read Andrew’s piece. There’s some smart, balanced commentary in here. He does a good job of trying to get past Cluetrain’s self-conscious, deliberately tub-thumping tone to think about the end behind the means. There’s useful contributions to the ongoing self-examination of the blog explosion too – I love the fact that he oscillates between the “blogs are a blip” and “blogs really matter” camps, then ends up admitting that he’s about to participate in the Register’s forthcoming Editors' Blog project at the US version of the site.
Anyway... it’s Saturday morning, I should be playing with the kids. Read Andrew’s piece for yerself – this one’s sure to stir the pot some more.
BTW: Andrew also coins the utterly perfect word for what’s going on here: It's all a load of “Bollogs”. Damn, damn, damn – wish I’d thought of that one as the title for this blog in the first place.
