Oh boy. A small New York Times column has dared to say that "For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade." Now the usual suspects are freaking out! About.com consultant (and author!) Jeff Jarvis: "We who publish must learn how to say what we don't know at least as well as we say what we know." That part actually doesn't address the column at all, which is about people publishing things they don't believe to be true and never really saying so. (The two blogs in question, in this case, are Techcrunch and Valleywag, which have always been openly devoted to rumors and have often had unbelievably thin relationships with factual causation and correlation.) I can't help but think I don't want to be on either side of this and I probably don't have to be if I ignore it from here on out.
Monday, June 8, 2009
4
Do Jarvis and Rumsfeld get together for epistemology chats?
“We who publish must learn how to say what we don’t know at least as well as we do not know how to say what we do know that we do not know.â€Â.
Don't know whether kitteh helps the demos skew younger, but I feel like a kid again jes lookin' at it!
I'm pretty sure that Jarvis wrote an entire book about Google without talking to anyone who worked there, maybe without even using the site; so he's definitely an appropriate spokesman for this effort.
Luckily, the Times also just republished that article about how the failure rate for blogs is worse than for restaurants; so who cares if those crazy bloggers don't get their facts straight, they'll have abandoned their crochet blogs by the time anyone notices.
It is really easy to tell a "half baked post" from a fully baked one. Just take a toothpick and stick it in a tiny little hole in your keyboard (any one will do) and if it comes out dry that means it's done.