...maybe life isn't a journey to uncover new truths in far off places, but instead to simply gain enough to experience to understand what is all around you, all the time.
-- Matt Haughey, Advice
December 2005 Archives
Doing some last minute shopping in the mall yesterday I saw something that made me cringe -- a Johnny Damon uniform shirt in Yankees pinstripes. Having Damon go to the dreaded Yankees is bad enough (and only reaffirms why I hate pro baseball), but having his new uniform shirt on sale just days after his signing is nothing short of startling. Merry Christmas New England!
From an email my friend Pete Cuce sent. Reprinted with permission:
People that like to bitch make time for it.
Yesterday I made a post to my business weblog with some rough thoughts on the TypePad outage. I had some additional observations that didn't make it into that post I'm going to write up here. These are rhetorical questions that I find fascinating to look at.
Why does the blogosphere think Six Apart sucks so much? We all suck. I suck. You suck. Software sucks. For some reason though it seems Six Apart is at a different level when it comes to ridicule. Why is that? Even people that have never used their tools take pot shots at them. Granted they've made their fair share of mistakes. Take last week's outage for example. Om Malik reported that a number of other hosted applications suffered outages last week. WordPress.com was down for some time as was del.icio.us, gone for most of the weekend. All of these outages are unfortunate, if not annoying, yet you'd be hard pressed to find these others receiving a fraction of the rants that are aimed at Six Apart. The difference in intensity is pretty startling.
Why is the WordPress community so vocal, bordering on vindictive, when it comes to Six Apart? This might be related to my first question, but I've noticed that the WordPress community is pretty aggressive in kicking Six Apart when they're down. Take the comments in this post (the suggestions to use WordPress.com is a bit amusing given they had their own meltdown last week) and this post for example. Why is this? If you are a MT or TypePad user of any stature, make a post griping about your tool and see how many WordPress users show up in the comments. See how many other blog tool users show up. The difference is also pretty startling.
What's even more fascinating to me then all of this is that despite years of "MT|TypePad|Six Apart sucks" rhetoric the company still continues to grow and thrive in leading the market.
So what's the lesson to be learned here?
Commenting on the application of "desperate heuristics" to make sense of feeds like RSS, Phil Ringnalda adds:
In Atom, doing so is equivalent to gathering up everyone who spent years enduring the endless arguments on the mailing list, and urinating on them.
Brilliant! Well put! The original post about some Atom tests he ran and additional comments are here.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Winston Churchill
Having read Mena's speech at Les Blogs and follow-up comments this quote seemed an appropriate one. She may not have been the first to talk about civility or etiquette, but she makes some good points. If we all believe that blogs are a powerful tool then we must all think before we shoot. All too often that restaint seems lost by the best of us.
