Gillmor Knows Something is Up
|Steve Gillmor Deconstructs Dvorak — (or so he thinks) — I found this on a trackback and was amused to discover that uber-blogger Steve Gillmor, who considers me to be an anti-blogger for some reason, subscribes to the RSS feed of the blog. And he does not subscribe to the more substantial RSS feed of my PC Mag column. I find this revealing. There is something weird about finding someone de-constructing stuff you do. It’s valuable since sometimes I’m unaware of some of the subtleties myself. Some years ago a parodist deconstructed my column Inside Track with an attempted breakdown of the formula. Inside Track is actually written with a formula (it does change from year to year a little) and it was amusing to see if the fellow actually got it right. He didn’t, but he came close. In the case of the Gillmor deconstruction he’s giving me a lot more credit than I deserve. I actually posted the Markoff comment about blogging being like stamp collecting only because when I heard it I thought it was funny. I also knew that JM hates the grief that bloggers give him over his dismissal of blogs. So, in my normal style, I thought the comment would throw some kerosene on the fire. The death of newspapers commentary actually stemmed from a follow-up post I was going to make on the blog about the Craigs list situation and classified ads. I realized I was on to something and ran it as an essay. There wasn’t any real scheme to make Gillmor (or anyone else) scramble around. It was all a coincidence. Then again, this explanation could be part of a grander unified super scheme.
Perhaps Dvorak is way ahead of the curve here. After all, he did get me to read his column, and nailed me for three page views to boot — one from the blog, and two on the PC Mag site. Like the master packager he wants the local papers to be, he separates the content from the come-on, upselling his readers (in this case, via a Rojo attention feed that alerts me to potentially-interesting Web 2.0-ish content) from the blog RSS feed into his page view monitization scheme.
Now, I don’t subscribe to John D.’s column RSS feed. His blog is another story. Perhaps it’s just the incongruity of the effort that draws me toward its feed.
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Note: it’s posts like this that are ruining Google.
