Pioneer copy-cats

— Commenting on the mud-wrestling between warbloggers and the Font Kiddiez, WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis says: Nick Denton calls the feud developing between pioneer bloggers and warbloggers. It’s a simple case of the pioneers being jealous of the attention the newcomers are getting. Jeff’s right about the jealousy part, wrong about who … Continue reading “Pioneer copy-cats”

— Commenting on the mud-wrestling between warbloggers and the Font Kiddiez, WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis says:

Nick Denton calls the feud developing between pioneer bloggers and warbloggers.
It’s a simple case of the pioneers being jealous of the attention the newcomers are getting.

Jeff’s right about the jealousy part, wrong about who the pioneers are. Among the Warbloggers we have several who’ve been logging news, culture, and politics on the web longer than Font Kiddiez Kottke, Winer, Blood, Searls, and Nutmeg: they would include Ken Layne and Bill Quick (since 1995), Tim Blair, Matt Welch, Emmanuelle Richard, Ed Mazza, Jason Ross, and Tony Pierce (since 1997), as well as yours truly, class of 1994. Jealous, yes; pioneers, no. But the Font Kiddiez have spent an awful lot of time and energy proclaiming the fiction that they invented weg logs, on Dave Winer’s web site, in Rebecca Blood’s forthcoming conspiracy book, and on Denton’s web site:

People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.

I suspect that Denton knows better, but likes to stir up the shit so he can sit back and enjoy the show; Winer, Blood, and Hourihan have a different set of issues.

Update: this snarky post by Font Kiddy Matt Haughey lays bare the confusion:

The original post that brought it up, though heavily exaggerated, doesn’t sound like the book will really cover blogger’s views of September 11, nor communicate the great power of weblogs and the good things they did for a lot of people that day.

See, Matt, the purpose of the book isn’t to rustle up some business for Jason, Dave, and Ev — it’s to bring some excellent expressions of human reaction to tragedy to a larger audience than the weblog-reading public. If you weren’t such a brat, you’d already know that.

I suspect that what the Font Kiddiez have in mind is something like their book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, basically a Unabomber-with-a-modem melange of brainlessness trying to look brainy. Think Al Gore drunk and you get the picture.

6 thoughts on “Pioneer copy-cats”

  1. Nice misrepresentation of what Matt was trying to argue. Reread his post: he’s arguing that the book’s selection seems limited and unrepresentative of the whole blogging community, and that it appears that the book is leaving out responses that do not coincide with a certain perspective. He could be mistaken, for all I know, but that’s not snarkiness, and that’s not being a brat. But then who needs logic or facts to make an argument?

    I think warbloggers have more issues with the so-called “font kiddiez” than vice versa.

  2. What people were doing prior to 1998 doesn’t have much bearing on the history of weblogs, because that’s the year the weblog — the bastard child of link lists and daily journals — started to appear. If publishing a personal page with links on it in 1997 or before made you a weblog pioneer, we’re all pioneers.

    As for the rest — “nutmeg,” “brat,” “kiddiez,” etc. — grow up.

  3. Now now my children, whom I created in my image. It is I who created the first ‘blog, as I have created everything else. How else would I pass on the details of my daily life to you? Where else could you have learned of me and everything else? On the seventh day I rested and blogged about my work week. Now stop manifesting your frustration from your lack of penile girth and length and bow to my magesty.

  4. Jerry makes a good point that my Font Kiddiez group hides some real divisions between elves (the builders of websites who have no particular insight into the world we live in,) scammers (the people who brought you the dot com bubble,) and True Believers (the Cluetrain crowd, who earnestly believe that DSL will set us all free from the clutches of rapacious capitalism.) But even that set of categories doesn’t really capture Dave Winer, who is, as far as I can tell, simply an asshole with too much time on his hands.

  5. he’s arguing that the book’s selection seems limited and unrepresentative of the whole blogging community

    Believe it or not, I understood that, and that’s why I think Matt’s full of it: the editors have no obligation to fill the book with crap just to make it “representative” of somebody’s view of the web. It’s about a historical event that took place off the web, for God’s sakes. If he can write something genuinely worth reading, he can get in, and if he can’t, he can’t.

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