— Del Eastman, a neighbor and fan of Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, feels that my musings on the future of the web inadvertently trampled on his hero:
REF INSTAPUNDIT.COM. I HAVE GLEN BOOKMARKED. I DON’T HAVE YOU BOOKMARKED. I CHECK GLEN’S SITE TWICE A DAY. I DON’T THINK INSTAPUNDIT IS OBSOLETE. IF HIS SITE IS OBSOLETE WHY DID YOU USE HIM AS A HOOK TO GET PEOPLE TO LINK HERE? AND NO, I DO NOT AGREE WITH GLEN ALL THE TIME. MAYBE ABOUT 60-70% AND I STRONGLY DISAGREE ABOUT SOME THINGS. BUT HE IS MOSTLY FAIR AND VERY INTERESTING. I’M A BLOG SURFER AND I DO NOT KNOW GLEN PERSONALLY BUT I THINK I DETECT SOUR GRAPES HERE. I WON’T BE COMING BACK TO YOUR SITE. THANKS FOR THE CHANCE TO RESPOND. DEL/BARTLETT, TN
Del left some additional comments 8 hours later, having a hard time staying away. Another one of Glenn’s fans offended by my asking the question about his relevance was the pseudonymous “Hillary Carter” of the Hoosier Review, a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper. Hillary’s response was to post a picture of herself, which looks hot according to That Guy. Dawson had the nerve to say that he likes Glenn but doesn’t care for his site; I hope that doesn’t result in a Howell Raines treatment. The man’s brave.
Instapundit’s response to this post was the most disappointing of all, because he misread it. Recall that I asked if Instapundit was over, examined some trends, and concluded “not yet.” Insta spun this conclusion 180° and claimed I was asserting his irrelevance, which brought out the Clone Army in my comments section. That’s sad.
As to the trend I predict, consider this analogy: once upon a time, Yahoo set out to index the web manually, establishing a system of categories and assigning as many web sites as they could find into their respective slots. At one time, people relied on Yahoo to help them find content on the web. As the web grew, Yahoo hired an army of monkeys to index the exploding web, and couldn’t keep up. Then along came Alta Vista, with a high-speed automated approach to web indexing that was much more complete, had less personal bias, and returned a lot of junk. Nonetheless, Alta Vista destroyed Yahoo as a search engine, only to be destroyed itself by Google which took the novel approach of ranking sites by the number of links in instead of a simple content analysis.
The blogosphere is at the stage the web was at when Alta Vista knocked-off Yahoo, and I’m looking forward to the time when we have a Google for the Blogosphere.
These things happen, and just as Yahoo found a way to remain relevant as a shopping, news, and messaging portal, I have no doubt that Reynolds will find a way to remain relevant when his indexing skills are no longer needed.