— Doc Searls, the Linux dude, reports that Scripting News is taking dead aim on Glenn Harlan Roberts, who’s apparently been pounding his chest again about traffic:
Someday Glenn Reynolds will be shocked to find out that he’s not the darling of the bigpubs anymore, then someone else will be blustering how they made him obsolete. It won’t be any more true then than it is now.
I hate to see all this animosity between people like Winer who’re obsessed with technology, and I mean that in a good way, and people like Roberts who’re obsessed with, um, other things. But one of the inevitable, recurring developments in tech-driven media is the emergence of massive ego after an accident of history puts a good-enough guy in the right place at the right time. If there was a way to bottle that and sell it, I’d be rich.
Winer does see one benefit to the rise of technically illiterate blogs — he’s not hated quite so much by the tech crowd any more, and given that he’s actually quite bright, it’s good that techies can work with him without being too put off by his personality, or more accurately, lack thereof.
It’s inevitable that technologies leave the tech reservation as soon as they’re sufficiently useful, often to the annoyance of their creators. But the interesting development in blogging today is the emergence of what I call “cross-over bloggers.” These are the rare people literate in both tech and the fuzzy realm of politics, public policy, and culture. There was a huge increase in their visibility post-Sept. 11, and it’s pretty much a given that many such people are blogging now, or will be shortly. This promises an interesting evolution for the culture as a whole.
I suppose Eric Raymond might be considered a cross-over blogger, since he’s involved in open source software, the second amendment, and the Playboy philosophy. But given the fringe nature of his doctrines, he doesn’t rate very highly on either the tech scale or the culture scale. There are others who make a more nuanced mesh, like Steve Den Beste, Bill Quick, Bjorn Staerk, and Charles Johnson, so it’s not impossible to beat the C. P. Snow rap that tech and the humanities are separate worlds.
UPDATE: Winer and Harlan Roberts kissed and made-up on the phone, so all’s peace and love again at the antipodes of the blogosphere, not that their hassle was ever really the point.