This whole uproar over Jason Calacanis quitting blogging has to be one of the most ludicrous bitchmemes / bitchfeeds ever. I was going to go back and read over all of this stuff from the past couple days, but then I realize what a complete and utter waste of my time that would be.

Calacanis is quitting blogging and has started instead to spread his thoughts on an email list -- yes, an email list. This is 2008 let me remind you. He sent the first one out today. I didn't sign up because I don't want and/or need any more emails than I already get. Plenty of folks have reposted what he said on their own blogs however (big surprise there) and Steven Hodson has a nice breakdown of the bullshit.

Allen Stern thinks this is all just to spread the word on Mahalo. Maybe, but more it's just silly. And what's sillier is how much we are all talking about it both in the blogosphere and on FriendFeed (yes, I realize that with this post I now am as well - funny how that works, huh?).

Blogs are not dead, blogging is not going to die. Calacanis will be back blogging in a few months time. Just wait until there is something he feels like he needs to talk about and actually wants people to hear. Do you think he is going to use a mailing list with a thousand people on it? No.

From the things I did read, he has some fair points, but they are points that have been discussed ad naseum about comment trolls, etc. That's the Internet, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good far outweighs the bad so you deal with it.

With all that said, ladies and gentleman, I'd like to announce that I'm quitting blogging and will now send messages via carrier pigeon only. If you'd like to receive one please put out some bird feed for my pigeon in your backyard.

In my earlier post about talking about FriendFeed on FriendFeed, I for some reason left out one of the central points I intended to make: that I fully expect to see a lot of the weekend Bitchmemes that used to take place on the tech news aggregator Techmeme, move over to FriendFeed - where people can really bitch about something to their heart's content without having to do something as cumbersome as writing a whole post about it.

I think we really saw that this week led by CenterNetwork's post on FriendFeed follower patterns (Allen is exactly right by the way, which made some of the other posts about how quickly the big guys are gaining followers just look kind of silly).

There was a huge FriendFeed discussion on that post. A huge one under Scoble's "Participation Premium" post. Along with quite a few others.

And so ladies and gentlemen a new weekend getaway is upon us: the BitchFeed.

See you next week when the topic of discussion will no doubt be how awesome FriendFeed was during the iPhone 3G launch. Followed the next day by how overhyped the iPhone 3G is on FriendFeed.

You can find me on FriendFeed here, feel free to bitch at me/with me.

While the first two rules of Fight Club may be that you do not talk about Fight Club, I think the first several rules of FriendFeed are that you must talk about FriendFeed.

I was mostly off of the Internet the past day or so (I know, gasp), so I decided to jump back on and check out FriendFeed's "Show best of day" feature to see what big items people were talking about. 7 of the top 10 are directly about FriendFeed. At least one other is about Twitter with much of the discussion below it being about FriendFeed.

Now I love FriendFeed as much as anyone else - and have since October of last year - but this is pretty ridiculous. And I think we all know it's like this pretty much everyday.

It would be silly for me to bitch at everyone to stop writing about it - after all, I know full well that I'm one of the worst offenders for writing about FriendFeed between what I write here and on VentureBeat. And I realize that this very post is a continuation of that problem.

Instead, maybe we can get an option for a "Best of" minus talk of FriendFeed? It could be as easy and excluding all items that include the word "FriendFeed."

I realize I could hide all of those items that I don't want to see, but that would take too long to do every day - and honestly, I do want to see those a lot of the time, I just want to option to eliminate them all if I'm looking for something more substantive.

I also realize that this "best of's" are tailored for each user, but I'm willing to bet that most of this people reading this post right now are seeing the same thing.

While this will probably be less of a problem as time goes on - there are just a lot of new people on the service right now and they're excited about it - even now on sites like Digg and Techmeme we often see the most popular items being about those sites themselves. I would love to just have an option not to see those sometimes.

There is some great stuff out there to be found on FriendFeed, it's just surrounded by layers of meta discussion fat. "Best of" is a particularly useful way to view FriendFeed, but it needs noise filters just like everything else.

You can find me on FriendFeed here.

Internet - Can we please stop with the FriendFeed murderous meme?

Over the weekend it was that FriendFeed is going to kill Twitter - which won't happen. Today it's that FriendFeed is going to kill Google Reader - which won't happen. The simple fact of the matter is that FriendFeed doesn't have to kill anything or anyone to be useful. In fact, it can easily be argued that both Twitter and Google Reader make up a good part of FriendFeed's usefulness as it currently stands. You do, after all, need something to talk about.

I really don't get Loic Le Meur's post at all. It starts out with the following:

It [FriendFeed] has almost totally replaced Google Reader for me, h ere is why:

-instead of making me use Twitter less, it makes me tweet even more, because I know it also goes to Friendfeed and I will get comments there. I must admit I start to like Friendfeed comments more than @replies in Twitter, but I read both.

That has absolutely nothing to do with Google Reader and several of the other points are only very loosely related to Google Reader in that I think he's saying it should be more about conversations.

Okay, that's fine, but if there were to be a conversation about every single feed item I have in my Google Reader (thousands everyday), I would be completely overwhelmed. It would be nice to have a feature to maybe turn conversations on and off, and maybe we'll get something like that in the future, but for now there is no way I could use FriendFeed to replace Google Reader.

And really, the point is that I don't need to - their overlap is pretty small for me. I find great stuff on FriendFeed, but I still find much more stuff on Google Reader. They complement one another for my information intake.

Sometimes I worry that users like Le Meur and Scoble are building up FriendFeed too quickly, setting expectations too high, too soon. It's a great service, one of my favorites, but it's not the end all, be all - at least not yet.

More importantly, lets stop suggesting that FriendFeed is going to kill every single service that it imports data from - you just know a "FriendFeed is going to kill Del.icio.us" is coming next. Or maybe FriendFeed will kill Seesmic (Le Meur's start-up); it too pipes in data from there after all.

FriendFeed is not out to kill anyone. If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.

I already posted a pretty long piece on the whole Twitter/FriendFeed bitchmeme going on, entitled "The only thing Twitter has to fear, is Twitter itself", but I could go on and on about this for a long time.

I understand the convention behind the FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-COMPANY is going to kill FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-COMPANY - hell, I use it too sometimes, but I really think those who feel FriendFeed is going to kill Twitter are missing the point of both services.

Twitter does one simple thing: provide 140-character updates, messages, links, etc - FriendFeed does another: pull in your data from various sites, allow for conversations about said data. True, you can post to FriendFeed, and that is sometimes very useful, as FF clearly realized it could be when they first tested it out with FestivusFeed as a joke, but FriendFeed simply does too much else to make it useful in a way that Twitter is currently used.

I am happy that FriendFeed has caught on enough that such a conversation can take place. As I said last December in questioning why more people aren't using it:

I'd be surprised if FriendFeed doesn't catch on in 2008.

That is proving true. As is the comparison I made back in October after FriendFeed first launched in beta to Facebook's News Feed, which is now trying to do part of what FriendFeed does -- and I wouldn't be surprised if it soon adds the ability to comment on Feed data.

All this debate about FriendFeed and Twitter would be over in a second if Twitter would just goddamn work already. I'm still holding out hope for one of my 17 predictions for 2008, that Yahoo will buy Twitter (#16). Those two need each other right now. Wouldn't it work great with FireEagle too? Come on Yahoo, do it.

So obviously the Ars Technica story yesterday blew up pretty big, pretty fast. Arguments have been made back and forth and various sites have written it up as well. Quite frankly I'm just happy it's out there on a larger scale now - whether you believe Ars is ganking ideas or not, I hope you're more likely to watch for it.

I still have yet to hear from Ars directly on the matter, but one of their writers did comment to me by way of FriendFeed requesting a parley of sorts around the time of MacWorld. I have absolutely no problem with that, I'll talk to anyone, it will be good to put an actual face to this mysterious Ars, which right now may as well exist as Opus Dei in my mind.

Mathew Ingram wrote a post today on the topic today trying to balance both sides (he emailed both me and Ars founder Ken Fisher). A comment Mathew ended up making after a very level story was the thing that struck me most:

"For what it's worth, I have also started hearing from other people about similar occurrences -- and not just one or two mistakes or slipups, but a consistent pattern (or what appears to be a pattern) of such behaviour. I'd just like to say that if Ars is doing that sort of thing deliberately, it's a pretty crappy thing to do -- what does a link cost a site like that? Nothing. And yet it can mean so much to the site that gets linked."

So either there is a conspiracy out there against Ars, or they are in fact, taking part in certain practices that have raised the eyebrows of many.

The conspiracy argument is kind of odd because cui bono? Who benefits? Ars Technica is a big site, but it's hardly the biggest site out there, so it's not really a take down Goliath situation. Yet for a lot of people, when you talk about ganking ideas, Ars Technica comes up above all others.

So I'm glad we'll be meeting. Even if they continue to skirt around the issue of doing anything suspect in the past, at least perhaps I can be an influence to change their ways in the future, hopefully I already have - whether they'll admit it or not.

But I'll continue to be on bullshit patrol until then. (Which, by the way, is a big pain in the ass with their restricted goddamn feed. Anyone know a way around that?)

Ars Technica is really good at stealing other's ideas. Plain and simple.

Anyone else, and I may have given them a pass that they came up with what seems to be the exact same approach to a story that I took last week. Not Ars Technica. They've done this before. To many people. Many times. I'm hardly the only one who has noticed it.

Last week, I saw Apple 2.0 writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt's story that used a graphic of the world he found in The Mac Observer forums. I saw the map and thought of one thing: the game Risk. As such I wrote a short article on VentureBeat on Friday with that as the main crux: The iPhone is winning at the game of Risk.

Today, Sunday, 2 full days later, Ars Technica comes back with an article, with their own picture dubbed "iRisk." The opening paragraph talks about how the map, which they made their own version since I'm sure they didn't even both to ask the real map's author permission to use his (which both Philip and I did), reminds them of the board game or world domination. I, naturally, don't even get a link.

You may think, big deal, so you had the same idea. It's bigger than that. Here is what I truly believe Ars does on a regular basis (and coincidentally, I've had this conversation with a few people right before this happened, and all three fully agreed.):

Ars sees a news story. They sit back for a few days and let everyone else weigh in. They take the best of those ideas and craft a post out of it. The stories often look well-crafted because of this. Many of them hit the frontpage of Digg (this one probably will too).

They wake up on third and everyone assumes they got a triple.

I've tried in the past to go about calling them out in a nicer way, but that time is over. I'm sure they'll try to claim they didn't see my story. Whatever. If this was just one or two or 12 incidents maybe I would buy that. I'm not buying it now. Ars Technica is bullshit.

[UPDATE]: Well the response to this has been huge to say the least. While some of the comments have been negative, the majority have been overwhelmingly positive.

Much more interesting however is the emails I've gotten. I'm not at liberty to share many of them, but lets just say A LOT of people, well respected and well placed people working in the industry out there have the exact same thoughts.

One message that is perhaps not so shockingly lacking is anything from Ars. I did notice that at least one of their writers started following me however on Twitter. I've been warned numerous times that they would try to come at me stating they are the AP or Reuters of the web, and that they aren't a blog and don't have to follow blogging standard practice. If that happens I'll laugh and let you know.

[UPDATE 2]: (I wrote this in a comment below but figured I'd move it up here too)

Let me just be clear on something. The linking is really somewhat of a secondary issue here. I realize that Ars linked to Apple 2.0, as they should have. The issue is that Ars routinely takes other site's angles on stories and writes them up as if they were their own.

Sure, linking is the way this is deemed acceptable - and I would not have complained if Ars had linked to me - but many splogs link too. The real issue is a larger one as I see it: Ars sitting around and waiting for other sites to write stories, then publishing their own a few days later with the very same ideas.

Yes, they may link to the originator of the news (from what I hear they've been told many times to do so and have gotten better at it), but they are very often not linking to those whose ideas about that news they take for their own.

Some of you seem to want to let them off the hook just because you see the presence of a hyperlink in their story.

[UPDATE 3]: In a comment on IP Democracy's post on the matter, Ars is now saying they wrote their post on Friday but decided not to publish until Sunday. Okay, maybe next they'll claim a timestamp of 12:01 if I say I wrote mine at 12:02.

Though I still have yet to hear from Ars, I'm seeing a lot of varying excuses from them on this matter via 3rd parties sending me info.

They can make excuses and claim ignorance all they want. The fact of the matter is that A TON of people have all recognized the exact same pattern of behavior from Ars, and instead of acknowledging it and attempting to do better, they make excuses and talk down to people. Again, bullshit.

[UPDATE 4]: And for the record here is the other site in question that talks about iPhone Risk. It is actually a really cool site, and one that I honestly didn't see before it was in the comments. I wish I would have, I certainly would have linked to them. To that site: I'm sorry you got caught in the middle of this, but hope you're getting some decent traffic.

I kind of like what the term "Bitchmeme" has evolved into. Most of the time it's not quite so serious, it's just a way to explain everyone talking themselves in circles about something rather silly. But there is and always has been something more meaningful behind it: the absurdity of bloggers constantly bitching about other bloggers and the way they do things.

I'm not going to give any examples because that would just turn this post into bitching about other bloggers too, and there really is nothing specific I have in mind here, but I think most of you will know what I mean. There are a lot of examples out there.

I see people left and right complaining about the way one site does things, or who writes what. Then we have those who try to tell others what they should write, and what's worthy of a post or story. It's all nonsense.

In my opinion the sheer act of bitching about what someone else is doing, whether that be in a post or in a comment or via Twitter or FriendFeed, etc, is far worse than whatever the supposed infraction was. The bitching party also has to realize that while they may not find whatever it is they are bitching about of use, someone else might.

And really, even if no one else in the world does, who cares? Why bitch?

I think of the scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt is arguing with Ed Norton in a diner trying to explain that his material life is stupid. Then Pitt just stops and says "Do what you like, man."

Everyone should do what they like. Who is anyone to try and dictate what someone else does? If you don't like the way an author writes or the way a site runs things, don't read it. No one is forcing you to. If you think Techmeme is an echo chamber (the subject of the initial Bitchmeme post), don't read it. No one is forcing you to.

These posts and comments that offer nothing but to bitch and attempt to instill their beliefs - they're tiresome. They do little but distract from any kind of real conversation about an actual topic. Instead people get all worked up about what that person is saying and a Bitchmeme is born.

I really don't want to see Bitchmeme evolve into a full-fledged Bitchosphere.

Who says old school media companies still just don't get it? I do.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch had arranged to rent out a theater in San Francisco tomorrow night to show Marvel's new film Iron Man to 600 of his readers. He paid for every seat in the theater and then put up a post directing readers how to sign up (paying $1 to make sure people would actually legitimately want them). It went smoothly, me and several people I know were supposed to go.

A few hours later, TechCrunch gets a cease & desist letter from Marvel stating the showing was unauthorized -- even though Arrington had called the group sales lines on the website to set the whole thing up. He was told to take down the post immediately and contact the lawyer who sent the very terse letter.

Now, I don't know all the legal angles at play here, but I assume Arrington does, he is a lawyer after all. But just from a pure PR perspective, this has to be one of the dumbest moves in recent memory on the Internet for a mega movie's opening weekend. They were basically getting 600 fanboys to come see their movie, and thousands more buzzing about the event if they couldn't make it. These folks, myself included, probably would have provided plenty of free PR whether it be via blog post, IM, Twitter, etc.

So now I'm thinking either a) the movie sucks or b) Marvel is very stupid or c) both.

I had been very excited for Iron Man too.

Bitchmeme on.


UPDATE 4/30: The show will go on! Marvel blames Oracle who apparently has an event at the theater at the same time and thought the TechCrunch readers (The Sharks) would break into a melee with the Oracle invitees (The Jets). Sure.

I'd like to think that being near the top of Techmeme most of the night as well as consistent coverage on Twitter and FriendFeed helped the cause. That, or Arrington's $2,000 in legal fees...

My fellow Twitterites, our long international nightmare is over. Well, not really. But we did get Twitter to at least acknowledge the problems they are having in a meaningful way - both on their blog and in a little yellow box on the site as I suggested a few hours ago. They're even now posting updates to the story on the blog and provide links in both places to the GetSatisfaction forum.

Had Twitter just done this a few days ago, the issue may have not gotten so big. Sure, people still would have bitched up a storm - but I probably would have written only 1 post instead of now 3. I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but this makes me wonder if Twitter just didn't hope that no one would notice there was an issue. Of course when their API is sending out data and sites like FriendFeed are pulling it in correctly, it would have been fairly obvious to everyone after a few days - as it has been.

Speaking of conspiracies, what is up with this? Ian Lamont of The Industry Standard tried to login to his account earlier and kept getting prompted to download a parislemon.json file. A commenter of his had the same issue as well. Is Twitter after me? Are they sending my JSON data file to unsuspecting users in an attempt to silence me?

I cannot be silenced! At least not until Twitter is fixed and I'm too busy using it rather than writing posts bitching about Twitter.

Quite a few of you saw my post from last night about Twitter's failure. Quite a few of you have noticed that it's still going on. We're about to enter day 3 of Twitter FAIL and still aren't getting a whole lot from Twitter about it.

Yes, Twitter did in fact acknowledge the issue yesterday in the GetSatisfaction forum. But one problem with this is that most Twitter users have no idea there is a GetSatisfaction forum. Would it not be a good idea post about that on the Twitter blog - if not post about the problem itself? Or even better, how about one of those little yellow boxes you now love to use on the main site to alert us to the issue?

And yes, Twitter does have a twitter_status account to update on downtime. The problem? Neither this nor the GetSatisfaction info have been updated for over a day. (Also, is anyone even seeing the twitter_status updates in their stream?...)

The real problem here is that it's not clear there is any problem. It's not like the site is down. It's just not working correctly. You shouldn't just leave a broken site up with no explanation that it's broken.

As The Last Podcast says, talk to us when things go bad. This is a communications breakdown.

PASS: I pointed out something that went wrong with FriendFeed once on FriendFeed - not only did they fix in within minutes, they actually acknowledged my note and told everyone what the issues was.

FAIL: What Twitter is doing.

If this problem spills over into tomorrow - or worse, Tuesday when the huge Web 2.0 Expo starts in San Francisco, expect a world of pain for Twitter. If they would simply acknowledge and update the users it might not be so bad. Otherwise we're going to see Bitchmeme taken to a whole new level.

Follow my updates on Twitter here. Not that you'll see said updates until they, you know, fix Twitter.

TechCrunch has taken the Techmeme Leaderboard and extracted the top authors since the beginning of this year. Not surprisingly, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is #1 with Erick and Duncan of TechCrunch coming in at #2 and #4 respectively.

The rest of the top 10 is filled with likes of people I read everyday. Dignan, Blodget, Kirkpatrick, Ricker, Ingram, Savitz, and Stern.

My colleague Eric Eldon at VentureBeat comes in at #29 while Matt Marshall comes in at #71. Dean Takahashi (now with VentureBeat) also comes in at #62 with his work from his previous site.

You might recognize the guy coming in at #34 AND #38. I'll just note that when you add his stats together, he comes in at #7. Right behind Kirkpatrick, right ahead of Ricker. [update below]

I kind of like the dual listing though. It's like Cate Blanchett getting nominated for two Oscars this year for two different pieces of work.

[UPDATE]: Henry Work, the author of the article, is recalculating the list to account for authors on multiple sites. And it looks like I'll be coming in at #8 as Caroline McCarthy is actually on the list three times. Impressive.

[UPDATE 2]: With the post not even up an hour yet, Gabe Rivera has already predicted this as the new Bitchmeme. I am positive he will be right.

[UPDATE 3]: And upon further review, Henry says I get no love, I will remain a on the list twice as two separate people. Though accounting for ties, they have moved my #39 ranking for ParisLemon up to #38.

[UPDATE 4]: And as Gabe thought, this meme is now the #1 on Techmeme. I even have my own new shiny headline right under the TC post, which I believe puts me in sole position of the #38 spot - take that Paul Miller!

It seems like there have been quite a few Bitchmemes this week, but the one from yesterday/today about Andrew Baron (founder of RocketBoom) auctioning off his Twitter account takes the cake.

Part of me is thinking: Who the hell would buy someone else's Twitter account? But then I think I know who. Someone who either a) is really lonely b) wants the small amount of publicity they'll get from being the first to buy a Twitter account or most likely c) someone who wants a way to easily spam the followers Baron has accumulated.

No matter the reason, I find the whole thing a bit silly because I am simply going to stop following Baron's account. Sure, some people will either not know or care that Baron sold the account, but if whoever buys the account simply keeps spamming their new followers, they will lose those followers. Twitter isn't mainstream enough yet for its users to be as naive as they might be with some other services.

The bidding is already up to $1,125. Insane.

Even crazier though is that I think Baron has gained a lot more followers on Twitter since the auction began (which he says is now in question because of a possible eBay TOS violation).

This kind of reminds me of the the Digg user who auctioned off his account in 2006. That was basically a one-time deal (I'm not sure it even ended up happening) and hasn't happened again (as far as I know).

There is a larger issue here, which Chris Brogan and Mathew Ingram talk about, what does it mean in the social Internet age if your community is for sale? But really, as time goes on, what isn't for sale? It's situations like this that remind us the value of the 'remove' button.

There was a lot of early hype that it might be about Fav.or.it, but I think this week's Bitchmeme has to be bloggers' commentary revolving around the 'Writers Blog Till They Drop' article The New York Times wrote today.

Nearly everyone has weighed in on the topic now including Om Malik who recently had his own serious health scare, which was at the very least not helped by obsessive amounts of blogging. Over at VentureBeat, I found it humorous that Dean wrote a post on the issue just a day after he said goodbye to all of us at the office as he left for vacation - he just couldn't resist.

While Om's piece on it obviously has meaning given his experience, others see this topic as a serious low blow seeing as how Russell Shaw recently passed away while on a reporting trip.

As Steven Hodson says:

"I’m sorry but this is some of the stupidest, lamest and idiotic headline grabbing piece of trash that I have seen in a while. It might be a headline one would expect from National Enquirer or even The Globe"

The headline is pretty extreme, but it certainly got the blogosphere talking about the topic. The obvious key here is that it's important not to be too obsessed with any career/hobby you have.

Blogging might seem a perfect target since most of us are sitting all day staring at a screen, but really everyone should try to eat healthy and exercise unless you want to increase your risk of a serious health situation down the road. I try to go to the gym at least every other day in between 5+ hour sitting sessions. I also like to stand up and type whenever possible.

Bitchmeme is healthy and will live on...

A weekend is never complete until we have a Bitchmeme. Now Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera even takes to announcing them on Twitter, something which I am particularly proud of.

Instigator of the latest Bitchmeme, Mark Evans, doesn't feel it's really a Bitchmeme because his story has value -- to which I say, Bitchmeme does not discriminate. No one said a Bitchmeme always has to originate with something stupid; I feel like it's just some topic that gets everyone all in a tizzy and eventually has them talking in circles -- and perhaps most importantly, gets some people talking out of their asses.

As such, today's "Original Blog Thought" is a Bitchmeme.

It's actually not all that different either from a Bitchmeme that took place in January, started by Steve Rubel's post on the "Lazysphere". The key issue? Is the blogosphere becoming too much of a "me too" factory of posts on the latest tech news, and should it be about more original ideas?

And actually it's technically not even Mark Evans who started this Bitchmeme. As Mark mentions, it comes from a post Ed Bott wrote last week in defense of another of his posts, which I labeled as a Bitchmeme in and of itself. This is really all the same extended Bitchmeme that has just taken periodic breaks.

Mark Evans lays out some very good reasons as to why we see this me-too blogging. Others such as Dave Winer, are the ones who really turn this into a Bitchmeme by using Evan's post as a launching pad for dictating what should be written about on blogs.

That's not to say all Winer's points are bad, but at the end of the day who is anyone to dictate what anyone else should be writing about?

A lot of folks (myself included) write about the biggest stories in tech on any given day. I'm not sure I see why this is a problem. I try to give readers the story and offer my perspective on it. This is what I like about Techmeme beyond it being a good source of tech news -- it's a good source of various opinions on the tech news. I like knowing what Frederic of The Last Podcast has to say about something -- like this Bitchmeme -- I also like knowing what writers like Mathew Ingram have to say on an issue. If there is someone not offering anything new, or I don't care to know their opinions, I simply don't read it - yet others may disagree with my assessment, and it's still good to have it all there laid out for a reader to decide.

Of course original thought is important, but not everything has to be 100% original. We would have run out of music and movie plots a long time ago if that were the case.

There are still plenty of bloggers, thousands, millions, out there writing up original content on a daily basis on just about anything you can imagine. If that is what you are looking for, go read that. It really is that simple.

So while it's good to think about why there is so much me-too blogging going on, I don't find it particularly useful to bitch about it. But again, that's just my opinion and maybe others find that to be a good read.

Hell, I got another Bitchmeme post out of it.

For more of those, look here.

Oh boy here we go again. As if one Bitchmeme wasn't enough for "Apple-Auto-Checked-The-Box Gate", Ed Bott sees fit to weigh in on the topic today with what can only be described as a dissertation on why Windows is awesome when it comes to updates. Great topic for a few thousand word piece! Zzzzz.

It's not even that I entirely disagree with what Bott and other's are saying - yes, Apple should make updates opt-in - it's just the fact that this is such a stupid thing to go and on about (especially days after the initial blow-up), and now a lot of those pent-up Windows folks are using it as a platform to proclaim the "evils" of Apple.

Take Bott for example. He speaks about how he bought his wife an iPhone almost as if it were like giving a Jewish grandmother a crucifix for Hanukkah.

"I helped her set it up, gritting my teeth at the mandatory installation of iTunes on her PC , but accepting it and turning on Apple Software Updates to make sure she keeps up to date on the many, many patches for iTunes."

Bott no longer has teeth from too much gritting and apparently patches are a bad thing - no real surprise in his line of thought there given how quick Microsoft is to patch various problems (slow).

He goes on:

"So I was stunned and angry when I saw Apple Software Update pop up on her PC last week."

Stunned AND Angry. He's right. This is a travesty! Something to get really upset about.

"Ironically, an excellent model for how this update program should work already exists. It’s called Windows Update, and it embodies all the principles that Apple should follow."

I was just thinking the other night what a model of perfection Windows Update is. It's just so imaginative - especially when it used to crash my Windows work computer about once a month. Brilliant stuff.

I'll stop there so I don't bore you to death, but know that is only a few paragraphs into a story of about 20. Then of course there is the comparison image gallery (which I can barely decipher what Windows is asking you to do in most screens). It's enough to make any Apple user cry.

Ed - I have a fix. Pay close attention, it's a little difficult. UNCHECK THE DAMN BOX. It takes one second.

As The Last Podcast points out, there was a mini-Bitchmeme of sorts today on Techmeme. Everyone was going crazy about Apple "making" users install Safari with their iTunes update (as if un-checking a box were so hard). Naturally I wrote about it over at VentureBeat - if only to poke fun at it. However there is something much more interesting to the story.

Engadget dug up an Onion article from October 3, 2007 that predicted March 21, 2008 (today) as a date of Apple backlash!

Does anyone else find it a little odd that an almost complete BS story bitching about Apple hits the pinnacle of Techmeme on the day The Onion set aside nearly six months ago?

Spooky.

By now everyone has probably read Mike Arrington's piece/rant on blogs raising money, the inevitable rise of blogging networks and the politics associated with such things. I'm not going to say much on it, but I do have a few thoughts as someone who has made the jump from a personal blog to one of the larger blogs. This is of course my own perspective and in no way indicates how others I work with at VentureBeat feel.

I think Arrington makes some great points, namely on the blurring line between blogging and business as well as the politics of linking. That said, I'm not sure the end game here has to be a massive "dream teaming" of blogs into super networks. I completely understand why that makes sense, but I also thinks it runs somewhat against the principals of blogging. That, of course, leads to another debate, which Frederic mentions, as to what is blogging vs. what is more traditional journalism -- something which I am getting to know more and more about.

When I was writing the majority of my thoughts here, at ParisLemon, some other writers and myself did have this whole B-list group thing going on as Louis Gray mentions. But it was never anything formal, and there were certainly no rules on linking to one another or anything like that. We all just sort of gravitated around the same stories and it was interesting to see one another's perspectives on things.

I think that is the innocent side of all of this. Perhaps Arrington is right that if we all were to get larger and more money was involved, it would have gotten political and things may have potentially grown sour between some of us - it's probably naive to think that wouldn't have happened in some regards despite the fact that a lot of that stuff is awfully petty and really distracts from interesting conversations. Still, when it is your livelihood, it is your livelihood.

Exactly why we need a Bitchmeme.

A few people have asked why I didn't weigh in on the whole FriendFeed debate today - basically Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said he didn't really understand why FriendFeed was exploding in popularity while Louis Gray told him he was missing the point of the service. Well first and foremost I'm busy with my new gig, but also I've said what I had to say quite a few times now.

I've been using FriendFeed since sometime around the beginning of October last year. Back then it had far less features and was still in private beta - but I still could see its potential - exactly what it is reaching right now. I was even surprised back then that Google bought Jaiku (which they still have yet to do anything with) instead of FriendFeed - which of course was started by a group of ex-Googlers.

Back in December I wrote a post entitled "You Should Probably Be Using FriendFeed" in which I stated:

"I really like FriendFeed and quite frankly I'm a little surprised that more of the "regulars", those tech users who seem to be on every service, either don't use it or don't talk about it often."

As so here we are. People are just now sitting at the table, but I've already had my dinner.

And of course remember that Prediction #7 for 2008 was that social aggregators would be huge. Naturally I mentioned FriendFeed first in that category (though they do go far beyond simple aggregation now).

I think this debate may qualify as another Bitchmeme - whew it's been a while!

Well it's 2008 now, but it's good to know that one 2007 tradition will hold steady: "Bitchmeme". Today Steve Rubel - who is a great blogger that I have followed since I started blogging - asks if tech blogging hasn't become a "lazysphere" in which people are content to write little blurbs on a topic to simply get on Techmeme or possibly even Digg.

In certain cases I think that is a very true and fair point. Anyone who simply copy-and-pastes a line from another blog, maybe adds a sentence of their own and then links back to them would certainly seem a good candidates for the "lazyweb". But I think it's important to differentiate between those and the rest of many of the writers frequently on Techmeme. As Steven Hodson and Mathew Ingram point out, many of us are out here trying to add value to a discussion - even if we are not necessarily always the source of the discussion. Maybe many don't agree but I find going to Techmeme and finding many familiar writers weigh in with different opinions on topics to be interesting. If I don't like a particular writer, I don't read them.

The fact of the matter is that if no one discussed topics someone else has already brought up, just about everything would get lost in the ether of the Internet. It's these very discussions that can sometimes bring about change such as we when many of us write about the displeasure with certain elements of Google Reader's new social direction.

Furthermore, as I pointed out in a comment on Mathew's post, while I certainly do get a lot of value from original posts, I do still find it important to comment on big stories which I have an opinion on. Aside from opinions, I think it's also easy to forget just by looking at Techmeme that many of us have many other readers outside of Techmeme - should they not see some of this news simply because they don't read Techememe?

So while I agree with Steve's assertion that certain elements of the tech blogosphere are becoming fluff and lazy - I think it would be wrong to hold all of those found on Techmeme under that umbrella. Sometimes a strong opinion is no less important than an original thought.

Other 'Bitchmemes':

• The Fight Over FlickrFan, the Last Great 'Bitchmeme' of 2007
  
• The Case for a 'Bitchmeme'