Nice tools. Morons.

I certainly didn’t read the Business 2.0 article Blog Nation (I’m no longer naive enough to think I’ll want to read anything a print journalist writes about blogging), but after ruzz pointed out the rather impressive fact that they were actually clueful enough to have heard of BBT I did look at their list of weblog tools and services. Oops, there goes their one clue.

Among their useful tools are things like EditThisPage.com which they claim is a free Manila hosting service (in fact, it has been forwarding to ManilaSites.com for months, and ManilaSites has been saying “sorry, full up” for most, if not all, of that time), or the eGroup (remember eGroups? I do, barely) for web logs, which died on April 12, 2000, or Joe Clark’s anti-librarian howto on getting an ISSN for your weblog, which was very much the thing to do in 2000, or the link to NewsBlogger, which is a bit questionable since it hasn’t really worked since August 2001, and hasn’t worked at all for several months now, (the description of Blogger’s Search, which has worked for maybe two hours in the last year, is also nice: “Is often unavailable due to maintenace, code tweaking, etc.”).

Unlike my usual quibbles with articles on blogging, which tend to involve interpretation and nuance, this is clearly a case of yanking someone’s ghost page of links (probably from late 2000 or early 2001), running a link checker over it (all the bad links go somewhere, they just don’t go to the places the article thinks they will), and throwing in a few new things. At first I thought that the two descriptions with dates (12/00 and 1/01) were a warning about how old they were, but now I think they were probably the “new!” links in the list originally. Along the same lines, I thought Business 2.0 was supposed to be “new!,” but now I’m thinking 2.0 like Windows 2.0. Even in these dark days, it really should be possible to have an intern actually follow all the links you are putting in an article, just to make sure that they actually go where the description claims they do.

6 Comments

Comment by ruzz #
2002-04-17 01:03:11

i think whats important here is that they need not go beyond the first link, which works :)

heh.

 
Comment by KafkaesquĆ­ #
2002-04-17 03:41:57

I think what’s important is knowing a little of what you’re writing on. Would we take serious an article about ENRON from a reporter who knows nothing of the financial bunglings behind the scenes, or an examination of problems in the new Afghani government from someone just off the Topeka want-ad desk?

I’ll always remember when Ted Koppel (ABC’s Nightline fame) did a report on the Internet and the DANGERs lurking there, and stated right at the start he knew less about this then his kid. I nearly blew cola out my nose, and wondered why his kid wasn’t hosting then. Imagine him saying something like that before a political interview. Not sure why it’s continually tolerated for technical pieces.

Eh, sorry. This one hits a hot button for me…

 
Comment by Tim #
2002-04-17 03:56:39

This is what happens when you ask a blagger not a blogger to write the piece: hacks like this get paid to fill space. Let’s face it, most papers and magazines exist to sell advertising space. The copy is just filler. It’s a disgrace but it happens every day on every topic in every paper.

 
Comment by Peter Scott #
2002-04-17 06:15:04

I’m collecting other news stories about weblogging at:

http://www.lights.com/weblogs/inthenews.html

not that I think that they are particularly interesting or useful…but just because I have to index everything!

 
Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2002-04-17 08:59:02

Maybe I should try looking at them professionally, as a cataloger, rather than as an enthusiast. If all I had to do was say ”650 0 $aHyperlinks$xUnintended targets” they might be easier to take.

 
Comment by ruzz #
2002-04-18 02:32:49

googlebot googlebot.

 
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