David Emery OnlineDaring
20 April 2006
I’m back.
I hope you all missed me.
So, let me see… what have I missed? Remarkably little, really. Google have finally launched Google Calendar, and by all accounts it’s a type a google launch, as opposed to a type b; i.e. it’s good, like Gmail, not bad, like Google Page Creator.
I think the two most interesting stories of the last week are blogging based – the image to the right may give away the first one:
John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, has given up his day job to concentrate full time on writing the mac/geek/computing site.
Bravo! Well done! Go give him money!
He’s one of the best “pundits” out there – very rarely does he write a word I disagree with, and I think it’s incredibly brave of him to go chase the dream in such a public fashion.
The utter flip side to the Daring Fireball story is what’s going on on Scoble’s Blog – Robert Scoble, Microsoft blogger and normally a reasonable read (after you filter out the Microsoft propaganda), has now got someone else writing his blog for him.
What?
The whole situation is mighty odd, and I find the whole “guest blogging” thing strange whatever blog it’s on, but coming from someone like Scoble, who’s normally pretty darn savvy when it comes to blogging etiquette it’s almost worrying. I don’t think guest blogging is officially rude yet, but it really should be – certainly frowned upon, at the very least. It severely damages the inherent trust you have with your reader, which is only amplified when RSS comes into play.I subscribed to Scoble’s feed, which hence implies I want to read post’s by him. If I wanted to read post’s by someone else, I would subscribe to their feed instead.
If I put my cynicism hat on for a minute, I’d say that Scoble may have got a little sick of blogging – if you look at some of his latest posts you’ll see what I mean – and needed to take a break, but wasn’t allowed by his Microsoft superiors to leave his blog fallow for a week. Certainly Robert’s blog has done an incredible amount to boost Microsoft’s credibility in recent times, so I think this theory bares more weight then most Microsoft conspiracy theories do.