Blogebrity

Forbes trashes blogs; Steve Rubel, Xeni Jardin, Dan Gillmor, and Metafilter trash back

Now Forbes says blogging is the new lynching [bugmenot]. The article itself is less heinous than the sidebar, Fighting Back:

BUILD A BLOG SWARM. Reach out to key bloggers and get them on your side. Lavish them with attention. Or cash.Earlier this year Marqui, a tiny Portland, Ore. software shop, began paying 21 bloggers $800 per month to post items about Marqui, while requiring them to disclose the payments. Marqui’s listings soared on Google from 2,000 to 250,000 results. Never mind that one blogger took the money and bashed a Marqui marketing strategy anyway.

Steve Rubel points to competitors’ better coverage:

Forbes, I am very disappointed that you chose to take such an unbalanced POV when BusinessWeek and Fortune told us both sides of the story.

Xeni Jardin ups the ante:

Why they omitted “gouge their eyes out with forks,” “clamp electrodes to testicles,” or “ship them to Gitmo by the crateload,” I don’t know. C’mon, take the gloves off, you pussies!

Dan Gillmor calmly takes the article in hand and shreds it into neat little strips:

One sidebar, attacking a pro-Linux blogger, inveighs against bloggers’ alleged attacks on free speech because they complained about journalism they found wanting. This could have been an interesting story to cover, but Forbes turns something fairly subtle into a cartoon. One of the problems with the story the Linux folks were attacking was some unsupported innuendo, which the Forbes piece actually repeats in an especially slimy way. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that the Forbes reporter has a long history of jabbing at the open source folks.)

Metafilter takes home the gold, or would have if Pamela Jones had been the author of the article and not another subject:

ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn’t liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger’s access anyway

Yeah that’s a fucking great idea.

Sidebar
Who is Pamela Jones?

A complete douchebag

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Friday, October 28th, 2005 at 7:58 am and is filed under Featured, Feuds, Steve Rubel, Xeni Jardin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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