Snappy the Clam

DaveNet : How To Start a Weblog (For Professional Journalists)

or, How to Back Off When You May Be Alienating a Potential Market.

This in particular caught my attention:

It's been cast as an Us versus Them thing, and that's incorrect. It's a new style of writing, made possible by the Web, and by the advancement of software.

I find this statement hard to accept when DW and UserLand themselves have been guilty of encouraging this attitude: look at this, out of John Robb, UserLand's bad cop:

"Weblogs covered the story of Pim Fortuyn's death better than the major media. It wasn't even close."

This isn't Us vs Them? No, all that railing and whining about BigPubs and editing and such and integrity isn't all antagonistic. It seems to me that this change in attitude took place at about the time that the sweetheart lock-in deal with what might be the Biggest of all BigPubs took place. As for integrity, every piece out of anyone at UserLand that is at all concerned with weblogs should feature a large bold disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: UserLand sells Radio Userland, a popular weblogging software package.

This is how it works in, yes, I'll say it, Real Journalism; when the NYT even mentions a tv station they have a stake in, the article features such a disclaimer.

No context, no people just know, no "we're a SmallCo." No. Up front. Or otherwise you have no integrity at all. I mean, Jesus. Dave Winer sells weblogging software. He stands to directly profit from the proliferation of weblogs. How in any way does this make him an objective source on weblogging? He may have domain knowledge, but anything he says is colored by this integral conflict of interest. This is like listening to BigOil on conservation practices, I'll listen to your viewpoint, but by no means am I going to consider it definitive, or even preferable to the "media."

As a matter of fact, I'd say that the tech press may be even more subject to this sort of cronyism: what the hell is John Markoff doing having a social dinner with Dave Winer? How can he then claim to cover UserLand objectively? When Dan Gillmor was using UserLand products to write his weblog on the Merc's site, how could he then be an objective reporter where UserLand was concerned? DW complained bitterly when Giilmor was moved to different software, because he'd just lost a journalist advertising his software for him, which is mind-boggling. It's as though Bic complained in public when Maureen Dowd started using a Parker Jotter.

Not everyone has the short memory that UserLand so cynically counts on.