Mike has a new puppy called 'Ajax'. 
No more TechMeme for me 
Today, I have dropped my TechMeme subscription. It's gotten dull as dishwater. They ought to rename it TechBizMeme, since it's basically become a place where companies whose business model is based around getting people to click on little chunks of text that they have automatically filtered out of their browsers.
Selling advertising on the Internet is a bit like subsidising the production of the Ford Model-T by putting an ad on the dashboard for equine supplies. My parents have AdBlock installed on their browser. That game is pretty much over now.
Still, I'm glad to see that so many people are living under the delusion that they are working in the technology business, when in fact thay are working in the media business - a business, needless to say, I have absolutely no interest in being in.
If you are in the media business, you need to fully grok the consequences of AdBlock and BitTorrent. You don't have to like the consequences, but I imagine most of you haven't even understood the full consequences of a system whereby anyone can share anything with anyone else without seeing any adverts in the process.
I'm an unabated pragmatist. I value blogs that teach me things. I read the blogs of developers (like Simon Willison and Kevin Marks), designers (Andy Budd pops to mind), entrepreneurs and the full array of academics, standards body types (especially within the Semantic Web/RDF space) and so on. What is really beginning to piss me off is that TechMeme and places like it are becoming a talk shop for people who talk about basically nothing at all. Opinion and fact free analysis spiced up with breaking news of how big company X has decided to put a letter 'i' before their name. Flash! Flash! Breaking news!
Instead of linking directly to the people in the know, we've recreated a reporter class in sites like TechCrunch. Of course, Arrington and friends have built a great business out of this, but the value proposition, for me, of reading TechCrunch versus reading the people who actually do the things that eventually end up on TechCrunch and TechMeme has disappeared.
If you finish reading your RSS reader in the morning having felt like you've learned something, then that is a good thing. More often than not, I feel like ripping my own eyeballs out after reading the utter dross in my newsreader. And the 'pomo' reaction of "well, all the action is on Twitter now!" doesn't bloody satisfy me.
So, some merciless pruning is in order. I used to be on Mike Arrington's side when the Gillmor Gang was on, but I'm on Nick Carr's side now. Way too many of you are talking bullshit. And if you don't stop it, you are getting none of my attention.
