Eric Magnuson

My unique intersection of cooperation, sustainable business and local living economies.



Until I re-prioritize blog publishing, all my contributions to the noise can be found on Twitter.



Saturday, July 01, 2006

Gnomedex and the male ego

I am here at Gnomedex 6.0 at the Bell Harbor Convention Center in Seattle where snark and chest thumping rule. It's a generalization of this audience, however there have been enough moments in the conference where ego trumped style to destroy an interesting dialog. As an outsider to this world of bloggers and deacons of web2.0, there appears to be ample battles being fought between the bloglines.

Today the most explosive exchange came between Dave Winer and Blake Ross when Dave jumped down Blake's throat for not listening to Firefox users, or something. Blake got defensive and mentioned some post Dave had made on his blog about a Firefox feature Blake was involved in and then it just turned into a lot of shouting. It all seemed very male ego-based and very silly. At least they are passionate about something, although I would love to see more passion expressed around issues that actually mean something in the world.

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5 Comments:

  • At 7:04 PM, Anonymous Blake Ross said…

    Thanks for the feedback, although summarizing something as "very male ego-based" isn't something I can really take to heart and try to work on. Can you say a bit more? As I understand the situation, I was trying to lead a discussion about grassroots marketing, rather than a general Q&A with me about Firefox, since the A's to said Q's can already be found all over the Web. Things devolved from there, but more specific feedback would be helpful.

     
  • At 8:16 PM, Anonymous Jon Stahl said…

    At least they are passionate about something, although I would love to see more passion expressed around issues that actually mean something in the world.

    Well, well put, my friend. :-)

     
  • At 8:28 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    "Flame wars" amongst the bit-twiddlers: for shame! I've tried to identify the differences between the store and forward BBSs and blogging and blog networks. It seems as though the most common feature of the BBSs continues to thrive in dweebland.

    So, my questions are: Are there "moderated" blog networks out there? How does one network contrary blogs without inducing flame wars? And is there anything about blogging that makes it more amenable to disciplining the blogger to civility than other "speakers corner" media?

    Have a fun fourth. Remember to remove to a safe distance after igniting fuse.

     
  • At 3:01 AM, Anonymous techly said…

    well, dave has a point. microsoft-bashing will not do good. focus on what really matters.

     
  • At 9:03 AM, Blogger Eric Magnuson said…

    Blake, my "male ego" comment was not directed at you, although my phrasing probably didn't make that clear.

    Maybe the most common features of the BBS world are being perpetuated in blogland because the same people carried the culture forward. I wonder if we see the same flamewar tendencies exhibited in the txt messaging, myspace generation?

     

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