

Steve Gillmor's Commenters Revolt - sutro
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/01/27/the-realtime-real-estate-crisis/#comments

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spolsky
har har! I tried to parse ONE article he wrote once. It took several hours and
turned out to be an enormous waste of time. The results are here:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/items/2006/12/...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/items/2006/12/23.html)

What I don't get is why people keep paying him to write this stuff (he's been
doing it for years in InfoWorld) since he might be smart but he's clearly not
a very good writer. My only guess is that the editors who hire him don't want
to admit that they can't understand what he's saying.

~~~
brentr
It's bloated writing. He tries to pass himself off as intelligent, but his
rambling clearly shows this is not the case. When people use big words and
obscure references, it's usually a sign they are trying to imitate
intelligence.

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jwr
I don't get it. So, if he writes crap, why do people upvote him on HN? Why did
I even have to click the article? Don't we have better things to do?

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brandnewlow
I've never once managed to get through anything written by that guy. I can
emphathize a bit with his readers...but then why are they reading him?

~~~
TomOfTTB
His readers, at least the ones that comment, are the only part that is worth
reading. It's actually kind of amazing how they latch onto one word or one
sentence and then wrap their own views around that sentence as a way of
"understanding" what Steve meant.

In the comment section quoted here you'll see several people who claim the
piece made perfect sense to them and was a well written even though any
rational person can see the piece is too vague to definitivly say anything.

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lbrandy
_"If we could interactively configure our screens to reflect our interests,
publish them out via a social graph to our natural affinity and peer groups,
and then test content and information flow against advertising models until we
find the best mix…. The growth would be explosive, the stickiness fly-paper
strength, the incentive for third parties to build and market to power users
an offer they couldn’t refuse."_

Say what now?

~~~
TrevorJ
I get what he is saying, but what I don't get is he's basically describing the
blogsphere as it is right now.

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geuis
I would love to see someone hook up a Bayesian filter and some markov chain
code to Gillmor's collected writings. Then have a free web service with an API
that would allow you to develop Wordpress plugins to automatically have Steve
Gillmore guest-post on your personal blog.

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nrao123
I can actually make out a Steve Gillmor article just by reading the summary on
my RSS feed. Sometimes just by reading the headline. After that I NEVER click
through to the rest of the article.

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TomOfTTB
Whenever I read one of his posts (which is rarely now) I think of this
cartoon...

<http://tinyurl.com/cp5eqz>

Pretty much says it all.

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pclark
blatant use of Datapresser.

