So, Kevin Rose has a blog that he’s taken the time to name my blog, and he begins this post by stating, “I rarely blog, but recently saw this post by Jason Calacanis so I thought I’d share my thoughts.”
Now, I don’t have anything personal against Kevin, but I also don’t like the trash talking that he initiated on this week’s Diggnation re: Netscape. I don’t like to see it continued in his blog post. I also don’t like to see Leo Laporte take a stance on the issue and phrase it as Rose Vs. Calacanis. I just expected Leo to look more realistically at the situation and strip it of the personalities involved.
Here’s the thing that irritates me most about all this: Digg isn’t an original idea. Del.icio.us, Slashdot, and other similar services have been around. Kevin Rose has commented on this before on Diggnation, and also commented numerous times, rather amicably how he doesn’t have a problem with “digg clones.” It’s not an original idea, but it is the best marketed of these types of sites out there. Now that they have a large footprint and a large community (something that they haven’t had since day one of their launch; why do they continually point out Netscape’s developing community as a ‘flaw’ of Netscape’s?), they are getting unnecessarily defensive and have started mudslinging, rather than addressing the issue at hand: is there value in paying top contributors and people who have a talent for cool-hunting?
Here’s the other thing that I don’t understand about all this, and, forgive me if this sounds like it’s mudslinging. I’m really not trying to go that route, but Kevin’s post brought me back to a thought I have a lot when I see Kevin acting like we’re ripping him off and when I see people defending digg ad nauseam in a knee-jerk fashion without really looking at the issues involved: Why does the entire Internet seem to think that Kevin Rose is the saviour of the Internet when he’s a former TV personality and he “rarely blogs”? How can someone who rarely blogs really be in touch with what’s going on on the Internet? I guess, social bookmarking can fill part of that practice, but it seems so stripped down compared to blogging. With how hyper-critical a place the Internet can be, I don’t understand why more people don’t pick on this point.
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