December 23rd, 2006

Gillmor-speak gets redacted into minutiae-as-clarity, for once

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:59 am

Categories: Intellectual Property, Podcasts

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There's this great blog interpretation/expose by Joel Spolsky where he redacts Steve Gillmor's latest blog post, which is ostensibly about Jonathan Schwartz' recent blogs. Dave Winer's, too, I guess.

But, because the post is pure Steve, nothing is ever quite as it seems: Hey, there goes an eight-foot white rabbit down a hole, and, man, is he late!

Steve has clung tenaciously to the semi-accurate technology elitism-through-opaque-references schtick for years and will probably never stop. All he needs to do is keep a wee bit ahead of the curve, and for the business to change every six months (as it has), and he's fine. Anything more than 40% accurate in hindsight is pure-gold punditry. His score is often better. (Some day the alchemy may actually arrive for sufficient legal tender to emerge from the neo-hype cum roadkill expository process.)

Yet this once-in-a-lifetime chore by Spolsky shows just how powerful Steve's world can be. He just needed for the blogosphere to arrive so that the lack-of-message finally had a medium. Back page of InfoWorld just wasn't the quite the right fit. And so on; in reverse. (Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! Bullwinkle, again?! … .)

Joel says he'll only undertake this three-hour Rosetta Stone-type chore once, which is a shame. Because if Steve had such a stream-of-consciousness translation wetware widget on an on-going basis — he might actually double his audience to 854 — but they would be the most important 854 people in history (and they damn-well own their meta-data that proves it).

What's truly a hoot in this clarity-check is that a developer is behaving as an editor for an editor who is trying to behave like a developer. Only in the blogosphere … Happy New Year, Steve.