Another Quiet Day

Why Shel Israel Needs to Pull the Stick out of His Arse

Shel Israel wrote:

You raise the issue of Seth Finkelstein, whose blog I had not read until you pointed it out to me. Thanks for referring him to me and I will subscribe for a while. Maybe he will keep my interest and maybe he won't. Like the rest of us, if Seth wants to be an A-lister, he needs to not just do the right mechanical things, he needs to interest enough people enough of the time. He needs to have readers enthusiastic enough about what he has to say that they link to him and talk about him and catch his passion and get valuable information and insights on things they care about. In short, he needs to be relevant.

---

He is referring to one of Nick Carr's frequent, and vastly entertaining, link-trawling efforts where he picks apart minute inconsistencies in the ideological spiel that guys like Israel machine-gun into the "blogosphere."

What is annoying about his response this time is that he completely ignores the fact that Seth Finkelstein has been writing on the internet for years and has been active in fighting censorship and bad laws for an ungodly long period of time.

In short, his accomplishments are far greater than those of an idiot-blogger like myself and yet he seems to have earned no respect from "A list" types such as Shel Israel just because his technorati rank is in the multiples of thousands. (The "A list" is an archaic concept anyway and will be irrelevant when the "blogosphere" splinters into tiny, ad-targeted niches, each with their own top dog.)

Anyway, the short, eleven word version of this entry would be:

Nick Carr, comedian. Seth Finkelstein, smart. Shel Israel, boring.

Update: Shelley, over at one of her new weblogs The Bb Gun deals with this whole thing in a much funnier and much smarter way than I ever could (arse just doesn't have that subtle something when it comes to intelligent commentary).

Second Update: You really also should read this. Kinda changes some of the things, no?

Baldur Bjarnason – 23/8/06