Maybe I should have gone to bed - or, Duncan Riley's reasoned response to Louis Gray

I was re-reading Corvida's post (yeah, the one that tangentially mentioned me) and noticed a comment from Todd McKinney, which read in part:

I’m still convinced that this review was primarily linkbait. As such, it’s one of the most effective campaigns I’ve seen in at least the last day or so. The story stayed at the top of techmeme all day.

I responded, in part:

I haven’t read enough of Riley to know whether this was intentionally linkbait...

Then...and only then...did I take a peek at Corvida's link blog, which linked to this Matthew Ingram post, which linked to this Duncan Riley post. Here's how Riley begins his response to Louis Gray:

So I started another bush fire, at least among the growing list of self important so-called A listers who would happily crucify anyone who dare question their favorite startup of the minute.

I say A-List somewhat lightly, because the guy who’s come after me is someone who’s called Louis Gray. I’ve been blogging a bloody long time and for a lot of that time I’ve been reporting on the movers and shakers in blogging, and until a couple of months ago I’d never heard of this guy.

Riley then pulls an Alexis Kouros. He quotes from Gray:

Duncan Riley checked in with a quasi-analytic comment this morning

Riley's response:

Notice the put down with “quasi-analytic,” lets not fight on ideas, lets denigrate the messenger.

I would hope that I would not get bent out of shape if someone referred to one of my writings as "quasi analytic." Hmmm, I just said the following to a well-known person:

The paper talks about a “Return on Influence,” but doesn’t really provide evidence of any such return.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised if that well-known person were to reply as follows:

Ontario Whimperor, I've been blogging about social media for a long time. How dare you, a D list blogger whom I've hardly ever heard of before, and certainly not one of the movers and shakers whom I usually cover, dare to question my masterpiece, especially when you couldn't write a social media white paper if your life depended on it?

Actually, I would be surpised if that well-known person were to reply in this way. But let's return to Duncan Riley's point by point analysis of Louis Gray's post. Gray said the following:

FriendFeed is not the exact same thing as any service out there, and there’s no way that Duncan could have given the service its full due in his limited exposure to it.

For the record, Riley's critique of FriendFeed was based upon a single day of use, with little use of the "comment" feature and no use of the "like" feature.

Riley's response to Gray's point?

That’s right, I forgot, I’m a complete retard who is completely unable to come to any conclusion unless I’ve used a service for as long as Gray has. Wanker.

Eventually Riley addresses the concern, raised by others, that it's probably better to offer comments in the original source of the material (e.g. Twitter, a blog post) than on some type of overlay. However, Riley chose an interesting way to present this argument:

So now we have a fancy RSS feed with comments. Note that the comments follow from a headline link, no content. [insert drag queen here] oh but you can have a conversation darling [/drag queen], and this appears to be the part Gray thinks I’ve missed because I haven’t participated. Here’s the thing Loiuse....

Hmm, maybe this is linkbait. It worked for me, I guess.

But moving on to Riley's not commenting on anything or liking anything, this is what he said:

Correct, I didn’t “like” anything because when I want to comment on an item, I’ll do it at the source, like the vast majority of people would. If it’s a Tweet I’ll reply on Twitter. If it’s a blog post, I’ll leave a comment. Why the fuck would I want to use a third party service? Why...would I want to comment on a Tweet on FriendFeed? Or is it that I should just because he says so? Pass the bong....

FriendFeed is a decent enough service, but it’s not the second coming of christ no matter how much Gray pitches it.

Well, I haven't checked FriendFeed to see what comments are there yet, but it appears that Riley has received some comments on his own blog (as he prefers). And it should be noted that Riley did not receive condemnation from 100% of all commenters. Take Ken, for example:

I used to read Louis Gray’s blog before as I thought it was objective and covered various services well.

Then he became completely obsessed with Friendfeed and every second word on his blog was Friendfeed. Quite frankly if I wanted to read so much about Friendfeed, I would read their own blog.

After seeing him jump down another blogger throat for having his opinion on a service, I am removing his blog from the list of blogs I follow.

And there were others that agreed that FriendFeed was not the cure for cancer, and several criticisms of the A listers who are promoting the service.

And as for the others...I won't say it. But, based upon what he wrote in this post, I seriously doubt that Riley will follow my suggestion:

Perhaps you could revisit the topic in a week or two and revisit your observations.

After all, as Riley said:

I’m a complete retard who is completely unable to come to any conclusion unless I’ve used a service for as long as Gray has. Wanker.

Perhaps we should continue the discussion...um...at the FriendFeed entry for Riley's post. Heh.

[LATER ON 16 MARCH: PERHAPS ANOTHER RE-EVALUATION IS IN ORDER.]

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

Sphere: Related Content