Sam Gentile, one of the Microsoft .NET developers who recently discovered Radio Userland, is on a nice anti-weblog tirade related to this conversation on Microsoft:

"Where are the checks? Who checks the facts? There were and continue to be totally false things posted by people on a variety of things. Who watches the community? What if someone gets hurt?"

I'm not sure what Gentile's looking for here. People make factual errors all the time on weblogs and every other place conversations occur. Others correct them.

Here's an example: Gentile is wrong about AOL/Time Warner owning the New York Times, Boston Globe, and "the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country." The New York Times Company owns the Times, Globe, and 16 smaller papers, but no magazines. AOL Time Warner owns more than 100 magazines, including Time, People, and Sports Illustrated, but to my knowledge does not own any newspapers. No corporation owns a majority of newspapers and magazines (yet!).

If Gentile's looking for a publishing community in which people are right all the time, good luck. The give-and-take of weblogs lends itself to fast corrections from readers and other webloggers, which is enough of a check against irresponsible publishing for me.


I don't work for Microsoft. Please correct your post.

And I am not on an "anti-weblog" kick. You people just don't get it how foolish you sound. You make Radio into the 2nd coming. It isn't. Get over it.

I didn't say you worked for Microsoft. I said you're a Microsoft .NET developer, and that's accurate. You've been a Microsoft developer for 17 years, according to your recent comments on Mike Deem's weblog.

Let's just stop this now, OK? I am not getting in another battle with people.

Who cares? Microsoft.NET or .NOT Everybody's anti-something. However I can't imagine why someone could be anti-bloggin'. This is the same as "shut my mouth!".

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