I haven't heard any official word on this but the Inquisitr is reporting that TechcrunchIT is dead.  For those unfamiliar TechcrunchIT was the Techcrunch network's attempt at a site focused on the Enterprise market.

I don't want to dwell on this much because I honestly feel a little bad about the last time I posted on Steve Gillmor but for the record this is entirely his fault in my opinion.

From the perspective of someone who runs an IT Department when I'm thinking about the issues facing me in that regard I'm completely, 100% pragmatic.  So the absolute last thing I have any interest in is Steve Gillmor's pontification about Twitter, Silverlight and the future according to him.  If I were an IT professional that didn't already read Techcrunch I would have read one post by Mr. Gillmor and never visited the site again.

(For the Record, I didn't think Nik Cubrilovic's posts were bad). 

If you want to get some idea of what an IT site should be you're better off looking in the vein of Anandtech or Tomshardware.

Addendum: The Site keeps coming back and then going away so it's unclear whether it is done or not.  Either way I think the point above stands.

Sarah Lacy wrote a response to the blogosphere's reaction over Cuil that I thought was very interesting.  For those who don't know Cuil (pronounced "cool") is a new search engine founded in part by a high profile ex-google employee.  When Cuil was ready to launch they briefed high-profile bloggers about the technology and how revolutionary it was but didn't give them an advanced look at it. 

This led to a bunch of blogs writing glowing praise for the startup only to try it and realize the product...for lack of a better way to put it...stunk.  The end result was that many blogs began the day with a post praising Cuil and ended the day with a post bashing it. 

The question Ms. Lacy raises is "who is culpable for this PR disaster?"

So yeah, they screwed some things up. But doesn't part of the blame go to the blogosphere? I'm counting me in that too. I was probably too effusive. Like everyone else in the Valley, I find technology and new companies exciting and Cuil has a great story. But you don't make up for that by then eviscerating a company. It doesn't somehow balance out in the greater cosmic order. TechCrunch says the whole thing was Cuil's fault because they didn't let pre-briefed bloggers use the service. Ok, that was dumb, but take some responsibility!

This is probably the only place where I vehemently disagree with Ms. Lacy.  This is entirely Cuil's fault and in fact they violated what may be the most cardinal rule of being successful which is that you should always try to set others up to succeed.  Regardless of whether the blogosphere is right or wrong they were predictable and Cuil set up a situation in which they were very clearly going to come out looking foolish.  That, to me, puts the blame completely on them.

Ms. Lacy goes on to say...

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn't it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we've got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that's not Cuil's fault. And I don't think it's serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

I don't really disagree with Ms. Lacy here as much as I think what she's saying is of little consequence. 

In my experience, individuals can change how they react to the world but cultures really can't.  A cultural reaction will persist no matter what.  Society might become more enlightened in how they view the world but that only changes what they react to not how they react.

Let me see if I can make that clearer.

The colonies that eventually became the United States developed an aristocracy very quickly.  These aristocrats largely treated the commoners with disdain because those commoners were seen as different and hence inferior.  Then immigrants started flooding in and suddenly the native commoners weren't so strange anymore which led to the aristocrats and the native commoners treating the immigrants with disdain.  Then people with different skin color came along and they were the different ones.  and so on, and so on, and so on...

So what was considered "different" constantly changed but society's reaction to those who were different stayed the same (and has to this day).  Because society's reactions don't change.

In that same sense, you can say (as Ms. Lacy did) that the blogosphere needs to break itself from "having to get a story two seconds before the competitor" but you have to accept that it never will.  She might make that change in herself but the blogosphere will remain the same.  Which brings me back to my point.

If you have a startup and you are getting ready to reveal it to the world you have to plan for the scenario as it is and not how you wish it would be.  The fact that the blogosphere makes knee jerk reactions might be disheartening to an extent but it gives the situation predictability which is golden in PR. 

In the end, the blogosphere's tendency to react is as much a gift as it is a curse.

One of the things that has been interesting about Techmeme is that it somehow managed to avoid the standard blogosphere "cycle of love and destruction"

What I mean is that there is a cycle to every product that becomes the darling of the blogoshpere.  Bloggers tend to (a) fall in love with a product, (b) talk endlessly about said product, (c) start to get annoyed with the product and finally (d) completely turn on the product to the point where they endlessly bash it (even though it remains essentially unchanged from the time when they loved it). 

This cycle has played out more times than I can count over the years with products of all shapes and sizes.  Everything from the iPod to Facebook have fallen prey to this cycle at one point or another. 

That is, everything but Techmeme.

Sure there has been the occasional bias accusation but Techmeme seems to have skipped the attack part and instead simply stopped being the topic of conversation.  That is, until now.  Lately there has been an endless parade of Techmeme bashing (the latest comes from Duncan Riley) seemingly determined to do whatever possible to make the site seem irrelevant. 

This is fascinating to me and I've been trying to determine exactly why this is.  What I've come up with is this...

Blame it On Twitter

As odd as it sounds I think a lot of this has to do with Twitter's downtime. 

Twitter was, in the cycle outlined above, entering into "stage d" as more and more people started to turn on it.  The problem is, in most cases, the criticism being levied in this last stage isn't justified.  Facebook for example hadn't changed when Scoble started to bash it for having a 500 person friend limit he just picked that moment to turn on it.

So when Twitter actually started deserving every bit of criticism levied at it the complainers thunder was stolen.  No one was there to defend it which meant there was really nothing to discuss and that left those who would normally attack it for the next couple months with a bunch of negative energy to expend and no target to expend it on.

Enter Techmeme, an old faithful service that had never been the target of everyone's ire before. 

Gabe's Big Mistake

When someone is trashing you for no good reason the worst thing you can do is give them a response.  That's exactly what Gabe Rivera (creator of Techmeme) has been doing lately and the end result has been an endless stream of attacks.

This is because, whether people are conscious of it or not, they attack to get a rise out of the person they are attacking.  So giving them that satisfaction just fuels the fire and encourages more attacks. 

The referenced Inquisitr post above is the perfect example of what I'm talking about.  I like Duncan Riley, he was always my favorite Techcrunch writer and the number of times I've linked to the Inquisitr in the last few months should indicate that I'm still a fan.  But this falling out with Mike Arrington has really caused him to stray into some unseemly territory and the post he made on Techmeme is clearly a dig at some kind of perceived relationship between Techmeme and Techcrunch. 

So Mr. Rivera choosing to respond to it will just encourage others to write similar attacks in the future

Pay deference to the A-List or they'll make you pay

FriendFeed, despite what people say, is no where close to doing what Techmeme does.  Techmeme is a memetracker while FriendFeed is essentially a RSS Reader with a few nifty features.  It does nothing that Google Shared Items didn't do before it.

Yet over and over again you hear how FriendFeed is taking the place of Techmeme.

But what's interesting about that claim is (a) it's made almost exclusively by A-Listers and (b) it's generally made by those A-Listers that have not been enjoying success on Techmeme lately.  Which leads me to believe the argument is really just an outgrowth of their resentment of Techmeme.

Like the jilted lover who claims he "didn't like his ex-girlfriend that much anyway" these A-Listers denounce Techmeme as no longer relevant because they are no longer the center of it.

So what is to be done?

Honestly I think the most important thing to remember here is that all the blogosphere's past targets are still standing.  iPods, Facebook, and even Twitter are all still going strong and will continue to do so.  If I were Mr. Rivera I'd go out of my way not to respond to attacks on Techmeme anymore (as I said above) but beyond that this is more of a "weather the storm" situation than it is a "proactively do something" situation. 

If there's a lesson to be learned here it's simply that every product that gains focus in the blogosphere will eventually get beaten up by it.  Even if you don't follow the traditional cycle your time will come and you just have to be mentally prepared for it.

I get how you can sometimes feel persecuted in the blogosphere and I get how that makes you feel the need to defend yourself.  But making 11 posts on the same topic in a 24 hour period is overboard.  Particularly when you're just making the same point over, and over, and over again.

The "scandal of the moment" on Sunday was that Google's new Wikipedia competitor Knol is ranking very high in the Google search results even though its only been around for a couple weeks. 

Dare Obasanjo posts on it and runs his own test by searching for a Knol term and finding Knol comes up as the 4th result on the 1st page of Google results.  Upon getting that result he says...

Not bad for a page that has existed on the Web for less than two weeks.

Google is clearly favoring Knol content over content from older, more highly linked sites on the Web. I won't bother with the question of whether Google is doing this on purpose or whether this is some innocent mistake. The important question is "What are they going to do about it now that we've found out?

I repeated Mr. Obasanjo's experiment with another term and got just about the same results.  The Knol page came up 4th after Wikipedia, the MayoClinic and MedlinePlus.  See below...

But there's a flaw in these experiments which is that Mr. Obasanjo and I both used "Featured Knols".    These are topics featured prominently on Knol's front page and which have obviously been viewed, rated and commented on by several Knol users at this point. 

So I tried one of the terms that wasn't "Featured" and guess what?   The Knol article didn't make the first page of listings at all. This is consistent with an unscientific survey Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land did which found that 10 out of 30 Knols he looked at made the front page of Google listings at some level.

But again, look a little closer and you find that all the Knols that did make the top of the listings had several comments and/or positive ratings and how high they were on the search results seemed to be in direct relation to the rating/comment level. 

So clearly Google isn't giving Knol an all encompassing boost.  What seems more likely is that Google has designed several rating mechanisms (Article rating, comments, probably even page views) and is using those to determine which Knols are of high quality and then reflecting that in their search results.

What's wrong with that?

Google's job is not to be fair to web content creators it is to deliver the best results to the people using their search engine.  If they've created a site designed to provide accurate content what is wrong with them pushing more traffic to it?  Again, they aren't doing it blindly.  They've simply built hooks into Knol that allow the Google Search Engine to determine which Knols are of the most use. 

It isn't really fair to other web sites but it isn't really abusive either.  Google isn't doing anything that's contrary to their stated goal of delivering the most accurate information to Google searchers.  I know that, If given the choice between delivering more accurate results to searchers or being fair to webmasters, I'd pick more accurate results any day. 

That's exactly the choice Google's making and I for one don't have a problem with it.

Side Note: I have to say one of the absolutely shocking things about this whole affair is that the three blog posts I consider authoritative on this topic (the two quoted above plus seobook.com's article) don't even mention the rating system as a possibility.  In fact, they don't mention it at all.  Do a word search for the word "rating" on each page and you'll come up completely empty.  That's a little ridiculous. 

I have a couple friends with a booth at the San Diego Comic-Con and they invited me down on Sunday (I actually think it was because they needed someone to watch their booth why they went to events, but whatever).  I've not really been a comic fan in recent years but I was a huge fan in the past and not that much has changed so it was a fun trip. 

The one exception being the beating I took over a post I made on this blog last week entitled "How Numbers Lie: The Dark Knight Returns."  In it I tried to make the point that, while the film's box office totals were impressive the press had made it look like they were more impressive than they are and the film was in fact under performing Spider-Man 3 based on theater counts. 

With the limited amount of data available (one weekend) that was true. 

But what appeared to be a downward trend turned into a record breaking upswing in the week that followed.  The Dark Knight had a very good week.  As of Sunday it should easily break $300 million dollars in total box office sales (by about $14 million) which means it got to $300 million a full 3 days faster than the previous record holder "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" 

That's amazing.  That's beyond Amazing, it's Spectacular, Sensational and any other adjective you can think up.  So I'll be the first to admit I underestimated the film (though in all fairness its run is unprecedented which makes it easy to do so)

So this is me giving the film it's "just deserts" 

To give you the complete picture here's the film compared to Tim Burton's Batman (inflation adjusted thanks to the fabulous service offered by Boxofficemojo).  Anyone who remembers 1989 remembers just how big that film was.  Seeing how much bigger Dark Knight has been gives you a good idea of how impressive the film's run is...

(I also added Dead Man's Chest just for Good Measure)

The New York Times article on Steve Jobs' health is making quite a stir today.  Fred Wilson, who has already made his feelings known on this issue, had this to say...

Steve Jobs is an arrogant fuck who thinks he's above the law. He's also the most amazing technology CEO/entrepreneur working right now. He's way better than Bill Gates (who isn't working anymore) and the Google duo in my book.

Apple and Steve are at the top of their game, pushing the envelope in so many ways. But Steve is wrong to try to hide his personal health from the media, the market, his customers, and his employees.

Steve's health is not a private matter as much as he'd like it to be. Apple's stock is off between 15-20% in the  past 45 days in the midst of one of the most powerful product cycles (iPhone) we've witnessed in the tech business.

On Steve Jobs' Health I'll say one thing and one thing only. 

Steve Jobs has no responsibility to reveal anything about his health BUT Apple has acted irresponsibly here.

This isn't hard folks, Jobs' answers to the board and he has a responsibility to disclose issues to them.  You are not on the Apple board, so he has no responsibility to you.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  Telling the world of a possible problem would only give the competition an advantage making it the absolute last thing he should do. 

With that said, where Jobs' and the board have failed is in allowing Apple to become the "Cult of Steve".  That is really the issue here.

The stock is falling not because Jobs'  has a health crisis but because he's set up no backup plan should he have to step down.

THAT is the point.  But that isn't as much a failing of Jobs' as it is a failure of the rest of Apple's governance.  A corporate system works on the principle that employees are mercenaries in regards to their own circumstance but that they collectively act in the interest of the company.  So while each employee will try to get as much as they can when it is time to negotiate their personal circumstances they will act in the interest of the company when negotiating with every other employee.

Apple's board has been remiss in letting Jobs' run the place like his own personal fiefdom which has now resulted in the outside world thinking Apple has no future without him.  But in that scenario Jobs' was acting exactly like he should as an employee.  It is Apple's board that has really failed stock holders.

The Quick Aside About Quoting Fred Wilson...I quote Fred Wilson because I have a history of commenting on him and this issue and I think his comments here illuminate something about the "Transparency Movement" that's important. 

It is one thing to say "I believe in being transparent" or "I would like to share all my health information publicly" (as Mr. Wilson has said he would like to do).  But it is quite another to say "I demand that same behavior from everyone else"  which is exactly what Mr. Wilson is saying...

The technology revolution that Steve has had so much to do with has changed a lot of things and one of them is transparency. You can't hide stuff anymore. So honesty is the best policy.

So when I speak out about transparency keep in mind that part of the reason I'm so against it is because I know the people who endorse the idea are also those who would demand it of the rest of the world.

A few years back I made the decision to take a month off for a vacation that would "exercise my mind" if you will.  I wanted to soak up some culture and my friends in San Francisco assured me there was no more diverse place than there so I went out to spend the month.

After a couple weeks though I began to realize that not only was the place not diverse  but it seemed to be the home of more uniformity of thought than I'd ever seen (which was impressive in that sense).  In fact, to quote hard facts, in the 2004 election (which was close at the time) the nation was split right down the middle as far as party support but San Francisco only had a 15% Republican vote. 

Bottom Line: People there agree with each other on just about everything, for better or worse.

This experience taught me a very important lesson which is that everyone wants to think they are accepting and open minded but most people aren't.  In fact, actually being open minded is very hard.  Sort of like bending your elbow backwards in that you are trying to force yourself to do something you were simply not designed to do.

Think about it, close mindedness is as much a product of evolution as your elbow.  In a land where humans haven't developed high level thinking yet compromise is impossible.  Which means the only way to survive is by having a group mentality.  Because if you think like your tribe than you'll be willing to fight for your tribe and if you're willing to fight for your tribe than your tribe remains defended which ensures your continued survival. 

The problem is that thousands of years later we are stuck with brains that are designed to form impressions early and then remain entrenched in those positions no matter what.

Which brings me to my quote.  Cyndy Aleo-Carreira wrote an article yesterday entitled "Misuse of Social Media: Social Implies Human Interaction, People!" in which she gave a few examples of what she feels is "misuse".  One example was this passage written by Charlie Demerjiana in regards to the suicide of Eddie Davidson, a spammer who killed his wife and child before taking his own life. 

While it is hard not to feel bad for his brutally murdered wife and child, not to mention his wounded daughter, Eddie's suicide itself is the stuff of happy thoughts. Every deceased spammer is a million fewer in-box-clogging, malware-infested mails a day, so lets tip one back for liberal gun laws.

To which Ms. Alea-Carreira responded...

Yes, by all means, let's tip one back for liberal gun laws that seriously wounded a teenager, killed a three-year-old little girl, and left a 7-month-old baby in a hot truck, dehydrated. I've often suggested stringing spammers up by their toes and letting anyone with an email account play piñata, but I don't recall ever even suggesting that it involve an innocent toddler. Eddie Davidson's death isnt anything that should be celebrated, even if you do consider spammers to be wasting the oxygen they breathe.

What she's missing here is that not everyone expresses themselves in exactly the same way she does.  It's not really acceptable for a man to speak emotionally about a tragedy in many cultures.  So when the author in the quote says "While it is hard not to feel bad for his brutally murdered wife and child" that person is expressing shock and sadness in as deep a way as his cultural upbringing will probably allow. 

In that way the person is expressing the exact same thought as Ms. Aleo-Carreira but they are doing it in a way that is acceptable to a different culture.

As far as "Celebrating Eddie Davidson's death" some cultures believe that is justified.  It's a basic tenet of almost every religion that bad people are put to death for some crimes and while I would agree that Mr. Davidson's crime doesn't warrant death in my eyes I understand there are cultures in which they would feel it was.  Further I understand that those cultures have a right to the Internet just as anyone else does. 

Which is what gets me to my point.  Ms. Aleo-Carreira's point is essentially "I strongly disagree with how these people think so that makes their expression of those thoughts a misuse of Social Media" which in turn is actually saying "People who aren't like me in thought, action and expression are undesirables." 

Essentially its closed mindedness masquerading as tolerance. 

As the Internet becomes more and more widespread you are going to see more and more culture clashes like this.  That fact is both a blessing and a curse.  The curse is that it means people with delicate sensibilities are going to need to either isolate themselves or develop much thicker skin. 

But the blessing is that it gives us all a chance to influence cultures we don't agree with.

What people like Ms Alea-Carreira need to realize is that condemning others culture doesn't do any good.  If you want to influence other cultures you have to accept them on their terms and then try to show them why your way is better.  Not call them bad and denounce them. 

No one ever changed their opinion after being denounced by a total stranger.

For anyone who doesn't know, Randy Pausch delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon that later became popularly known as "The Last Lecture."  The lecture, which was delivered after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he had only months to live, is the story of Mr. Pausch's life and the lessons he learned over the course of it. 

There's a lot of useless junk that makes the Good Morning America/Oprah/Talk Show circuit and my fear is that Mr Pausch, who also made the rounds on all those shows, might get dismissed by many as just another new wave guru. 

He's not.  He's just a good man who has lived a happy, successful life and is trying to impart that wisdom to others.  At only an hour long there isn't much I can think of that would be more worthy of your time.

The lecture is embedded below...

Reading blogs at the same time as actually being an IT person has been sort of like living a double life for the last few months.  On the blog end, you'd think Vista was finally catching on.  Every day there's a new Vista study or survey showing how its making inroads into the corporate market. 

But in my real life, no one has deployed Vista.  Not only that, everyone I know is actively pursuing ways to avoid deployment of Vista altogether.  Making plans instead to skip it entirely and hope for the best from Windows 7 (or in rare cases considering a large scale Mac deployment)

So I felt more than a little vindicated reading the new Forrester study (via Computerworld) that says...

Fewer than one in 11 of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, according to survey results released Wednesday by Forrester Research Inc.

Of the 50,000 enterprise users surveyed by the Cambridge, Mass., analyst firm, 87.1% were still running Windows XP at the end of June, compared to 8.8% for Vista. According to author Thomas Mendel, that implies that the majority of PCs upgraded to Vista were those running older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or 98.

Exactly! 

The reality of Vista is that it would be almost irresponsible to deploy it at this point.  Though technically there are a few improvements I've found that there is no case that can be made for upgrading to Vista in a corporate environment.  There's simply no way to justify the cost of software, deployment, and retraining based on how little it offers.

Let's look at the supposedly compelling reasons to upgrade

Bitlocker: Bitlocker, which encrypts a user's hard drive, is nice but it's technology that falls into that gray area between theoretically useful and actually useful.  If you've ever asked yourself why all these Government or Financial laptops that get stolen aren't encrypted the reason is because any info that's valuable is too valuable to risk losing just because someone lost their password. So if those industries aren't willing to encrypt their entire hard drives what chance does Microsoft have of convincing anyone else? 

Enhanced Network Stack: Big Whoop!  When's the last time you  heard someone complaining about the inefficiencies of their network stack?

Sleep Mode that Actually Works: This I'll give it.  This might be the only real improvement from Vista to XP (though its more bug fix than actual improvement)

New GPO (Group Policy Objects): These basically allow you to customize more settings across groups of users but having looked at the list I didn't see anything that I either hadn't already done or couldn't do using VBScript.  So the question is, if I already have scripts to do the same tasks how much does Microsoft integrating those functions into the OS really do for me?

Direct X 10: Doesn't do anyone any good.  No software developer in their right mind is developing exclusively for Vista so having a version of DirectX that's exclusive just guarantees those features won't be used.

Image Based Install: Microsoft finally integrated a decent image based install system which makes installing the thing faster.  But everyone is already using a third party program to make disk images for their PCs so I don't see what IT professional this is going to appeal to.  Too little, too late on Microsoft's part.

Now lets look at the negatives

• The most compelling features are also available for XP (WPF, Windows Search, etc...)
• It's slow on everything but the very fastest PCs
• It still has compatibility problems (most of our software from custom vendors still doesn't work with it)
• They changed the UI just enough to be confusing
• Security is so obnoxious (with its constant pestering) that you are forced to let users turn it off
• The new driver model means your devices might not be supported or the new driver might still be unstable (Nvidia in particular has had a lot of problems with this)
• It's more expensive than XP was
• It has an even more limited license than XP (in Particular, you can only transfer it once as opposed to XP which allowed for three times)
• Built in DRM (I don't see this as a big issue but I have to give a shout out to the Freetards)
• Many versions have been stripped of features that were standard before.  The so called Premium version for example was stripped of Remote Desktop.

So what have we learned

Basically that Vista isn't worth it.  There are no advantages to point to, plenty of disadvantages and the cost to deploy it (according to my calculations) was around $197 per system.  So the question becomes: Why on earth would any company deploy it?

I honestly don't have an answer to that question