waffle

Can we get over this? The asinine question: “Is weblogging journalism?” The answer: “That depends entirely on what you’re writing.” If what you write on your weblog is journalism, then your weblog is journalistic.

How come no one ever asked “Is writing on paper journalism?”? Because it’s a stupid question. I suppose I could see some doubt from some who want to dispel the “journalism” part of anything that’s not written on a bunch of dead wood by-products and backed by advertisers, but there’s a word for such people, and that word is “jackasses”.

Asking if weblogging is journalism is like asking if walls are white.

John Gruber has quit his job to pursue his excellent web site Daring Fireball full time. If you don’t know about it, DF is an exceptionally well-written weblog – nay, column – about computing, but mostly the Mac side of things.

Greg Knauss recently wrote after having taken over the also-excellent Kottke.org for a short period that there are two kinds of weblogs out there: linkers and writers. Kottke.org tried a year ago to go full time and largely succeeded, but the salary was indeed a drop and Jason Kottke announced recently that he wouldn’t have more of it.

With no disrespect at all towards Jason Kottke, I sincerely believe that John Gruber and DF will prevail where Kottke.org didn’t. Jason Kottke is an awesome editor. He picks good links, he brings up good points and has an eye for emerging sensations only surpassed by Andy Baio (who is a veritable phenomenon in this field). But when Kottke posts a link, to most people, and in most cases, it’s just a link.

With almost each new Fireball, I marvel at the well written material, at the expansion of tangents where a lot of well-salaried columnists wouldn’t ever see tangents, at the brilliant argumentation and mostly at Gruber’s almost infallible combination of wit, pen, knowledge and intuition. At least once, Gruber’s account of the subject of the week has swayed large swaths of the general opinion and without distorting facts or naming names. There are very few people in very few areas I think higher of than John Gruber’s writing; as Moses was to getting across a body of water without getting wet, so is Daring Fireball to the modern, well-reasoned and subjective Mac commentary.

Increasingly, Kottke.org is up against the collected body of link lists. With things like del.icio.us tag feeds, it’s not as hard as it used to be to catch the rough diamonds. Good writing, however, never goes out of style, and DF has been shown to deliver over time with very few quality dips. (That Kottke.org also occasionally has what you’d call a longer editorial entry and that Daring Fireball sports its own good link list is beside the point because the aim of the sites are vastly different; when Kottke.org was a full time endeavor, link posting increased, and with DF the writing will increase.)

So, I’m not about to ask people to help support Gruber. I remain very confident that Daring Fireball will in short time speak for itself and pay for itself. And I love it.

I thought we left the stage where we acted like five-year-olds.

Extremely important update: DB says he didn’t send the reply email with the picture in it. This changes a lot of things, but a lot of things still apply in this post, so I’m leaving it verbatim with this caveat. (Update ends.)

I like to pretend I know DB a little more than fleetingly. I know that he can be a little less correct and nice than you should in order to prove a point. I guess the best way to sum it up is that he’s not afraid to provoke, even if he’s not confrontationist about it. It’s not the first time. But I have to say that when he posted an image that crashes an image toolkit deeply embedded in Mac OS X, he stepped over the line. (For what should be obvious reasons, I won’t be directly linking to it, but you can hunt it out with Firefox, Camino, Opera (shudder), IE (double shudder) or any Windows/Linux browser not using the same image toolkit – the post is linked from the onlyfirst link in this entry.) He clearly had a choice of putting the image before or after the ‘jump’ to the full entry, and he chose to put it before.

I know that it’s Apple’s fault that the bug is there. I know that it’s a real shame that there are bugs like this in image toolkits. I know that DB has had some grief with similar – and lots of dissimilar – bugs before and has been very vocal about Apple’s Quality Assurance division. I know that, and I respect the fact that the ultimate trigger lays miles away from DB in the depths of Cupertino. But that doesn’t make it right for DB to post it.

That doesn’t give DB the right to keep the image there — had he moved the image to below the fold or simply removed the inline image replacing it with a link after a day or so, I for one — and many others — would maybe have deemed it acceptable. The point would have been proven, and if the image isn’t there to prove the point, by the method of elimination, what else is there to arrive at than that it being there to piss people off, to destroy piled up tabs or browsing sessions, conveniently being able to blame Apple afterwards? DB’s reply to Wincent is definitely meant to piss Wincent off (by attaching the image in question to the mail) – the reply wasn’t entirely unprovoked, but neither was Wincent’s. (Which isn’t to say that it gives Wincent Colaiuta the right to insult DB in person (including a pic of “[his] ugly mug”) – no, that’s in my book just as childish as anything else.)

I understand both DB and Wincent. DB wanted to warn people about the fragility of the system, and Wincent wanted to warn people about what going to DB’s entry would do to them. I still respect both guys, but it’s safe to say neither came away from the problem without a sizable dent in their reputation; DB as a highly potent (very wide reach in terms of readership) and deliberate publisher of things that demonstrably will crash several different apps on your system (and if that’s not malicious, I don’t know what is) and Wincent as the kind of guy who would sink to the depths of very deliberate Ad hominem attacks. And what I want to know now is… was it worth it?