waffle

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.