Reacting to News in a Blogcentric World

 Today the NYT and other papers ran a Reuters article quoting Thomas Rubin, a Microsoft lawyer who went berzerk on Google:

In remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday to the Association of American Publishers, the associate general counsel of Microsoft, Thomas Rubin, argues that Google’s move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.

My first reaction was to expand all the responses in Techmeme and see who had responded and then go to authors I thought would respond in various ways:

Then I selected Don Dodge's piece.  Don is a Microsoftie, but occaisionally calls it like it is. 

And Don says:

Really dumb move!  What are these Microsoft lawyers thinking? Even if they are right, which is debatable, what reaction do they expect from the public at large? This strikes me as pandering to the Association of American Publishers where the Microsoft lawyer is speaking today. Here is a transcript of his speech. The speech is actually pretty good until he drives over the cliff and starts slamming Google.

But the thing that struck me was that I went directly to the blog world and used existing tools to find my entry point into the conversation.  The conversation is truly asynchronous but continuous in this way. 

Usually what I do is then take the comments of these people and then make my own extensions.  Today, however, it's the mechanism more than the soap opera that interests me. 

I have Don and others in my aggregator, but I went through a tool like Techmeme to give the content relevance.

 

Technorati tags: don dodge, context, microsoft, google

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

 

 

Link to Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Microsoft lawyer rips Google on copyrights - Why?

Comments

[Jay Fienberg]

What you are illustrating is an excellent example of how the web changes access to, and even the shape of information.

But, I think describing that information as "the conversation" is figurative at best.

And, at least when other people talk about this information as "the conversation," I worry a bit that they're engaging in a kind-of cultural imperialism, e.g., those who make up the culture of power users of these blog mechanisms assert their structure onto what's actually a diverse and heterogeneous collection of voices (not necessarily intentionally part of any conversation, let alone *the* conversation of the blogosphere).

[Jim Benson]

Yeah, I know. We've talked about this before, last time over brunch I believe.

The question is still ... what else to call it?

I think last time we actually came up with something clever, but that could have just been the Mimosas talking.