Yoghurt
A recent blog by my friend Richard Taylor crystallised some thoughts I'd had about Steve Gillmor of "The Gillmor Gang." The Gang is a great podcast - a bit like jazz, it can meander through long dull periods but then come to passages of extreme intensity. Steve's writing can be like that too. Richard says about Steve's writing:
So what is Steve trying to do with "Bill's Gold Watch"? Is he trying to create a new Journalism? To me, it reads more like poetry. Even if it does not make complete sense, it sparks off thoughts and associations, and that appears to be the intention."Bill Gold Watch" was a classic. As is the more recent "Blame Friend Feed" which contains the great sentence
In other words, an errant API project sucking Track clouds out of the Twitter core finally reached the critical mass necessary to hip Jack, whoever that is, to the reality that without the XMPP real time gateway, Twitter could just as well be FriendFeed without the siloed conversation spamyards.Brilliant. And perfectly clear to those who understand it. And perfectly opaque to those that don't. Joel "Nobody I know can understand a thing Steve Gillmor is talking about," Spolsky even wrote a commentary on Steve's notorious "Bad Sinatra" post. I can see that in a few years, English Literature PhD's will start churning out the Steve Gillmor theses.
And Mike Arrington? He's the John Cage of Blogging and "Twitter" is his 4'44".
Who said yoghurt was the only culture in California?
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2 comments:
Good post. I agree entirely. In fact I called the Blame Friend Feed piece a piece of Anti-Journalism in the comments.
Richard - clearly great minds think alike. But seriously, I don't think Steve cares about being an anti-journalist - he seems to be happy with addressing only the audience who can understand him / put up with him. By the way, I understand some people didn't think van Gogh was so hot while he lived.
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