Thursday, November 3rd, 2005, 3:12 pm
The Enemy is Inside
Filed under:
Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)
OBERT Scoble is a well-known Microsoft evangelist and blogger. He has recently set up a free blog in wordpress.com, which is of course based on Open Source software. I decided to ask him what he was up to. I was highly skeptic as he made this questionable migration of his popular blog and heavily-requested feeds. Earlier this week I sent Scoble an E-mail and got a disappointing reply; both of which I post verbatim below:
Me:
You are of course aware that you run your blog on Linux while evangelizing Windows. Hypocrisy?
Robert:
No.
An evangelist must be credible if he wants to be listened to.
The only way to be credible is to actually use other methodologies and products.
You must have evangelism confused with marketing. The two are not the same.
Rather than being critical of Open Source or PHP/MySQL, he implicitly revealed devious intentions; at least that’s the way I interpreted it. Only a couple of days later Scoble posted an item titled “WordPress Sucks”. He gets paid to say that stuff. He came in to give a critique and when the WordPress community posted follow-ups in defense of WordPress, they simply echoed his unjustifiable rants.
To make matters worse, Scoble opted for a free software package and complained about an extremely powerful feature in WordPress: RSS feeds. Is he complained about WordPress feeds, he could bash his wrath anything (or envy anything for that matter). Owing to that, he loses credibility rather than gain any.
Scoble on WordPress was a ticking bomb from day 1 and it exploded prematurely for all the wrong reasons. Like Matt said, WordPress is the Burger King of feeds. WordPress.com must become more selective when it comes to people it permits access and subscription to. I once mentioned the importance of WordPress invites. They are perhaps insufficient as they only deter splogs and mirrors, not enemies.
