Weblogs: Miscellaneous

This episode takes place between 10 minutes 8 seconds and 14 minutes 22 seconds in the IT conversations recording of Robert Scoble's Overload session of Bloggercon 3. Winer single-handedly manages to ruin an interesting thread of conversation, first by declaring he doesn't understand what's being said (he's a technologist, for crying out loud), then pretending that the current speaker, Bob Wyman, was doing a vendor pitch.

Scoble

Grab him with the mike

Bob Wyman

Yeah.. My name's Bob Wyman. I'm with pubsub.

Scoble

Excellent

Bob Wyman

Don't worry Dave, I'm not going to plug the product.

Scoble

*laughs* I just did anyway. so.

Bob Wyman

Right... and keep it up! Keep it up! Okay, but...

Winer

*muffled*

Bob Wyman

Yeah Dave... Dave... I have no intention... of... doing that.

Scoble

Okay.

Bob Wyman

Fine. I just want to say, don't be worried. I respect your viewpoint here.

Anyway, the point is, this business of detecting duplicates and how to feed them out to people; its an issue I work with everyday. And I want to warn people - and there are other people that do the same thing - and some of us do it better than others, some not as well.

But I want to warn people - something that I am very well aware of because I think about this everyday - is essentially it can be very, very dangerous to allow people, like your aggregator developers, like your search engine developers, like your matching engine developers, to essentially making... be making decisions about what you want to read, or what you should read.

Now, there some things that seem very obvious, like say if the bulk of two messages almost precisely contain the same content, "Oh yes its a duplicate" and we should probably throw one of them out. But there's very important information that can come along for some people in the presence of a duplicate, like "Oh, this story was duplicated 57 times". Or who were the people, what was the geographical distribution of the people that distributed this? Was it somebody I knew?

I just want to say be very careful *interrupted*

Winer

Bob... *muffled*

.. participate in the discussion actively here. Okay. You're talking over my head. And I'm a tech... I'm a technologist for crying out loud. This is a users conference. Okay. You gotta understand what that means, and if you don't understand then just listen. Okay. This is only *interrupted*

Yes, but users need to raise the issue, because. Like I said, I am a technologist and I don't understand what he is talking about. *un-miked conversation*

No guys, I'm sorry. Look, we've been here before. Okay. And the last time we were there, this was at the Boston conference, the first one, we had vendors doing demos. Okay. And I... This is a university. This is not Comdex. This is not Macworld Expo. What? *unmiked conversation*

We'll have this discussion now. That's what we are going to talk about now. Until you guys. Until we come to some kind of consensus and agreement on this. You see, you're not the only people who matter here. This is a university. Okay. And there are users in here *muffled conversation*

I didn't say I was. *muffled conversation*

Oh god, this is ridiculous.

[Presumably to Scoble] This is what I asked you to be very very careful about, okay.

Scoble

I have been. I haven't heard a commercial product *muffled*

Winer

I have.

Scoble

Okay.

Winer

Well you know...

Scoble

*muffled* get back on topic.

Winer

... having a vendor discussion. *muffled* ... there's a rule, there's a rule on the papers that no vendor discussion. For a reason. We don't want vendors for a reason because that lets you talk, he's gotta talk.*muffled*

anon

Robert shouldn't tell us who he works for, because that would make a vendor out of him.

Winer

I have spent hours and hours with these guys talking about *muffled*

Scoble

... can we get up to.. go ahead...

Dave McClure

In response to your question...

Scoble

What's your name first of all

Dave McClure

Dave McClure, used to work for Paypal, now an independant free spirit. So I don't work for a corporation at all *laughs* Actually, we value the participation of vendors. I don't think we need to make that distinction, I think we should have the same trust that users will speak reasonably ... that... *interrupted*

Do we want to, like, honour the rule that like people talking... *interrupted*

So Dave, I appreciate that you have organised this conference, but I would also suggest that your opinion does not reflect the overall opinion of people here. *applause* But that does matter. That really does matter.

Scoble

Lets get back on topic here

P.S. I have my suspicions that Bob Wyman is a Heinz fan... 57 duplicates indeed!

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