An interesting attack piece from Marshall Kirkpatrick at the Weblogs Inc blog The Social Software Weblog aimed at Stowe Boyd over at Corante who dared be critical of the new “Technorati Slider” service that kicks out all the allegedly insignificant riff raff of the blogosphere and lets you only see results from the A-List….Sure, Stowe’s argument may have been a little precious but do we see the conflict of interest here? I mean seriously, Kirkpatrick complains that the “Slider” name isn’t the best choice, and he’s probably right. They should have called it the “Weblogs Inc and a few others” feature.
Which AOL owned Weblog Network will benefit the most from a filtering feature that ranks a blogs authority by the number of incoming links?…..hmmm, let me see….would it be Weblogs Inc perhaps. Now I’m not attacking J-Cal because he worked hard (or maybe just made Peter Rojas work hard…) to get Weblogs Inc., to where it is today, and he deserves a lot of credit for that, but when you start attacking people over a difference of opinion where that differing opinion is a threat to a feature that has huge benefits for the company you work for…it’s called a conflict of interest….and lets face it, I know all about conflicts of interest, every time I open my mouth lately I’m accused of having one due to my part ownership of b5media :-)
