01 October 2011

Dishing the Dirt on Me and Techdirt


I'm sure all my readers know about Techdirt:

Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog uses a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies ability to innovate and grow.
The dynamic and interactive community of Techdirt readers often comment on the addictive quality of the content on the site, a feeling supported by the blog’s ~800,000 RSS subscribers, 45,000+ posts, 600,000+ comments and a consistent Technorati Technology Top 100 rating.

(Yes, 45,000+ posts in 14 years: makes me look positively un-serious....)

One reason I'm pretty sure anyone who follows my microblogs will know about Techdirt is that I tend to post a huge number of links to its stories. Indeed, sometimes I think it would be just easier to hook the Techdirt RSS feed in directly and save myself all the trouble of doing it manually.

That's an indication of how closely aligned Techdirt is with much of the key stuff that I'm interested in: copyright, patents, digital rights, business models, digital abundance etc. Techdirt not only offers extremely knowledgeable analysis that you simply won't find elsewhere, it makes it all freely available – thus offering a good example of precisely the kind of models based around giving stuff away that it discusses and advocates.

Mike has already run some of my pieces there, and I'm delighted that he's asked me to contribute stories to the site on a regular basis. One knock-on effect will probably be fewer standalone posts on this blog, but overall the number of posts I write will probably rise. As for my writing on other titles, I'll post links to everything here, which will remain the central reference point in that respect.

Given this move, now seems a good time to produce a formal registry of interests, which I have made a separate post for easy reference.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

7 comments:

  1. I hope this means you'll be able to include the entire story in your RSS feed rather than just an excerpt.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Crosbie: I'll ask Mike...

    ReplyDelete
  3. jonny9:38 pm

    keep up the good work, glyn!

    ReplyDelete
  4. @jonny: thanks, i'll try...

    ReplyDelete
  5. @crosbie: OK, I've asked Mike, and I get the impression that he'd prefer just the intro plus link...so that's what I'll do....

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks for asking.

    At least it should be fewer clicks to get to read your writing than via Computer World UK.

    I'm still a tad surprised that Mike would be inclined to persuade you against publishing your own writing in your own RSS feed.

    ReplyDelete
  7. @crosbie: he wouldn't have stopped me...but I think it's a fair quid pro quo that Techdirt has the full text exclusively.

    After all, it's not as if it's really hard to get to the posts there...

    ReplyDelete