First of all, welcome Joel. Simply by posting here you make a good point- thanks to trackbacks, responses on other blogs are, in some way, linked- and even read by the original poster. There are two differences. First, the fragmented and disjoint nature of the conversation makes it hard to follow. And the second reason is that comments on this blog are read by me at least three times- once in email (I get emailed whenever someone posts to one of my stories), once in RSS (we have a RSS comment feed I follow for the comments on the other posts), and once when I go directly to the site to respond. But note, I’ve not yet read a single comment on this discussion on reddit.

I do want to respond to this:

Joel and Winer are high-profile enough that they don’t really have to worry about what every bozo thinks about their column.

In one sense you’re right. But the size of popularity of your/his blogs have nothing to do with- you can have a blog with three readers whose author doesn’t worry (nor does he have to) about what every bozo things about their column.

My point was that you’re never too big or too important to be wrong- and you’re never too small or too unimportant to not be right. And example number one (with a bullet) for this has to be the run up to the war in Iraq. As Andrew Sullivan himself has come to realize:

One of my own errors before the war was a function of being steeped in Washington policy debates – and neo-conservative arguments – for years. I had been so conditioned to suspect Iraq after 9/11 that my skepticism deserted me. I mentioned Saddam on September 12. The result was that the prelude to the Iraq war was far too easily framed by the information and biases of the Beltway elite, the Pentagon establishment, and the neocon brain-trust. Worse, we were unspeakably condescending to those on the outside who were right.

The point I’m making here applies to both the debate on the war in Iraq, and on wether Ocaml or C++ is the better programming language- no single person has a monopoly on the truth. Not George Bush. Not Howard Dean. Not Brian Hurt.

I do agree that comments need moderation. These days, if for no other reason than to prevent comment spam. Which even this blog has a problem with. Which, I suppose, is a good point- both Joel and I agree that some comments simply are not worst wasting bits on, we just disagree as to what level to put the threshold at.

That’s actually one of my big concerns with this blog. I really like the fact that we’ve got a healthy amount of argumentation, and people come out of the woodwork when a blog post is off — I’ve become as good a developer as I am by being told how good a developer I’m not, and how I could do so much better if only…

Beyond which, to the sharp manager, the key value I offer as a consultant is an outside view, and a wealth of experiences from outside the corporate culture. If I surrounded myself with people who think just like me, I wouldn’t be able to offer that value.

I think there’s a blog post here — why a consultant is not just a warm body with the life span of a single project.

Close, but not quite. What they are looking for is a circle jerk. They don’t just want an audience, they also want their fellow jerkers to stroke them, err, their egos. Its not just about telling the world how brilliant they are, its also about the other useless bloggers agreeing about their brilliance.

You can’t risk giving a forum to someone who might disagree with you, that would be crushing to someone who’s life revolves around pretending to know everything online. So instead you post your nonsense, wait for one of your friends to post “joel is so smart, look what he said today”, and then you post a link to their site so everyone can see that someone validated your opinion for you.