Ken Yarmosh, a paid consultant to Blogniscient, has written an open letter criticizing me for writing such glowing reviews of Memeorandum (blogniscient is a competitor to memeorandum).
In particular, he didn’t like my post yesterday on TechCrunch comparing the Blogniscient and Memeorandum and he felt that Blogniscient deserved it’s own review. I left a comment, reprinted below.
I’d like to know people’s opinion on this issue.
Ken,
A few thoughts.
1. I apologize if I haven’t answered your emails. I’m a one man shop and I get hundreds of emails a day. I cannot read all of them. It’s something that I beat myself up over constantly because I feel that if someone takes the time to email me, I should take the time to read it and write back. I may hire someone to help out at TechCrunch, but given that it is a zero revenue site I don’t know when that will happen.
2. TechCrunch is not an objective site. It’s all about my opinions. I’ve never claimed otherwise.
3. I apologize if I did not give your client a stand alone review. To be fair, I don’t think it deserves a stand alone review and is interesting, at this time, only as part of the broader discussion of how memeorandum is changing the web. I wrote my opinion of the service, and gave what I believe is a quite favorable review. In my opinion, and I repeat, in my opinion, memeorandum is a far superior service.
4. I have an open house here in Atherton and I invite many people to stay. During the web 2.0 conference people were on the floors, on the couches, in the bedrooms. One of those people is a VC with a $30m net worth. I didn’t include him in my top VCs post. He’s pissed. He’ll get over it.
Gabe has stayed here, and he has grown to be a friend. This has developed after I’ve gotten to know memeorandum, and quite frankly one of the reasons I like hanging out with him is that he’s so damn smart. There is no nepotism in my posts on memeorandum.
I have no financial or other interest in memeorandum, nor have I been paid to write anything about memeorandum or any other company.
5. I think you should look in the mirror. You are a paid consultant to blogniscient and this wasn’t disclosed in your early posts, or in the comments you blanketed the blogospere with.
I am launching a company called edgeio in the near future. I’ve posted, once, on edgeio, and I fully disclosed that I am a founder. I also said I won’t be posting on it much, if at all, in the future.
6. If people like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer think Memeorandum is great, perhaps it is simply because it is.
7. I think you owe me an apology for this open letter, regarding your claims of a conflict of interest.
Mike…I’d like to quickly address a your points.
1. I think Memeorandum is great and hope that you don’t think I’ve ever stated otherwise. I agree that people should write about it because it is quite innovative and an extremely great resource.
2. Ben and Blonisicient became my client about 2 weeks ago and I announced that when they did (via my interview post). For absolute transparencies sake, I’ve only been paid $100 total for two weeks of help (which kept the caffeine going). I did this for the fun of it. Like you, I run no ads on my blog and am trying to get the bills paid.
Those comments that ‘blanketed the blogosphere’ and my initial post about Blogniscient was when Blogniscient was NOT my client. As you can see from the pay, I did this more for the fun of it. I disclosed that Blogniscient was “my client” as soon as Ben decided he needed some help (which was not even 2 weeks ago). This was actually VERY important to me for the reasons you point to above (i.e., conflict of interest).
3. As far as email goes, I too am a one man show and understand how that works.
4. I think your generosity is to be commended. Opening up your house to others is probably a lot of fun and really lets you connect with others in this space.
4. I apologize for not understanding where you were coming from on TechCrunch. From what I’ve been reading, my assumption was that you profile all companies ‘as is’. I also assumed your recent move to this blog confirmed that but it appears I was wrong.
US$100? Is that all it costs to hire a Web 2.0 consultant these days? Wow. I’ve heard of low barriers to entry, but a man’s gotta eat.
I was disappointed to read Ken’s open letter, for several reasons:
1) Ken wrote: “I value it most as an objective resource, a fact based encyclopedia for Web 2.0 products and services. I understand that occasionally there will be some editorializing (as in the case of Inform.com) but I hope to see that reserved for your new companion blog going forward - and I plan on reading that one as often as TechCrunch. If you truly believe in letting the web decide, then I think TechCrunch can serve us best as an unbiased source for tracking Web 2.0. I know that’s a tough challenge but you seem more than capable for being up to the the task.”
Richard says: it’s one of the basic tenets of blogs that they are subjective - not objective. I thought the above comment from Ken came across as both misinformed and condescending. Mike writes TechCrunch because he loves new companies, not because he’s trying to write an encyclopedia. Blogs are about passion, Ken. Mike happens to be passionate about memeorandum, as am I. That comes across in both Mike’s reviews of meme and mine (which btw I wrote a month before I met Gabe).
2) I don’t think the fact that Gabe stayed at Mike’s house has any relevancy. I too stayed at Mike’s house for a couple of weeks, thanks to Mike’s generosity. He sometimes writes nice things about me too - but he did that well before I even knew who he was (and vice versa). I’m pretty sure he wrote nice things about memeorandum before he knew Gabe personally too. The fact is: memeorandum is a great product - I would still rave about it even if I didn’t know Gabe. And Mike would be the same.
3) Finally, I think Mike is correct when he says “To be fair, I don’t think it [blogniscient] deserves a stand alone review and is interesting, at this time, only as part of the broader discussion of how memeorandum is changing the web.”
I took a look at blogniscient the other day and thought it showed some promise. I’ve even saved it to my toolbar bookmarks. But it took time for me to get used to memeorandum (it was only when Gabe released his latest version a couple of months ago that I started to get addicted to it), so I’d suggest to Ken that it’ll take time for people to get used to your product.
Ken,
I was happy to blog about Blogniscient over the weekend and, like I said in that post, it’s a good service. You were successful in getting a number of bloggers to cover Blogniscient, and now it’s time to let the web decide. If they want to compare it to Memeorandum, let them - business is all about competition.
I think by turning this into a personal conflict with Mike, rather than a discussion about web services, you risk creating some bad PR for Blogniscient. Let’s try to talk about the products, and not the personalities.
Pete…this isn’t a personal conflict. It’s blogging. I asked for accountability. I called Mike out on what I perceived as bias. His response did the same for me. We cleared the air and at the end of the day, we are better bloggers for it.
1. Worst
2. Catfight
3. Ever
I was very disappointed by the the Blogniscient/Memeorandum post. I do not use either site, but I read TechCrunch all the time.
I distinguish between sites that intend to provide information (ex. DownloadSquad.com) vs. personal blogs that can be loaded with opinion and cronyism. I go to sites of the former type for early information about upcoming products and sites. While TechCrunch has hinted of favoritism before, this article was the most blatant.
You define TechCrunch as “…a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies”. Overly positive of negative posts don’t meet this objective-sounding criteria.
Iam not sure where Ken is coming from. If you read Blogniscient vs Memeorandum post, Mike gave his personal opinion not a review. If you dont like what Mike wrote about your product, find out what Mike likes about Memeorandum as a constructive input to better your product. In my personal opinion, Mike is more than fair irrespective whether Gabe lives in the same house or not.
I have to say that I think that Ken starting this furor has given his client more traffic and attention than they would have otherwise.
Here’s my cynical bravo to you!
Michael, that was a nicely crafted response of yours, keep up the good work