Mike,

I have to say, I find the other writers who write for TechCrunch relatively boring to read - I generally just skip articles whenever I see their bylines.

I think you personally have a knack for picking out really interesting content and saying what you think about it in a succint way, while being able to relate their efforts to the wider industry.

Frankly, the other guys don’t. They produce what I see as mediocre copy about mediocre subjects.

For me as a reader, the other writers on TechCrunch at the moment are taking what has been a great blog (by that I mean a great read) into bad territory.

I’m not sure where you want to take TechCrunch as a publication (and potentially a publishing house), but from a reader’s perspective, my message is: ditch everyone else.

Get back to basics and write more addictive copy — like you used to. Don’t become a manager.

Cheers,

George
(not my real name for professional reasons)

Mike,

Thanks for being honest here. I appreciate it. Let me respond as a reader of TechCrunch: I read your site to learn about new companies. I expect the articles to be well researched and to provide some insight. They don’t have to be positive, but they have to be accurate.

Mike,

Here’s the thing: Marshall didn’t talk to experts, I know this because the experts have weighed in publically. If he’s telling you he did, find out who they are and tell me. I hope it isn’t some random analyst who doesn’t know DNS from AJAX.

Check out these experts:

Paul Vixie, the guy who INVENTED bind (and wrote cron): http://lists.oarci.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2006-July/000806.html

Rick Wesson, named in the lawsuit by Verisign against ICANN for speaking against SiteFinder:
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg01080.html

CircleID (Domain name industry site): Mark Jeftovic from EasyDNS: http://www.circleid.com/posts/opendns_anti_phishing_typosquatter_no_sitefinder/

So I think while this post here might help, you’ve still done your readers, like me, a real disservice.

As a young entrepreneur, I’m just thinking “WTF mate?”
I’m in Palo Alto tomorrow if you want to meetup. My cell is on my website, http://david.ulevitch.com/

-david

Awesome, a stray “Mike,” made it in. In case you forget who you are.

David, He did talk to people because I was part of the discussion. I, for example, know a lot about this subject and spoke to Marshall, and put him in touch with others. I was in the domain name business for a long time and frankly I don’t see why OpenDNS should be so good at speeding things up. I think it’s more of a screw up on comcast’s part than anything else. But once I tried the service I saw a noticeable difference. Perhaps Marshall’s ISP does a better job. Anyway, thanks for the feedack.

Mike, whilst time may not permit it each of you on the team to review a product, why not add the techcrunch team member’s individual thumbs up/down (jury style) on a company/service and then also add a poll button on each article/company so that readers can easily provide feedback to you and other readers. In the case of the former, readers can get a quick eyeball on dissenting views and in the case of the latter you get instant feedback on what people thought of the service [rather than your article]. Use something like dpolls.com for the latter perhaps (I’m not connected to them)

@david: If you did indeed read Paul Vixie’s comments on OpenDNS that you linked to in your comment, you’ll find that he was *not* all that enthusiastic about this new service. Have a look at what he wrote:

[> ... In fact, I can't imagine a reason why you wouldn't use OpenDNS. ...]

Paul Vixie replies:

i’ll provide four, off the top of my head.

1. because i use the for things other than web surfing.
2. because i need a reliable source of NXDOMAIN data.
3. because i want to keep DNS open to non-web applications.
4. because i don’t want any central authority to see what Q’s i’m asking.

————————-

Did you actually read this, or was it just a case of quickly putting in some references in your comment, by conducting a google search or something of that sort ?

By the way, I feel that OpenDNS’s service is much better than SiteFinder. (Check comment #31 on techcrunch)

–saurab

If you’re seeing speedups, it’s because your current ISP isn’t doing its job properly.

OpenDNS servers seem to take the same amount of time to resolve well known addresses (google, etc.) as Sun’s DNS servers (ns.sun.com) (use the tool “dig”) , as well as my own personal server, which is running on a 10 year old Sun Sparc Classic with 64MB RAM.

Given the plethora of open (i.e., not restricted access) fast DNS servers, why use one that *admits* to giving you the wrong answer?

I do like the theory that goes behind OpenDNS. I believe it is a great idea for anyone that uses the internet and wants to avoid all kinds of phishing scams. My issue is that what if someone edits the DNS entries in OpenDNS and changes something like scottrade and etrade to phishing sites. Without some assurance from a 3rd party security firm, i dunno if i can trust using it for private secure transactions.

I inherited a computer at my new job which had OpenDNS installed. It would block access to my organization’s staff resource site. When I emailed OpenDNS to help me fix it or to help me get rid of OpenDNS I got no response. I figured out how to disable OpenDNS myself and now I’m happy.

First of all, I didn’t like the name openDNS which gives an impression that it is an open source technology. Secondly I think the centralization of system has made it more susceptible to failure and it will give too much to a single authority.

As with any service, one should ask:
(1) who is the intended audience
(2) is it more likely to be harmful or helpful

I think for a large portion of its intended audience–the typical web user, OpenDNS can be helpful–even very helpful, and won’t be harmful. It certainly isn’t the only, or even the best, tool available if your ISP has DNS problems, but it might be the easiest tool for the average user to implement. Yes, in some environments it won’t work at all, but those are very much in the minority. And ‘open’ means nothing more than ‘open’, as in open for all to use it who want to. At the very least it can be helpful in determining if you have a DNS/lookup problem related to your ISP.

Why would anyone want to be dependant on an external service provider for DNS - and help a bunch of .bomb kids make money off of putting more ads on the Internet? You can have OpenDNS functionality yourself with software like http://www.dnsredirector.com (and others) which won’t redirect non-existent domains to an advertisement (or “helpful” search page) I think non-existing domains should result in ‘page cannot be found’ so your grandma-like users realized they made a mistake. With OpenDNS’s approach, why teach spelling or make anyone learn to type something.com correctly when they’ll always make it “work out” for you.

Tell me how to get rid of open dns!

It is bloody annoying! Yes, how to get rid of this openDNS?
For every mistyping it punishes me with this orange crap. Hate it.

Yes, How do you get rid of it. It seems to have just shown up on my computer and all the ways that they have for setting it up on their web site don’t work to get rid of it. Can my ISP put it on the network because all of my computers have it (all three) and I did not put it on. Does anyone know how to get rid of it.

Hmm, not only is David Ulevitch misrepresenting the stance of at least one of the experts his is referring to, but he now seems to be involved in opendns to some extent. I wonder for how long?

http://www.techsnake.com/2008/04/24/opendns-breaking-your-firefox-search/