You can never predict which blog posts people will pick up on. In my case, often the ones I may not want trumpeted get that treatment. One case in point, is Doc Searls picking up on my bristling exhange with Lucas Gonze, which he refers to as "The Grumpy Dickhead Chronicles." Sigh. Oh well, that's the nature of decentralization. I made the posts, I need to lie in them, so to speak.

It should be pointed out that I'm cool with Lucas. He made an apology for picking me up as an examplar for something I'm not, and I apologized for reacting to that more strongly than was strictly necessary. Here is his more considered statement. I can't say as I really agree with much of it, particularly his casting of my wave of podcasters as a squad of idiot savants who accidentally did the right things. However, I do acknowledge it as a valid reading of events with his particular take on it.

I think Lucas and I differ at the architectural level and that spills into all sorts of unpredictable places. He thinks that fundamentally the store-and-forward nature of current podcasting is something to be avoided and only grudgingly acknowledges its efficacy for the present day reality of the occasionally connected devices. His ideal world would involve little or no storage, and instead would allow for universally connected devices that stream on demand rather than the subscribe and fetch. On the other hand, I dig the way that you can achieve what we do without constant connectivity. I think it is a more efficient use of resources, and I like how you don't have to build out for the high water mark like the streaming world does. Since a lot of the traffic is actually automatic processes at non-peak times, this spreads out the load to times where the servers would normally be sitting mostly idle. This is important for allowing folks to get involved as it lowers the horsepower necessary to play the game, and part of what is driving the popularity.

I just want to get it out there that I don't have any personal issues with Lucas. We agree on some things, disagree on others, so mote it be. I have found myself in lots of arguments lately ranging from rancorous to highly rancorous so anything that can reduce the drama is good with me.