I think Leo Laporte is great, but dear god I liked This Week in Tech a lot more before it was so Dvorak-y. I’m listening to the most recent episode, the one from Vloggercon and Dvorak is in perfect autopilot form. You could release the karaoke version with him muted, and you could just anticipate what he’s going to say and fill it in. “Yeah, and it’s all a load of crap.” “Who cares?” In these TWiT episodes, he has about the depth of an Eliza bot.
I understand his schtick and why he does it, and it has demonstrably worked for him. I, for one, am tired of it.
Update: Here is Dave Winer’s video with Dvorak in which John explains how he cynically manipulates outrage in order to get his readership numbers up. I do believe this will be the last time I ever mention him. From here on out, when he gets under my skin I’ll just wish him to the cornfield because any attention is just what he wants. The question becomes – will I have to stop listening to TWiT to avoid this cynically crafted line of bullshit?
Right on Dave! Yeah, I agree with you and have felt the same for quite a while. I hope that it doesn’t take over the show, b/c for my purposes it’s one of the best (if not the best) tech podcasts out there. Oh… and the link to vloggercon is http://www.vloggercon.com as opposed to *.org
I am very surprised to see him let this out. In journalism or media, credibility is everything and Dvorak just sunk to zero. How can anyone take him seriously anymore? Disappointed and surprised.
I agree wholeheartedly. Two things make your post so apropos:
1 – Leo has posted separate MP3 files for that podcast for others to try and mix. I’m assuming you’d delete the dvorak.mp3 file as would I.
2 – Dave Winer has an interesting post about Dvorak (and his disgust). Is it heartfelt? I dunno – but at least it was said.
It’s not a shock that this is his strategy. I mean, look at his output and you can watch him executing it. That’s no secret. Hearing him state it so baldly is surprising.
Leo made that part of the rules, no dropping participants. If you were to spend the time to re-edit this, I’d go to the effort of detangling the conversations. There was a whole lot of places where two or three people were talking full paragraphs over each other.
“The question becomes – will I have to stop listening to TWiT to avoid this cynically crafted line of bullshit?”
Don’t. TWiT has merits all its own. It’s Dvorak that has merit or credibility whatsoever. I stopped paying any attention to him, ever since he tried to pass himself off as ultra development expert as weight for his opinion about some tech some years back, only to prove in the next ten minutes he can’t even use a browser.
Keep listening to TWiT. Just don’t pay any mind to the twit himself.
“It’s Dvorak that has merit or credibility whatsoever.”
Oops. It’s Dvorak that has NO merit or credibility whatsoever.