In my last show, I talked about hippies and punks. That seems to have really set off Scarborough Dude, who did a show responding to mine. Ted Riecken of Island Podcasting responded to both. I have both shows on my player and the dicksnjanes episode came up yesterday but I skipped it. Ted warned me that it was pretty ad hominem attacks at me in the early going. Having just spent hours in a meeting arguing technical points, I didn't feel like listening to someone argue with me personally. I'll listen next time it comes up in the rotation.

One thing that I know I did not emphasize sufficiently because no one that has emailed or commented noticed it, I was not talking about "strawman hippies" or "stereotypical hippies." All of the comments I cited were as close to verbatim as I could get, some were even written on a notecard, from that audio documentary I had just heard on Puzzling Evidence. People actually said all that stuff, so I was commenting on specifics, not stereotypes. I'll listen to Scarborough Dude with an open mind, but I note that the title of his show is "Hippiefascistfreak." If the fascist he refers to is me, then any chance of me taking his counter-argument seriously is out the window.

In other even less pleasant arguments I found an old folder of things I had downloaded from Podzinger vanity searches last year and never listened to. It included this session from ad:tech last year. In it, Steve Gillmor talked about our squabble over the Earthlink ad. It amazed me listening to Steve relate his perception of my perception how completely wrong he was. My problem was never about "purity of the podosphere" or the "Madison Avenue production values invading the podosphere." My problem was that I heard that lame Earthlink spot 100 times (until I calibrated my fast-forward time to perfectly skip it every time) and I still to this day do not know what they were selling me. All I know of Earthlink is that they are a dialup company. They had 100 shots to tell me if they do something different nowadays and they blew every one of them. Do they have a product for which I would give them money? I don't think so, but I'm not sure. What I do know is they had a lot of opportunity to inform me, and by going with that vague and horrible spot they did, they pissed away their money on warm fuzzies instead of telling me something I could act on. That's my problem with the Earthlink spot. They used my time and I don't even know why. That's the ultimate act of disrespect from them to the audience, and that's always been my issue with them.

Steve, please, for the love of christ, you always talk about attention in the machine sense but then don't pay attention to direct statements people make to you. Do you understand where I am coming from now? I have stated this over and over. It's not about money, production values, indie street cred, or any of that stuff you seem to think it was about. It's about wasting my time on the vague. You have a direct channel right into my ears, so be goddamn specific and maybe we can do some business. If you don't have an offer, don't waste my time.