As a footnote to the Google Autolink brouhaha (previously blogged about here), I recommend listening to this 48-minute audio debate from IT Conversations. It's downloadable for free in various formats, and features Cory Doctorow (EFF, boingboing.net), Robert Scoble (MS) and Martin Schwimmer (Trademark Blog) arguing forcefully about Google's controversial link insertion feature.
A few comments:
- Although I've read their weblogs for a while, this is the first time I'd heard either Scoble or Doctorow, so it was interesting to put some voices to the names.
- No disrespect to him, but Scoble is better at blogging than he is at speaking. He didn't argue his case well, practically conceding the debate from the outset when he stated that AutoLink is not currently a bad thing. He seemed ill-at-ease and unprepared. Maybe somebody else would have been a better guest. (But not Dave Winer.)
- Doctorow, on the other hand, is a fast, aggressive debater and won this one easily (Scoble admits it). It made me realise how fortunate the EFF are to have this guy as a spokesperson on their team.
- One of Scoble's recurring tactics was to try to present the disagreement between the two as the differing perspectives of a 'user' (Doctorow) and a 'content guy' (Scoble). Since Cory has a popular website, numerous print articles and stories, and three published novels to his name, it was plainly ridiculous to imply that he's any less of a 'content guy' than Scoble.
- I may have imagined it, but towards the end it sounded like Scoble took a gratuitous (and quite bizarre) snipe at Firefox.
This audio show is the first of a new series called Sound Policy, and I'm looking forward to hearing what issues they might cover in the future... it's refreshing to hear intelligent people debating an issue in real-time that would normally just be a laggy to-and-fro of comments and trackbacks on websites.
One mistake: Cory's third novel isn't out yet, so that's two published, one soon-to-be-published. Oops.