ETCON: pot calls kettle black shock horror

Our old friend and sometime colleague Bill Thompson has had a whinge about blogging and ETCon, the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. The gist of the complaint is that a bunch of bloggers are just inflating themsleves by linking to one another's blogs, and that the scene should be "commented on by those who haven't bought into the worldview". Presumably the real journalists who attended in 2003 are just not up to snuff -- people like Dan Gillmor (Mercury News), Jack Schofield (The Guardian), and Chris Anderson (ex-Economist, now Wired). However, the diatribe would have carried a bit more weight if Bill had actually gone to the conference (unless he spent a week avoiding me -- which I hope is unlikely, since I helped him get started, writing for Computer Guardian in the 1980s) and if his opinions were not so widely linked to by blogs, including this one.