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MacDailyNews | Dvorak tries damage control

Dvorak's confession earlier this month about tweaking the nose of the Mac-using community came as no big surprise.

Anyone that has read his column, especially the last few years, has been perfectly aware of what he was doing. Online social web news site Digg made it painfully obvious in recent months. There, the users of the site regularly called him out on this big distortion on that.

It was to the point where people just started saying things to the effect, Look, just don't go to this guy's site anymore. Stop paying him to say this stuff. Even if you don't buy anything off the site, they get money off the ads on the page when you visit and he gets to count you as one of his readers.

MacDailyNews | Dvorak tries damage control:

Here's the story behind this. I was doing a Twit Podcast at the San Francisco Apple store. Dave Winer, the father of RSS and an all-around blusterer, was there, and he asked me how I antagonize Mac users so effortlessly. I told him I had constructed a foolproof model of how to do this, Dvorak writes. Winer immediately got bug-eyed and asked if he could record this on video with his digital camera. He was jazzed! I figured I'd give him an earful, since I knew he'd post it immediately.


I outlined a formula for maximizing interest in a single topic, which could result in a minimum of three columns. The video got passed around, and the Mac users were up in arms saying they've been tricked, that I'd been baiting them, Dvorak writes.

I suspect that the reason he blew the lid off his own trusty, old forumula is that it was old - and it was already blown.

Now he looks like the god of tech yellow journalism in a year or two when yellow journalism crawled out of the closet, licked its fee, and looked blandly at the rest of the world going, so what?

Meanwhile, the Mac marketshare is clawing its way back up through the single-digits and Apple is trading places with Dell to see which company is worth the most according to the US stock market.

Yep. Well, whatever. Next!

posted by John Collins @ 4:50 PM