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Source:Valleywag

Is the Internet boring? Well, generally speaking, duh. Except, of course, when blogging luminaries get into a scrap over whether it is. Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban started things a month ago when, in an offhand sentence, he declared the Internet “dead as a growth platform” because of a stagnation in the speed of home broadband connections. He reiterated his comments to Portfolio.com, and then repeated them on his blog. Say something often enough, and people start to notice. People like Web 2.0 venture capitalist Fred Wilson. A classic blogfight — observing the three rules of the genre — ensued.

First, a recap of Cuban’s actual argument — what people actually said being one of those nuances that’s lost in a blogfight:

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home won’t increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

Which brings us to the first rule of a blogfight: Change the subject. Don’t respond to your opponent’s actual point. Instead, respond to the headline, or a phrase lifted out of context, as an excuse to tout your personal brand and projects you’re involved in. In this case, Cuban provided perfect fodder in “The Internet is dead and boring.” Wilson’s response:

My delicious toolbar records my most visited web services. Typepad, Google Finance, Techmeme, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, hypemachine, yottamusic. I did not use one of those services 5 years ago. Not one of them!

In other words, Wilson, an investor in Del.icio.us and Twitter, is an Internet hipster, while Cuban’s an aging Web 1.0 fuddy-duddy.

Which brings us to our next rule of the blogfight: Make it personal. Wilson writes:

Clearly Mark’s not using the Internet the way I am.

Stung by the suggestion that he lacks early-adopter cool, Cuban was forced into a long disquisition defending his Web cred, including the uncomfortable admission that he stays up late on Saturday nights reading Facebook API documentation.

And then Cuban wraps up with the third rule of the blogfight: Assert superior knowledge. In this case, Cuban taunts Wilson, and his audience, with the size of his hidden Internet-startup portfolio:

I have a ton of Internet investments that you don’t and won’t know about.

So there you have it. The three rules of the blogfight: Change the subject, make it personal, and assert superior knowledge. There are actually more rules, but I’m not going to tell them to you, because I find your stance on net neutrality to be annoying.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Top, Feature, Fred Wilson, Blogfight, Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, union square ventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.