a 'mooh' point

The other day I noticed that the traffic on my blog had increased dramatically. I couldn’t really understand why (I have not written anything substantial in quite some time) – all I could see was that the majority of the visitors originated from Google. The search results were mainly “Jesper Lund Stocholm”, “Alex Brown” and “OOXML” … which told me just about nothing at all.

But then I noticed that a few of them also included the term “boycottnovell” and “techrights”. This lead me to check out the feed from #boycottboy’s website – and behold – I was actually mentioned in one of his defamatory articles.

The article is this: http://techrights.org/2010/09/11/sc34-is-still-a-farce/ .

The quotes start like this:

Weir is then met by opposition from Brown’s longtime right-winger, the ODF-hostile Jesper Lund Stocholm [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. He is a known Microsoft booster and Weir’s responses to him go like this:

I wonder if I shall refer to myself from now on as “Goose” or similar. Alex is clearly the Maverick here.

Now – and this is where I envy Rob – #boycottboyquotes a conversation I had with Rob (which I clearly won, btw :-) ) – but conveniently leaves out everything I wrote. It seems to me that Rob and #boycottboy live in some sort of symbiosis – each benefitting from on another. #Boycottboy clearly regards every little thing Rob writes to him as a “badge of honor” – regardless of the content itself. And Rob very much benefits from #boycottboys critique-less c/p of his comments/articles … with the infamous “#boycottboy reality distortion field” applied.

I wish I had a friend like that. I wish I had a friend that would blindly recite every syllable coming from my lips – without any sanity-check at all.

I totally get why #boycottboy needs Rob – but why IBM’s chief ODF Architect (elsewhere known as “ODF’s one-man-army”) needs someone like #boycottboy is beyond me.

And you know what the silver lining is here? I actually benefit greatly (and not only in a monetary sense) from being posted on #boycottboy’s site. The increased traffic from techrights.org keeps the fire burning and it is almost always a certainty that someone will write to me to invite me to speak on document formats at conference, potential customers or even political parties.

So please keep it up, you two – it helps me avoid the wife and kid going to bed hungry at night.