Tony Pierce Busblog Rant
2006
I am an undying fan of Tony Pierce’s Busblog and have been for several years now. Even though I was working on the front lines of the ‘internet’ industry for several years I wasn’t much of an individual contributor of content. I somehow miraculously found my way to Tony Pierce’s busblog four or so years ago and was elated to get reacquanted with him after having been an associate of his at UCSB back in the early ’90s. Seeing what Tony was doing online by himself is an inspiration and it got me going, working on at least a photoblog and occassionally posting to my own blog.
Tony is now the editor of the LAist and has been for about 1/2 a year or so. His performance on that project is incredible and he has vastly increased the readership of that online destination severalfold. As a side-effect of having to work 24-7 on LAist, Tony doesn’t update the Busblog as often as he used to. It still gets updated every day but not the several times a day that I guess people were used to. I have found myself incredibly annoyed at commentors who try to get on Tony’s case about not writing as often and wanting “the old busblog back”. Tony dedicated an entry to this phenomena today that is a direct and terse response to these people. I consider Tony to be a pioneer in this medium and his dedication is totally obvious – if you want to read more from Tony he crosslinks to his LAist entries, I’m not sure what more he should or could do – his job isn’t just to write entries, he’s also managing the whole operation. I think that this is less about pleasing all of the people all of the time and more about people who just don’t understand the realities of day to day life. There’s a finite amount of time we have to do things, especially if you want to do things well.
There’s a lot of good things about the internet, it brings people together, speeds up the distribution of informaiton, and provides an outlet for expression for anyone who cares to put some time into it. A problem that comes up from people being brought together is that some of the people have unrealistic expectations, who don’t recognize a good thing when they have it, or are just rude and inconsiderate idiots.
