@David: My guess is you still yell at the TV, especially when “football” isn’t going well.

When I was at College I lived with a guy who used to sit in the corner of the room while a particular TV show was on(I can’t even remember what the show was now) and literally yell abuse at the TV at the top of his voice. I suggested that maybe he shouldn’t watch it seeing as he clearly hated what he saw and a less stessfull activity might be better. ‘No way’ he said, ‘this is the favourite part of my week’.

On the web, we post comments or blog instead of yelling at the TV.

@Chris: Thanks. I guess reports of the Interweb’s demise were exaggerated. I feel the same way about nuggets of information. We don’t gather much in person, so it’s nice to build some camaraderie virtually. I think the games are over for a while, at least for me

@Steven: I’m curious to see your hatemail now. Sounds interesting. I was taken aback by the vitriol, but what can you do? Thanks.

@Robbert: I hope this isn’t a bad thing for you.

I wouldn’t worry about it. Once one is prominent in the blogosphere, one is bound to attract brickbats along with the accolades. Just for laughs, remind me to share a recent incoherent and mystifying piece of hatemail I received a few weeks ago.

Goes with the territory: not everyone will agree with everything you write. So be it.

The web is a big place, and nobody’s forcing anyone to read something. This is how freedom of speech is supposed to work on the web: if someone disagrees with what you say, they’re free to say so on their own blog.

Cheers,
Steven Chan

Like others comments here I’ve been hanging out for every “tag” post too. It’s been a great exercise in removing the elitism shroud from Oracle staff and (non-Oracle) bloggers out there. I found it tough at OOW not knowing much about the people I met to crack the ice, but now I’m going to track a few people down and see if we can build on relationships based on common themes published in the tag posts.

Howard is entitled to his point of view and he can react in any way he sees fit, but so are we.

Keep up the good work Jake. Do you have any other fun games for us all to play? How about tag*32

CM.

The only stuff that’s been clogging up my reader and getting up my nose of late has been all the petulant whinging complaining about this 8-things meme, and now all the post-analysis of who was right and wrong.

And the only thing close to spam has been Howard’s multiple posts and emails on the subject.

Despite evidence that the 8-things idea never did get out of hand, and is well over now anyway (more’s the pity), his site remains off the net. That is so funny!

I think somewhere along the way, some forgot that this is the internet we are dealing with, not a database.

There is no “SELECT * FROM internet WHERE topic=’oracle’ and category=’only oracle’ and stuff=’only what I like’;”

Don’t like what you get through an aggregator? Ignore it or roll your own, like using Yahoo Pipes…

Remember that you can’t please everybody all the time so take it (the criticism) like water from a duck’s back.

Peter.

Tom has discovered it, not to mention ancient Jewish sages: turn everything off at least a day per week.

I also enjoyed reading the “8 things…” a lot. It doesn’t always have to be technical. We are doing to much technical stuff anyway. Sometimes we need a relieve.

Patrick

Don’t let the wet socks get to you. Let them turn off their servers and sit in the dark by themselves while everyone else has a fun time playing.

Eddie already has categories in OraNA with their own RSS feed. He just needs to publicize it more so everyone with readers will know and use them. Of course, then he’d get blamed by the wet socks for spamming OraNA with a post for each feed.

Matt