We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

Merlin Mann tries to respond to it, but instead responds to everyone else's arguments about why full feeds are better. But, I guess if you call something a straw man, the only way you "win" is by attacking some other position. What gets me though is this curiously stalker-ish final paragraph:

(I’d also mention, just in passing, Marco, that your two primary businesses I’m aware of rely very heavily on all that expensive content being freely available and munge-able. A magazine article that can’t be reblogged will never make it onto Tumblr, and a more (theoretically) monetizable world of teaser-only websites and feeds turns Instapaper into a beautifully-implemented PR aggregator)

Ad hominem, Merlin.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

It's about time.

As my 500th tweet, I'd like to share some examples of milestone tweets. Everything you see are other folks #500th tweet from the last 24 hours.

The Britney Spears #500

As in "Oops, I tweeted again:"

@twools Tweet #500 - D'oh!

The World's Greatest Achievement #500

Because tweeting is a big deal.

@akashsablok Tweet #500 - Key to the City

The Is Every Tweet This Exciting? #500

You'd be amazed at the tweets that led up to this one. ("Just wrote my 498 tweet," "Just wrote my 499 tweet," etc.):

@Effcom Tweet #500 - Just captioned this image.

The Shameless Plug #500

Don't get me wrong, I do a lot of "marketing" on Twitter, too. But you should see some of the slides in that prezo. Not Tweet #500 worthy, imho:

@EricssonLabs Tweet #500 - Slide 5 was when I closed the window.

The This Explains Twitter #500

Shhh! No one is supposed to know this is what Twitter is for:

@ChristianTojil Tweet #500 - Twitter Explained

The Thanks To All The Little People Who Made This Possible #500

Actually, this one is really sweet. :)

@CrankThatmate Tweet #500 - What are friends for?

The Finally A Reason To Quit #500

It's a shame that the addiction will have to last to another round number:

@ASecondOpinion0 Tweet #500 - That's it, I quit!

The Because My Job As A Male Model Isn't Working Out #500

Yeah, I know, the background image is disturbing. Now you know how the Myspace crowd is dealing with Facebook... they're taking out their frustrations on Twitter:

@Vansome Tweet #500 - The goggles, they do nothing!

And finally, if you think Town Hall meetings get violent, imagine if this happened to all the folks above?

@TanujDua Lost 500 Tweets - Seriously, the 7,039 tweets you still have prove that you know how to turn off caps lock.

Twitter has stacked the URL shortening business opportunity overwhelmingly in bit.ly’s favour

The problem with that statement is there is no such thing as a URL shortening "business." URL shortening is a feature of a larger service or, at best, a loss leader to attract attention for your real business. (As the folks at Raven SEO Tools fully understand with their URL shortener kl.am.)

Of course, my disappointment at learning how many Twitter bots are already in existence just underscores how far behind I have fallen after my one year hiatus from tracking industry developments.

The good news? I built and deployed my first Twitter bot within just a few hours of discovering the possibility. Basically it retweets the blog posts from HalfEagle.com. (Of course, I'm doing that because HalfEagle.com is a project of mine... I'm not scraping someone else's site.)

Next step? Writing an interactive twitter bot. :D

...I just need an idea that isn't already been done. :/

Working in-house on web projects mostly means I am fixing sites that are already online. Although I often build entirely new sections and features for the site, I rarely get the satisfaction of launching an entirely new site.

I'd almost forgotten how it felt.

Especially considering the short amount of time this site took to get going (compared to my last site which took a year and a half). Although, I have my coworker to thank for that as he took the lead on the more difficult aspects of this new site.

Ecom sites aren't the coolest projects to work on, but this one was pretty fun, particularly the image zoom feature for individual products. For example, check out this Eagle Scout coin. You can still get the traditional "show larger image" experience by clicking the thumbnails, but if you simply mouse over the main product image you are treated to a much smoother experience.

I don't know if I could have made this post unless the site had already made a sale so I wasn't expecting to have the chance until later this week. However, thanks to the miracle of Adwords I had an ad running in about five minutes on Friday night and arrived to work this morning to see the first sale had already been made and shipped.

It's a good day. :)

Here's a video taken in downtown Zephyrhills at the Halloween event on October 28th, 2006. :)