nmg

It's Orlowski. If he dislikes something it's surely a sign it's good. Other projects he has said were obviously pointless and doomed to failure include linux and wikipedia. He's single handedly responsible for me no longer reading El Reg.

He's one of their professional trolls, and he's moderately good at it if only through bombastic volume. His baiting of the Pirate Party pre-election was quite amusing too.

I've written about Orlowski before. "Wankery of dubious intellectual merit" sounds like fair criticism of his El Reg articles.

You can count me also as disliking Orlowski intensely. Even when he has good points to make he makes them in such an offensive way that I want to disagree with him.

The man is a fool - I never read his stuff these days.

Incredible isn't. Someone linked me to his article on the Tims paywall yesterday and the min I saw the byline I just stopped reading. i think i'll save my blood pressure and skip this one too. FWIW I've been tweeting the chop story..

Stop being hysterical...

Even for Orlowksi, that was a clueless rant

Except possibly for his previous one (linked in the article) where he'd been even more of a pratt.

I like "webtastic wankery" though. Should be a conference / T shirt.

I'm amazed to discover he was at the TBL opening lecture. i was at that - could have brought rotten tomatoes :)

What they all said. He's a wanker and a fool.

He's the "Comic Book Guy" who feels his only reason for living (or "claim to fame") is to try to tear down other people ... and his research is poor too.

I've given up correcting him when he makes some factually incorrect statement on El Reg about smartphones and markets and who was first with something (he can't escape the "Microsoft and Apple created everything first" view, even when the facts show he's wrong)

It's years since I've bothered with the Register, and that sort of article is exactly why. It gradually turned into the Daily Mail's online tech supplement.

What's the best tech news site? I still have the reg on my feed list, even if I do open about one article in 30. Having a better site would be nice.

In *his* version of the encounter they don't come off very well. That's hardly surprising - he's not going to write a story that says "I asked some stupid questions and the clever people pointed out that I was an idiot".

Yes, poisoning of search engines is a big, unsolved problem, but I'm not convinced that it's *the* big unsolved problem. Nigel, Tim and Wendy are aware of it, for certain.

Orlowski's take, which you characterise as "it didn't work last time, last time is what we have now, and it doesn't really work" doesn't acknowledge the constant co-evolution of spoofing/scamming techniques and counter-measures that are designed to sort the wheat from the chaff. Altavista did a good job of scaling out conventional term vector IR. The scammers misrepresented pages by adding extraneous terms. Google analysed hyperlinks to better rank pages and weed out the scammers. The scammers build networks of extraneous pages. And so it goes.

*One* of the hopes of Web Science is that, by applying computational techniques to the modelling, analysis and prediction of the behaviour of complex networks, we can better understand this sort of co-evolution. It's certainly not the whole of Web Science, but it's an example that most people can understand.

As for Orlowski's competence, consider this from the same article:

Hendler jumped in:

"I was the external reader for a paper for somebody here at ECS. [...]

The first time around, he'd attributed that quote to Danny Weitzner. I set him right on that much (I was the internal examiner for fides's thesis) but he kept the "external reader for a paper" phrasing that a) makes no sense and b) isn't something that Jim said (Jim knows and uses UK academic terminology).

I hope no-ones upset because a Reg hack put the boot in because, um... duh :)

Not upset, more infuriated, but the man does seem to bear a family-sized bag of McCain's finest on each shoulder.

I don't normally rate Orlowski's articles, but his thing on the Times paywall is actually pretty good.

Personally I don't like the "newspaper is the collective noun for jounalism" mindset, but I'm glad someone is trying to find an actual business model for journalism, even if it's Murdoch, and the model is questionable.

...and that's what's infuriating. He *can* write well-reasoned bits of analysis, but all too often he tosses off dreck like this.

I quite like Andrew in person, over a beer, but I can't read his pieces any more than I can read Julie Burchill; in both cases, I believe they may be intending to provoke a reaction.

Oh quite, but it starts to get a little tiresome when you often find your colleagues (and by inference yourself) on the receiving end of his pieces.

On a completely different subject - there was someone in the lift today whose security pass said "Daniel Gark".