Paul Boutin

Fahrenheit 9/11’s worst offense: “Totally ruined that ‘the roof is on fire’ song for everyone.”

KGO Radio just interviewed me about local government workers whose emails have been cc’d to Sweden for two years without their knowledge.

Adam Penenberg’s latest Media Hack column for Wired News: “The fact that a blog could be de-linked from a presidential candidate’s official website (and actually had advertising to lose) shows that blogs have indeed arrived.” Media Hack is a new column by Penenberg, who most reporters remember as the guy who busted Stephen “Shattered” Glass. You can read about that in his introductory column from last week.

Technorati now tracks 3 million weblogs. The chart shows the number of blogs tracked by Technorati, rather than the total blogs in existence, so I’m not sure if the growth curve is as steep as the chart makes it appear. But still, three million!

Ok, ok, so a few of my bloggerati pals saw Dave’s post below and went: Whoa, are you saying there were 100,000 clickthroughs to Dave’s blog from one MSN article?

Yes, it’s the norm. The msn.com domain pulls something like 10 million unique visitors every day. Sure, some of that is due to the domain’s enviable default placement on a zillion browsers. But it’s not uncommon for a Slate story to draw a half million readers in less than eight hours, and those people need to actually click on a headline. We took North Korea’s website offline for a day by linking to it.

Am I bragging? Probably. There’s definitely something satisfying about writing a tech story so broadly accessible that it can compete with “Is Atkins right for you?” on the front door of MSN. It’s harder than I thought it would be.

Dave Winer on his 100,000+ MSN readers: “I never thought I’d place such a value on politeness.” True, I’ve noticed that MSN readers who email me are just nicer than average, even when they correct me on technical points.