xelipe

That is a good breakdown of Scoble's open letter, it was more of a love letter than a dear john letter. As mentioned, the gist of the letter is that, according to Scoble, the PR issue will blow over if Mark Zuckerberg invites Scoble over to his house.

You beat me to it... I was going to mention that in Spanish, the weekdays are named after Roman gods from Latin. If you find this amazing, then you will be surprised that the month of July is named after Julius Caesar. But what I find truly amazing is that Caesar Salad is named after a guy from Tijuana!!!

I agree. There is a big difference between getting a cut from generated search result (which is expected to change over time) and a users' blog post (which is often static after written).

And don't get with the problem with will cause to the linked sites in term of Google juice.

Yeah, I thought the same thing... then the fear that my tweets to trending hashtags like #threewordsforyou or #worstlies are in the Library of Congress for perpetuity.

Their new business model is more complicated than their previous business model. The five steps to citizenship seems like a weird concept. People that want to host a Q&A site like these don't want to be told they aren't good enough to have a top-level domain. Imagine wanting a blog and WordPress or Tumblr thought you undeserving of a top-level domain. Stack Exchange 2.0 has more steps to have a top-level domain site than the Chinese government has for it's citizens to acquire a domain. I'm sure there is a good Rails/PHP Q&A clone webapp.

It maybe true that some of these comments sound hypocritical but I feel that you are comparing apples and oranges with your comparison. Joel Spolsky spent a lot of time/energy on his Joel on Software blog and from his user base there "spun off" a business. Joel might have never spent on marketing for Fog Creek but he sure spent a lot of time on his blog that functioned as marketing for his business. His blog was not his business, he didn't wrap a subscription model to it. The same is true with Paul Graham, he built a following with his essays which "spun off" a book and a following to his other ventures.

Users get update because they feel like the rug has been pulled right under them. I for one, thought "Mixergy is kewl, Andrew is building an awesome community" but as soon as I saw his subscription model I realized that he was not building a community, he was building a business around a community. Building a community and building a business around a community are not the same thing and I probably won't be able to participate because I probably won't pony up to see a video. But funny enough, I would have bought a book if he had one in Kindle form like I have for Paul Graham, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jessica Livingston, etc. I probably would have gone to a conference like I have for Ruby Conf, Java One, Future of Web Apps, and Google I/O. I would have bought audio books as I did for Seth Godin, John Maxwell, and Stephen Covey because of Leo Laporte's and Jason Calacanis' podcast ads.

Andrew can fire his staff, fire his clients, and fire his users and he can certainly follow whatever business model he wants but for someone has had interviews with Seth Godin subscription models are a plain ol' boring not-purple sort of cow.

I would say that Metalab should have used a bit more tact. Even in Metalab's response they sounds like Mozilla committed a crime. I give kudos to Mozilla for fixing the issue so quickly, the gave it the right amount of attention and moved on.

I could use a copywriter for $8/hour.

I completely agree. I've had my work repurposed, many times, even by notable members of certain programming circles. It is funny when it happens, as in the case case of Microsoft/Plurk but this guy comes off as a classic case study of a douche to demand some sort of public apology and reparation. I mean, the folks responsible for the Mozilla site took the design down as soon as they were notified of the issue, in a timely manner as required by the DMCA. As stated, Mozilla is a big company with a large number of resources, like interns and offshore programmers that don't always do the right thing. The truth is that situations like these are simply used a the PR stunt.

I actually want Mozilla to steal my content, edit it for me, sexy it up, blog about it, tweet it out, etc. just as long as they send me some Google juice.