a) Who cares? My whole purpose would just be to share it with the world. And stick it to Wenzel. There’s been times when I couldn’t find an audiobook free online anywhere (and trust me, I know how to look)…so I’d go buy it on Audible and create a torrent and put it out there. Sharing the info dude. That’s what it’s all about. Even Friedman understood this…
b) Surely you could find some use for it. Even if it’s just a matter of selling it to someone else who wasn’t aware of it.
What are you talking about? IP is the best stuff to pool for…it’s non-rivalrous: You don’t even have to split time use with all the other people in the pool…you just make copies and everyone has it.
You’ve never split the cost of an online service and just shared one user account with people? You’ve never put money together for a high-end subscription service and distributed the info among all the people in the pool? You’ve never bought an expensive education product (e.g. a set of DVDs/CDs) with a group of people and just made copies for everyone?
I really highly doubt that. I honestly believe what he says on this. I don’t doubt he has a process that he was able to use to increase his chance of getting picked up by Drudge and that he was honestly just using it as an example of what he thinks is “scarce”, valuable information. There is no possible way that debate was all a ploy for selling this formula.
My guess is he just got a lot of emails about it and saw a profit opportunity, and one more way to try and attack Kinsella.
Could be a little of everything. I’d lean more toward people just getting tired of trying to keep up with all the posts. You respond to one, then other folks jump in, and you’ve got a little dialogue and an actual conversation thread. 4 hours later Wenzel’s got another post up. Then you respond to that one, and the guys you were debating with in the last one come and respond in that one.
Pretty soon not only does the whole thing get kind of old, but even if you wanted to, it’s tough to keep up with all your different threads…you have to try and remember who said what where, where you commented, where you haven’t, and when…and then on top of that you’ve got the whole moderation thing, so there’s a delay in your comments showing up… So you’d have a hard time keeping up even if you tried…you never know when or even if your comment is going to show up, and so not only are you having to remember everything I just mentioned, but you have to keep up with everywhere you submitted a comment and keep checking back to see if it got approved before you can even move on with the discussion.
And what’s more, I think depending on the platform you use to submit a comment, it actually affects when it will get approved. I’m not completely sure how it works, but it seems that sometimes, even when I got comments approved, there were others getting approved ahead of me, even if their timestamp was after mine. Meaning I submitted a comment, and others appeared in that same thread…then hours later mine appeared above theirs. My first guess would be that the Blogger platform might have an easier time receiving comments submitted from its own users (as opposed to those using some other OpenID from some other platform like LiveJournal, which I was using.) I could be totally wrong on that though.
Either way, I think 3-4 blog posts per day on the subject just wears down your audience. And particularly when all your arguments are the same tired fallacies, it just gets cumbersome.
But yeah, I’m sure Wenzel’s gotten plenty of hatemail and comments calling him out for being an ego-bruised clown. And you can only fool yourself for so long. Eventually you get enough people telling you how much you suck all the time, even the biggest most delusional narcissist can start to get affected. I’m sure if he was getting more supporting comments, he’d turn the whole blog into an anti-Kinsella/Tucker site. Or at least start one.