Matt Craven has written an interesting piece about Dave Winer over at The Blog Herald.

Along with a personal assessment, he brings up a recent Scripting News post which speculates, “What does an algorithm think?” — something I’ve often thought about, especially when falling foul of Google’s.

Dave’s post doesn’t actually answer the question, but has a little moan about posts on Techmeme : “Most of the authors don’t know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don’t admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it.”

In other words, only code writers need apply.

Now, I usually put myself in the ignorant category, unfairly as you’ll see — but being unfair to oneself is better than over-spicing the pudding.

Back in the 1980s when real computers were IBM mainframes or PDP 11 “mini” computers, and the hoi-polloi like me had to make do with “micros”, which really were micro then, I had a startup called, Earlgate Computers. It developed and produced software for the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC (Acorn) computer and one or two others, like the Atari and Commodore 64. All utter relics now.

Yours truly wrote a series of programs titled, Fitness Software, which was aimed at the running and marathon craze of the period. The packages, on cassette tape, were written in Basic, and the series sold to two big retail chains in the UK, Boots and W.H. Smith.

Even so, I wouldn’t claim I’m a developer or a programmer by today’s standards, although I have written commercial code. I usually muddle through with the latest gizmos and avoid too much complexity where possible.

Nevertheless, I do get onto Techmeme regularly, so presumably fall into Dave’s “waste of space” class. I think he’s probably right.

However, a word of warning. Narrowly-based communities that talk to each other in jargon incomprehensible to even an intelligent audience, really belong in a social network niche, not on mainstream tools of the blogosphere. People with peripheral skills and general interests can often bring new perspectives and shine light into dark corners otherwise missed.

As Matt writes, Dave comes across as an irascible sort of fellow, forever banging on about RSS and outliners. Not quite “Hold The Front Page!” stuff.

His other strand, U.S. politics in election year, is much better, even for a Brit like me. I happen to be very interested in who or what the next President of the U.S. of A. will be.

Now for the unanswered question : what DOES an algorithm think?

It doesn’t.

We have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 from 2.1 and I was expecting lots of problems and incompatibilities. Not so.

A sweet conversion and one-click upgrade of plugins made life a lot easier. Although the backend is very different and will take some getting used to, the impression is one of great improvement, even from version 2.3.3. I understand there was no 2.4. Mysterious.

This was undoubtedly the smoothest upgrade I’ve ever experienced. Well done Wordpress and its brilliant community of open source programmers.

I’ve just joined Twitter — for technical reasons, I hasten to add.

A pair of lovebirds twittering

The technical reason is that I discovered that the username “Syntagma” had not been taken, so I secured it in perpetuity — or as long as any social network lasts, whichever is the shorter.

I’ve sprayed my entire Gmail address book with invites, so you may get one. Since it’s still over 300 addresses long, even after drastic pruning, I’m awaiting the results with some trepidation.

So far, I have one tweet on my sheet, a brilliant piece of literature about what I’ve been doing today. Please don’t all rush at once to view it or you may bring the server down.

If anyone wants to follow or be followed, just send a tweet to Syntagma. I’m sure the system will handle all the techie stuff. I still haven’t found my way around it all yet.

I will, naturally, produce a comprehensive analysis of the service soon. In under 140 characters, of course.

You know, maybe that’s where they’re going wrong.

TechCrunch is reporting that secret merger talks between blog search engine company, Technorati, and Canadian blog network, b5media, have collapsed.

The reason given was a personality clash between b5’s CEO, Jeremy Wright, and Technorati’s Richard Jalichandra and, according to b5 “a lack of transparency on Technorati’s part during due diligence.”

Judging by that, this “merger” didn’t really stand a chance. One wonders if Technorati took it seriously.

Toronto-based b5media has apparently been looking for “merger partners or acquirers” after failing to raise more VC money — it has so far received stage-one funding of $2 million. It seems Technorati has also had its financial problems.

The notion of a mass roll-up of blog networks to make ad sales more attractive and economical has been around a long time. Personally, the dynamic of that approach has still to be proved to me, especially in the current financial gloom.

Technorati has a big name, but is largely associated with a failure to live up to its billing. B5media has relentlessly stuck to its remit and expanded to 340 blogs.

I’ve long since lost faith in this horizontal model, which basically claims that small-scale content sites multiplied n-hundred times add up to a better business than three or four wowsers, or a tight-niched, product-based network, like Glam or TechCrunch. In this case, less is almost certainly more.

No “blog” network has really scaled up to the point where direct-response ads can be replaced with brand advertising. To sustain a company the size of b5 in personnel terms alone, that’s what it takes.

I’ve no doubt b5media will disagree, but they are faced with a double whammy : the brick wall of scaleability in the middle of a credit crunch.

Declaration of interest : I worked for b5media for a few months when it started up, and I am now the owner of a rival content network, Syntagma Media.