Posted 9:47 PM by Floyd

The San Jose Mercury News has a columnist named Dan Gillmor who covers the technology business. For some reason Gillmor is thought of as one of the great bloggers. I've never understood this. I have nothing against him, but there's nothing particularly impressive about his business writing or political opinions or his writing.

When Gillmor writes about technology politics, he hews a pretty standard Valley line ("Mommy, Microsoft was mean to me again today!"). When he ventures into other politics, there's nothing to distinguish him from any other big city liberal boomer columnist ("FCC media ownership vote dealt blow to democracy").

Witness his latest effort, on Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft: (Emphasis mine.)

How much of this is the bad blood between Ellison and Craig Conway, PeopleSoft's CEO? Conway does his cause no favors when he uses words like "diabolical" to describe Oracle's (Ellison's) motives, even if he means it, because shareholders care only about money, not motives -- one of the problems with our system.

When Gillmor is made king, only nice people will be allowed to buy stock.

Much worse, in my opinion, was this post:

OK, enough.

It's time for California legislators who favor financial privacy to do the right thing: admit that a majority of their colleagues are in the pockets of the financial giants, and stop trying to pass a law giving folks like us little chance to say whether we want our most personal information bartered around like a commodity.

California's much-abused initiative process is designed precisely for cases like this. The legislative process has failed, and it's time for the people to show who's in charge.

It shouldn't be Citicorp, or Wells Fargo, or Bank of America or State Farm orany of the other financial conglomerates that have bought off the lawmakers. Yet these mega-corporations have succeeded in thwarting the will of the people.

In coming weeks and months I plan to agitate -- loud and hard -- for the people's right to keep their information more private. I plan to tell you how you can help pass an initiative that should be on the March ballot.

...

There's another industry that makes lots of money by publishing facts about people that they would rather keep private.

It's called the media. And Gillmor works for a big media venture. I look forward to him admitting that when he talks about the First Amendment, he's really just in the pockets of big newspaper companies.

The issue isn't that I disagree with Gillmor. It's that if you want to be a technology writer, you have to look at the world the way the Valley does -- not Sacramento or Washington D.C. Trying to stuff the information genie back in the bottle is pointless. A technology columnist should know that.

I remember Jarvis saying that we could tell blogs had made it when, among other things, Gillmor featured bloggers in his print column. I think we can tell that blogs have made it when no one cares whether Gillmor writes about bloggers or not.