Friday, February 10, 2006

Just be thankful Mohammed isn't involved

Mike Arrington has had a bad experience with Ed Dunn, the founder of a search engine called Fooky. It started after Mike had profiled Fooky on TechCrunch, in what was a perfectly level-headed review. Two days later, Mike joined what at the time was a shitstorm over accountability of contributors to Wikipedia with a piece about someone adding the N-word to Ray Charles' bio. Ed apparently took offence at Mike posting a screenshot of Wikipedia with the N-word prominently displayed, but only blogged about it the other day. Judging from Mike's post, Ed has taken that original misunderstanding and parlayed it into a small vendetta of emails, culminating in an accusation of stock-for-comment corruption.

Looking back over Ed's blog, hardly an entry goes by without him cursing The Man and claiming all sorts of discrimination against himself and Fooky. Ed, as evidenced by the picture at the top of his blog, is an African-American, and has apparently had to walk a rough road to where he is today. He reminds me of Derek Smart, another maverick technologist who has always done things his way in what is undeniably a very white profession - computer games, in Derek's case. I like Derek, and have exchanged many forum posts with him on various topics. I would like to think Ed is similarly loveable and that he has just made a mistake in this case which would be fixed by a simple retraction.

Mike Arrington is not a racist, and his Wikipedia post was actually anti-racist. His posting of an image with the N-word on it next to the article was merely supporting his arguments against racism. I hope Ed comes around and joins the Web 2.0 community to add a valid, authoritative African-American voice to the sea of whiteys like myself.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Paul,

Followed this over from your posting on CrunchNotes. Call me naive, but I really hadn't realised that the tech industry was so racially charged! I'm from the UK so perhaps it's different here? Or perhaps it's the same and I'm too dumb to notice!

Jack

10:56 pm, February 10, 2006  
Blogger Ray Frenden said...

Careful, if you invoke the name of Derek Smart a third, and final, time he'll appear in a flash and start a snark fest in your comments.

Oh no, the above was the ill-fated third mention!

2:55 am, February 11, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yawn, that was whack Paul. Come on, you could have done better than that. Why don't you try asking my side of the story before you make up your mind? The fact you would even draw conclusion from one side of the story states what kind of person you are also.

BTW, Please show me everyday where I scream victim of racism. You are probably typically uncomfortable that I point out the obvious. Do you think I would be around if I scream racial victim all the time? Get real dude...

11:37 am, April 13, 2006  

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