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.