Librarian, Heal Thyself - Dan Gillmor on Greg Hill

November 21st, 2004

Ouch!

A colleague of Dan Gillmor sent him the article that Greg Hill wrote about last week on weblogs and wikis. Dan points out a few errors in the story:

“Normally I wouldn’t bother to link to his piece, given its predictable nature. But as the e-mail correspondent who alerted me to its existence pointed out, the writer misspells my name and Dave Barry’s, and gets the title of my book wrong (I’m guessing he quoted from an online chapter draft, when the working title was different than the final one, and didn’t check Amazon or other sources to see if this had changed). I haven’t bothered to see what other errors must lurk in his commentary; these were enough to stop reading. Well, he proved his point, anyway.”

Now, this could have been an editorial issue, so we can’t blame Hill himself for this until we hear from the author. I have written many an article that, when it left my computer, had the correct spellings and facts and were somehow changed on the way to print.

I had an interesting e-mail exchange with Greg this week after my tirade about his article last week. He has written his column for a long time and is well respected in his community and in the library profession. That doesn’t mean that I now agree with what he wrote. He was dead wrong on a few issues, but a discussion was created and we agreed to disagree on the issue (like many discussions that I have had with Walt Crawford over the years). Again, he has a right to his beliefs, but we all have a right to disagree with him and call him on his errors (the true power of trust in weblogs).

Still, though. Ouch!

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