I have no real value to add around this particular gem that has been proferred by one of my favouritest columnists, as it speaks for itself. Paul Carr - he of acid tongue and deadly quick wit -has got himself in to a bit of a bundle with Orlowski over at The Register, all in the name of charity event 'Twestival'.
Over to Mr Carr: "Orlowski, in the highly likely event that you haven't heard of him, is what I would call a professional troll. A "journalist" whose oeuvre is to spout views so calculatingly dumb – global warming? scientific evidence, schmientific evidence – and to rely on wordplay so pathetic – Wikipedia users? "wiki fiddlers" more like! – that the editors of the Register regularly disable comments on his diatribes, lest a child accidentally crawl across a keyboard and beat him in an argument. He hates Wikipedia, he hates peer-to-peer filesharing ("freetards!"), he hates basically anything popular or successful or fashionable. Which all serves to explain why, above all else, he really, really hates Twitter.
In fact, Orlowski hates Twitter, and its users, so much that he decided to summon up all of his trollish powers to write an article hacking Twestival, and its charitable intentions, to death. Faced with a forest of positive statistics and coverage of the event, he sniffed around – like a pig nudging aside truffles in search of a turd – until finally he dug up a single negative fact. Donations to Twestival's online radio station, Twestival.fm, had failed to reach their $20K target, with pledges coming in at a little over $4K. Compared to the huge totals pledged through other channels, it was an irrelevant disappointment. An irrelevant disappointment on which Orlowski based his entire coverage of the event".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/17/twestival-charity-trolls
You can read the actual email back and forth on Paul's blog here: http://www.paulcarr.com/can-you-guess-what-my-columns-going-to-be-about-this-week/
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