Greetings from San Francisco - and apologies for lax blogging (SFO blogging?). I’ve been busy, you see - attending conferences, upstaging Symantec parties with Eris, emptying minibars, causing trouble - that kind of thing.

Will blog about it all as soon as a) I get five minutes and b) the wireless at TC50 becomes anything less than an absolutely sack of fucking shit.

Meantime, my post the other day on Spot.us and the future of journalism came to the attention of David Cohn, the site’s creator. With his permission, here’s his email response...

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Paul

Thanks for the critique of spot.us - I think you have some very good points and while I’m of course always happy when I get some uncritical praise - it’s good to get the criticism as well.

Of course - I have responses to all the points you made. I guess this is only natural as spot.us is my baby in a way. But one thing that I wanted to point out: Spot.Us would never fund a Woodward or Bernstien, or look into Sarah Palin’s kids.

One big reason: We only support local journalism.

ie: Fact checking political advertisments in San Francisco: http://wiki.spot.us/election

The quality of your water, school, hospital, etc.

How earthquake prepared is San Francisco?

These types of questions.

It isn’t about gotcha investigative journalism or big national politics. That’s actually NOT the role newspapers played. There will always be the NY Times and the Wash Post and yes, they are the biggest and best examples of newspapers, but the traditional role these organizations played was as the fourth estate in their local communities. They allowed communities to come together, get on the same page and deal with local issues.

ie: When the LA Times found out that a bunch of schools had exposed abstesos.

But I do agree: Spot.Us is no silver bullet. There is no such thing as a silver bullet - and we have PLENTY of challenges ahead. So keep the criticism coming - it’ll help me think more about how I can make this work.

Keep your eye for our launch in October (hopefully). We will directly be serving people in the Bay Area to start.

Best

David Cohn