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Cory Doctorow has written an entry comparing his differing experiences getting facts corrected in articles on The Register and Wikipedia.

Rough summary: Because Cory could edit Wikipedia himself, the corrections were made sooner (although at the expense of plenty of his time) than when he had to phone up The Register and get someone to change the page manually.

For those unfamiliar with the site, The Register is an online publication published by a limited liability company, written by professional writers, and funded by advertising. It has a reputation for acerbic. humerous and opinionated writing around topics of interest to geeks.

What’s interesting is that Boing Boing has a history of screwing things up. Often they’ll put an update at the bottom of the article as a correction, but they (and Cory in particular) are often guilty of shoot-first ask-questions-later attacks.

Boing Boing is an online publication published by a limited liability company, written by professional writers, and funded by advertising. It has a reputation for acerbic. humerous and opinionated writing around topics of interest to geeks.

Compare the traffic for The Reg and BoingBoing—pretty similar. And Bloglines reports that BoingBoing has readership of ~38,000 to El Reg’s ~15,000.

Fuck-ups, character attacks, and underinformed rants by Cory et al are just as dangerous to the world at large, and this smug attack on The Register is just an excellent example. Hell, at least ye olde newspapers have a “Letters” page to allow readers a right-to-reply.

Perhaps Cory could learn a thing or two from the fourth estate. BoingBoing could get themselves a readers blogger to handle complaints, rather than rely on their own judgement on what deserves sharing. Maybe then, he could claim any level of superiority over other online publications.

The two Johns must die

If you’re writing music playback code that you’re going to have to keep running and debugging and trying to get working, don’t just use a folder of They Might Be Giants MP3s for testing.

Their amusing, quirky tunes will please at first, but on the fiftieth playback you want to punch them repeatedly in their smug, wry, cornish faces.