Do I want every blog/site I visit tracked and published anywhere? No. Do I think sites I visit are necessarily worth “mentioning” on a blog/site? No. Am I so lazy that I won’t use something like StumbledUpon or Shared Items or Twitter things that interest me? No. Fred Wilson and I are obviously very different.

Fred’s latest idea is a last.fm scrobble effect for blogs:

The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother

Everything else is based on links I see on the web

I wish there was a last.fm for blogs

A last.fm for blogs! I want to scrobble my blogreading and publish it as a blog roll on AVC.

If you aren’t familiar with last.fm, the software will track and publish the music you listen to. You can embed your listening choices on your site. The software allows you to customize your listening choices. You can turn it off and listen to music in private. You can select directories that cannot be scrobbled for additional privacy. You can select the software which last.fm interacts with. One important note is if you start listening to a song you can skip it and it won’t appear in your listings (you have to listen to a song for a good length of time for it to appear publicly). In other words, there are choices for the user.

Now Let’s Look at Why Fred’s Idea is Stupid

Do you REALLY want software tracking every site you visit and publishing it to your blog? Let’s think about this a minute.

1. The software would have to determine which sites are okay to publish and which ones aren’t. It would be dumb to publish sites like where someone banks, when they check email or login to a mobile service, etc.
2. Next, the software would have to be maintained to filter the things you simply don’t want seen. For example, when you went to Amazon to look for a gift for your spouse.
3. And let’s not forget the things people might not want known period – can you say porn?
4. For the list to be meaningful then it needs to be “good”. If you surf the internet you encounter crap…things that aren’t worth mentioning or you strongly disagree with. Those would need to be filtered out.
5. With short URLs you don’t know where you’re going until you get there. It would be dumb to auto-publish from short URLs.
6. Oh, let’s not forget about the content that might offend people. For example, I posted something on Twitter today but I also made a note about the profanity. With this auto-publishing Fred wants…that wouldn’t happen.
7. Oops…let’s not forget sites that are valuable resources but most likely not ones you’d want on a blogroll list. Like the dictionary. Google searches. Wikipedia. Need I go on?
8. And we won’t even get into how awful this would be for kids (or people who aren’t technology wizards by nature). Or the security risks of using something that, in real-time, publishes the site you just visited.
9. I know, I know, this scrobble list is only supposed to be for blogs. What’s the definition of a blog that everyone agrees on?

Take all of that out of the equation you get back to recommending something. And you know where that leads you right? To the services that are already out there like Shared Items for Google Reader or StumbledUpon for those not wanting to use a reader (use the browser addon).

All Ideas Aren’t Good Ideas

It’s great to share ideas and get feedback on them. Fred’s ideas seem to stem from making things “easier” for him to the point of dumbing down brain activity. Take a look at his blog and see how much time he spends correcting misconceptions about different news items that eventually impact his startups (you know, like negativity about the economy). Fred must not surf the internet much because, if he did, he’d realize the implications of real-time scrobbling and how it would end up being more trouble than it’s worth filtering out what you don’t want to appear on a blog. He even contradicts himself. He doesn’t want to create a list (as in RSS feeds) yet this application would have to have a white or blacklist.

The Beauty of the Internet: Power of Choice

That’s one of the beautiful traits of the internet – the ability to pick what you want to see, what you don’t want to see, express what you want to say, and interact with whom you want to interact with (or not). To some, Fred’s ideas are visionary. To me, I feel like I am getting dumber as I read his site. I don’t want to fall into that trap of having everything done for me. I don’t want to be one of those that blindly follow someone when they, in the interest of making things easier for themselves, suggest an application that adds more noise to the internet, creating almost no added benefit, that isn’t being done already in a more efficient manner.

Laziness doesn’t get you anywhere. And we wonder why the economy is messed up? We have people like him in charge of distributing the money to companies. If this is the type of ideas they are funding…yeah, my mind won’t even go there.

In the End….

I guess I miss the Fred I was used to reading from a couple of years ago. The one that came up with innovative ideas that added value, was the catalyst to evolving trends, that pushed boundaries. Compare this to the “I want to scrobble everything because I’m lazy” entry. See the difference? But even then, his opinion about tagging wasn’t neutral as his VC has a vested interest in Delicious, which is one of the sites the tagging craze started from.

And now that I typed that, I’m not sure I trust his opinion(s) anymore and that in itself makes me sad.