Since I praised Erick Schonfeld for his post on the Yahoo-Google merger a few days ago it only seems fair that I take him to task on something else now.  From his post on Techcrunch...

Ever since the rear-guard at the Wall Street Journal won the battle to keep its news pages behind its subscription wall (although, its opinion pages are now free), they have been cracking down especially hard on anyone trying to breach that wall—even if those people happen to be paying subscribers. In what appears to be an attempt to discourage freeloaders, the WSJ.com is locking out anyone from its site when it detects more than one simultaneous log-in on the same account. But innocent, rule-abiding subscribers who may be using multiple computers, or doing nothing wrong other than forgetting to log out of their accounts, are being shut out as well (see email below).

That is no way to treat your customers. In fact, it shows an utter disdain for how normal people actually use the Web. But it is an understandable, and classic, reaction. Incumbent executives always try to fend off inevitable disruption by blindly protecting their current sources of revenues. I liked Rupert Murdoch’s original idea of tearing down the entire subscription wall much better.

Now, I'm not going to cover the Wall Street Journal again because I've already done that.  What bothers me about this is the idea of twisting what was obviously a stupid technical issue to look like an intentional slight on the Journal's part.   

I will happily eat my words if the people at the Wall Street Journal saw this repercussion coming and intentionally did this.  But my feeling is that they implemented a standard security measure badly and this was the consequence of that. 

Painting that mis-step as intentional so you can use it to slam them for a decision you don't like is a low blow on Mr. Schonfeld's part.

Addendum: I wrote this a couple days ago but only got a chance to post it now.  Since then Dow Jones (owners of the Wall Street Journal) replied to the original Techcrunch article. They said...

Our subscribers often use multiple computers to access their accounts; therefore, we’ve had a long-standing policy of allowing up to three concurrent logins in order to deliver the best customer experience possible. Customer satisfaction and service are of the utmost importance, and we regret any inconveniences incurred by this user.

Cheers to Techcrunch for posting the update, Jeers to Techcrunch for posting the article in the first place.

I've been a bit busy with the Holidays so I missed this news from a few days ago but I guess Mike Arrington backed Edgeio has gone out of business (I'm sure he's just thrilled that everyone is describing it like that but that's what everyone knows it as). 

For those who don't know, here's a brief description of Edgeio provided by Matthew Ingram...

Edgeio seemed like a good idea to me when it launched: A kind of distributed version of Craigslist, in which ads would be pulled from wherever they were — sitting on blogs or whatever, provided they had the right tags — and then aggregated at Edgeio’s site. But like Frederic at The Last Podcast, I never found much of value there, likely because not enough people decided to get on board and tag their posts properly.

Like Mr. Ingram I thought Edgeio was a good idea when I first heard of it but I was always surprised that they didn't seem to be supplementing the service with an internal classified site.  In other words, the service seemed to expect everyone to have their own blog and didn't offer any way for random people without a website or a blog to list items for sale. 

I kind of lost track of the company after its initial beta so I don't really know if they ever remedied that (though TechCrunch's job site was hosted on it so I assume they did).  I meant to keep tabs on it but I'm not one who usually sells his old stuff so it just sort of slipped through the cracks.

I still believe some kind of distributed system is the future of this industry.  I know for a fact that our HR department has to go to around 10 different sites when listing a job opening (not counting the various papers and professional publications).  If a company does have a web site where they list jobs it seems silly to not pull the data from there (which also makes changing things in the listing a lot easier).  But as a wise man once told me, sometimes the difference between a visionary and a failure boils down to nothing more than timing.  Edgeio's timing was obviously a little off.

On one last note I have to give props to Mr. Arrington for taking the comment-based-beating like a man when breaking the news on TechCrunch. If you're going to get raked over the coals you might as well have fun with it.