Just before Mark Pilgrim committed Internet suicide he posted a tasty little flame about me on Twitter.

A spammer picked it up and every few days it shows up in my Replies tab on Twitter, a reminder of how much Mark loved me. Or whatever.

It's a wonderful slam, something a Republican would be proud of -- because some of it is true -- but it's ridiculous at the same time. And it's packed with intrigue and innuendo.

1. I did run it without a privacy policy. No one ever asked for one. And it was still pretty early for privacy policies (it started in 1999 I think).

2. A privacy policy would have read like this -- No privacy. The point of weblogs.com was to broadcast all the data to everyone that wanted it. It was a central ping server. For a while it was the only ping server for the entire blogosphere. If you wanted to let everyone know that you had updated all you had to do was send a message saying so to weblogs.com. We then would publish the ping as part of our XML feed.

3. I did sell weblogs.com to Verisign, but just the domain. No software, no data. The data, to the extent that it ever existed is in a remote folder on one of my hard drives. An Old stuff folder inside another Old Stuff folder, etc etc. All the data was public. In the end it was almost all spam. Not worth anything, that's why they didn't want it.

Anyway, I thought it was worth a rebuttal on a lazy Saturday afternoon, after seeing this message about a thousand times since Mark first posted it. It'll probably be echoing around Twitter's network from now until the end of time. Long after we're all dead people will be wondering who Dave WIner was and why he sold all your ping data and what was #blork and who cares anyway cause they're all long gone.

Happy trails! :-)