I'm Gonna Change My Name To Wonkette
You all know Tony Pierce. Or you should. (He linked to me once, a long time ago, causing a significant traffic spike here.) Well, he wrote a book entitled "How to Blog," and has been promoting and selling it here and there.

Imagine his surprise when he recently made a discovery:

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another T. Pierce is selling a "How To Blog"?

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That's right, cyberfriends. For $347, you can get the most valuable blogging tips from the blogging expert T. L. Pakii Pierce. Because it's much more expensive than Tony's offering (which is less than $20), it's got to be that much more qualitatively better and like stuff.

Actually, the difference is that Tony is marketing to individuals, while Pakii is marketing to corporations. Imagine going to a department meeting at MegaCorp and telling your department head, "We can spend twenty bucks and improve our blogging presence." You'd be laughed out of the room. But if you say, "We can spend three hundred and fifty bucks and improve our blogging presence," you'll make employee of the year. Spend three thousand bucks, and you'll be employee of the decade.

Because of their different emphases, they use different language. See if you can tell Tony from Pakii without clicking on the links:

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recommend that if people want to leave a url back to their site as they comment that they first check the blog they are about to comment at and see what manner of comments have been left at the blog previously. This isn't always a real good way to determine if adding your url to your comments is acceptable but it is a good start in ascertaining protocol. Also check to see of the blog has an "acceptable use policy" and follow it if it does. If no policy is in place and you cannot tell from other comments whether it is acceptable or not to post your url then proceed with the understanding that your link my be removed if the blog publisher finds your url to be spammy or against their posting policy.

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have comments. dont be upset if no one writes in your comments for a long time. eventually they'll write in there. if people start acting mean in your comments, ask them to stop, they probably will.

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Can you tell who is who?

And can you tell who came first? Perhaps this isn't a ripoff. Pakii registered his site on August 7, 2004 (using godaddy.com, by the way). While Tony wrote his post on June 16, 2004, I don't believe that this means that Pakii ripped off Tony. If Pakii wanted to rip off Tony, he would have de-emphasized his discussion of technical issues and focused on ever-expanding content. Content is key.