More than a week has passed since the controversy over an attorney, Martin Schwimmer had asked Bloglines to remove his feed and Scoble posted multiple entries about the situation in his main blog. It’s not unusual to see his link blog fill up with many posts about the same topic. To this Scoble reader it seems to me Scoble thought this was a pretty important deal if he posted about it in his main blog multiple times.

He pointed to several people who thought Schwimmer was everything from crazy to confused to in the right. When I evaluated the situation, looked at it then and now from a business perspective, which is something that only the minority of bloggers seem to be doing (I guess this depends on whether or not one considers him/herself a business blogger). For me the bottom line is the bottom line. I think that’s what Mr. Schwimmer was doing as well when evalulating whether the relationship with Bloglines was mutually beneficial. Though Schwimmer’s arguments sounded very attorney-like I think the underlying premise was: what is Bloglines doing for my business?

So let’s review what happened over the last 10+ days since astute members of the blogosphere analyzed this situation. Despite the fact that nobody could actually read Schwimmer’s blog through Bloglines during this time, his blog subscription list actually shows an increase of 16 subscribers.

What does this mean, if anything? Does it say that people are curious like me about how many subscribers he’ll lose from this (mostly bad) blog press? Or does it mean that readers don’t really unsubscribe that often from blogs once subscribed to? Is a subscription list like an email list in that it doesn’t necessarily indicate primarily interested eyeballs? Is this the blog equivalent of magazine circulation?

I would think that Mr. Schwimmer saying to Bloglines: I don’t want them using my feed would be enough reason for many to unsubscribe via Bloglines, since it’s impossible to actually read him there now, but apparently not only has this not been the case so far, but more people have actually subscribed. I realize that this is only one source to evaluate and from a scientific dissertation probably means very little statistically, however, I wonder if through all this extra press (and look, I’m now giving him more), Martin Schwimmer has gained more eyeballs; he’s benefitted.

Therefore, this seems to fit the cliche: bad press is better than no press. In this respect is the blogosphere no different than mainstream media? Schwimmer has written a couple of follow-up entries to this situation on his blog: If He Doesn’t Like Bloglines, Why Does He Make A RSS Feed Available? (Jan 20), Clarifying Some Points As To Why I Asked Bloglines To Remove My Feed (Jan 15). Clearly, he’d like to continue to milk this publicity for his business which, not unsurprisingly is trademark law. I would also add that since Mr. Schwimmer doesn’t allow comments on his blog, he is actually inviting blogger commentary. I find that fascinating as that’s what Dave Winer has done with scripting.com (which is rarely about scripting, BTW, and more about what Dave is up to and thinks). Really, anybody that doesn’t have comments enabled is saying: I don’t want your comments here, you’ll have to make them somewhere else. This could actually be a marketing technique of sorts, though I won’t credit Mr. Schwimmer with this line of thinking.

So no, I would say to all the bloggers who read this and blog bashed on Mr. Schwimmer: he benefitted from the scorn. He still has a link in Bloglines to his blog (but no content being pulled, so less bandwidth being consumed), he gained subscribers/readers and perhaps most importantly for those who feel that they can’t go against the grain and truly speak their minds: he indicated he’s not a blogosphere lemming; good for him! Yes, this situation seemed to have helped Schwimmer, not hurt him. I don’t know what the overall intentions were of most bloggers but it seems to me if they wanted to impact Schwimmer’s readership or client base, it actually had the opposite effect.

If you really want to make someone or something unimportant then you don’t talk about it, don’t link to it, you just go quiet. This is opposite of the blogger mantra though, isn’t it? William Hung, anyone?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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