Battelle Watch May Be "Calling in Sick"

Batelle Watch, a popular Blog whose URL is http://battellewatch.blogspot.com, started up fairly recently, and its purpose was to critically chronicle the meteoric rise of search pundit John Battelle. But the site hasn't seen an update since late September of this year, which seems odd, given that this Blog was updated once every couple of days up until that time.

When confronted by sites such as Battelle Watch, which are fueled by such raging personal animus, I always feel a creeping suspicion that the target may in fact be the author, and that the barbs are meant to simply stir up Web site traffic, Blog links, and provide amusement for those in on the ruse. Back when I was running Netslaves.com, I recall that I got a considerable kick out of pseudonymously attacking my own writings, and then waiting for someone to defend me. In this manner, it was easy to determine who my true online friends were (I had few, it turned out).

I won't go so far as to claim that "Battelle Watch" is authored by John Battelle in stealth mode, but it's certainly hard to know much about the identity of the operator of Battelle Watch, whose Blogger "About Me" section simply reads: "Remember that gazillion-dollar boondoggle tech magazine called the Industry Standard? Remember how the Internet Bubble popped like a poison zit? Well, the bad times are back again and so is John Battelle."

Whoever this mysterious person is, he's a pretty good, acerbic writer, which narrows the population of possible candidates on the Internet to about 20.

It's too early to declare today's search-driven economy a bubble (sadly, this judgement, like an epitaph, can only follow the demise of its subject), and it's too early to deem Batelle Watch a dead site, but for the moment Ghost Sites wlll proclaim that Battelle Watch is "calling in sick," which means that its operator may have simply run out of the vitriole sufficient to keep it running at fever-pitch.