So much to blog, so little time.

But this one was too sweet not to mention.

The blogosphere has been buzzing today about O'Reilly sending a cease-and-desist letter to IT@Cork, demanding (yes, that's the legal term) that they not use "Web 2.0" in the title of their conference.

Everything clever and poignant that could possibly be said about the subject has been done so in the comments of above link - so I'm just going to quote a few of my personal favorites:

"Let's pull that bug out of O'Reilly's ass, and start calling it Web 2.1 - the bug fix release ;-)"

"Now this is how you go about rubbing people the wrong way."

"I and a very few other bloggers had jumped to the conclusion that this must be CMP's blunder; surely Tim O'Reilly was too savvy to make such a mistake. You have proven us fools, and that we will not forget."

"This is typical O'Reilly, really. Greed. Makes him a hypocrite too... Shame on you Tim."

...and my all-time favorite:

"Hopefully you'll agree to change your name before we ask a judge to issue an injunction against you prior to the launching of next month's 'Sara Winge Is A Giant Hemorrhoid Conference.'"

In the interest of full disclosure (and unless you're not one of my regular, alert readers), I must mention that I used to work for O'Reilly from 1997 to 2001 (I got laid off 30 days after Sept. 11) in the function of their "Online Evangelist". My boss used to be none other than Sara Winge.

A WIRED article on Tim last year triggered a long-overdue top-popping by yours truly - detailed here - and so the only thing I really have to say about O'Reilly even attempting to register "Web 2.0" as a trademark is this:

Guys - for f***s sake. Pull your heads out of your asses, already. You didn't used to be so dumb and uncool when I was there. What the f*** happened?

I can't remember such a dumb business decision in years.

Don't they understand who their audience is? The people I know with "a shelf of O'Reillys" are the sort of geeks who love Linux, FOSS and all that. They would absolutely hate what O'Reilly are doing here.

They *used* to understand their audience. That was a large part of my job, actually - take the pulse of the community and feed it back to the rest of the company.

Of course, they've had some snafus back then, and Tim stuck his foot in his mouth plenty of times - but never an embarassing and downright stupid PR disaster like this.

As a lot of people in the comments pointed out - this *will* cost them.

Geeks are fickle and don't take well to having their freedoms limited - plus, the quality of O'Reilly books has plummeted in recent years; their branding got muddled with those non-animal book covers, and they delude themselves, thinking they are cool, by feeding back only praise to the decision-makers (Sara is so very good at that).

It seriously makes me wonder what the hell happened to this company I used to *love* working for ... A pity, really.

Today's UserFriendly reminded me of this post.

Thank you, Jake.

This hits the nail on the head ...