An Open Letter To Guy Kawasaki: Please Don’t Be Evil

Sunday, October 28th, 2007
by George Appiah

Dear Guy Kawasaki,

October 4. What’s special about October 4? That’s when you went evil. I don’t know why you of all people would do this, but there’s one thing that I can bet my very life on: that this is no way to change the world at all.

I’m writing this because this is something that hits a personal nerve of mine. For the past 12 months that I’ve been in bed fighting a heart disease that came unannounced (I’m 27), your writings, along with a select few others, have kept me going and staying strong.

That’s why it felt like my balls were being yanked … when I found this on October 4:

Like my heart disease, this also came totally unannounced. At least others who have gone this route wrote about it before or immediately afterwards. Initially I dismissed this as probably one of those experiments. But two weeks on, and this evil deed continues.

Hello Guy, stop for a minute and ask yourself which is more important to you: the page views, or getting the your message across? And in this context, consider advertising as part of the message.

If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll realize I still have the “Signal Without Noise” in the feed title. Actually I’ve probably never visited your website more than twice since you change the title to “How To Change The World”. Yet with every single post that I read from you, I always had “Guy” in mind. I always know this is coming from Guy The Great, Guy The Technology Evangelist, Guy The Venture Capitalist, Guy Great Sushi guy, Guy with The Golden Touch — no matter where I read the content from.

So once again, ask yourself what’s more important: you and your message, or is it your website and its page views?

If it’s about advertising, why don’t you put those ads inside the feed? Afterall, if you’re asking people to visit the website to read the article so you can show them ads while they’re there — what prevents you from just bundling the ad with the feed and giving your users the choice to read it wherever we so wish?

Even better, you could publish two feeds — one feed with the full content with advertising, and a second, evil-inspired feed with only the excerpt. Who says you can’t eat your cake when it’s right there in your hands?

Seeing you use WordPress for your blog, the DualFeeds plugin makes this quite easy. If you can’t find the time to do this, create a temporal ftp account and give me a call or shoot me an e-mail. I won’t mind doing this for you, even with electrodes on my chest in my hospital bed.

But if you really must just be this evil, at least go the classic evil route. Forget about the statement:

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Now I don’t know about you, but I sense something very evil in that line. If (you think) your RSS subscribers are so dumb to not know that there’s more to a post than one sentence and a linked title, then I’m quite confident you don’t need these “dumb” people visiting your website anyway.

Oh, but then I may be wrong: Guy is a numbers guy — and those page views might be so important above anything else.

And when all is said and done, I still respect you, very much. I always have. And I always will. And no, I’m not un-subscribing from your feed like others have. It’s just that I keep “staring” your post in Google Reader — hoping to visit your site, someday, when I have the time, if I ever will — to read them.

Perhaps I’m taking this issue too personal. Well, thinking about it I know why: it is personal to me.

Good morning from my sick bed here in the sunny city of Accra, Ghana, where I call home.