What’s Wrong With Steve Rubel?

Steve Rubel had a rather nasty reaction to my free Viral Copy report. It’s obvious he hasn’t actually read it, because if he had, he wouldn’t be able to make the completely wrong-headed assertions that he does. But what I really don’t understand is his intra-day flip-flop on the subject of traffic.
Here’s Steve this morning:
Over at ProBlogger, Aaron Brazell has written an outstanding tutorial on how to integrate tags into your blog and why this is important. I tag nearly every post and I have been seeing my traffic from Technorati’s tag pages climb ever since.
But here’s Steve tonight, in his hysterical attack on me entitled “It’s Not About the Traffic!”:
However, I guarantee if you regularly add value to the community, your traffic will grow. But don’t get it into it just for the traffic and, going a step further, don’t pay a lot of attention to your traffic data. I don’t nearly as much as I used to. This was one of my key learnings over the past year.
I agree 100% about adding value, Steve. That’s exactly what the report says to do (you really should read it). But devoting a post to gaining more traffic from Technorati in the morning, and then ranting that traffic doesn’t matter in the evening? Strange.
Keep in mind folks, Steve is where he is today (Edelman and all) due to a cheap PR stunt back in 2004, less than two months after he started blogging. If you don’t remember, on May 25, 2004, Steve swore off all mainstream media for a week, vowing to read only blogs. Back then, Jeff Jarvis called it a “bogus gimmick” and a “PR stunt without substance” (link here, scroll down to the Carb News post on the old Buzz Machine).
Steve used a clever little PR gimmick (that would never work for an unknown blogger today, mind you) to literally propel himself to the enviable point he is now. Nothing wrong with that, unless of course, two years later, you look down from your A-List perch and proclaim that traffic is now bad.
Except from Technorati, of course.
I’m going to write this off as a bad day for Steve. Or maybe he’s just trying to do me a big favor, in which case I thank him.
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