paul helinski just does not know when to quit

Paul Helinski, president of GunsAmerica, simply does not understand the Internet or how it works.  This profound ignorance is rather surprising in this day and age, especially since he claims to have been using the “network of tubes” for the past 15 years or so, but being the gracious and generous person I am, I took it upon myself to try to correct this oversight yesterday. 

Apparently, I was too late: 

Alas, I have to get on a plane in the morning and will be working 16 hour days for the next week, so I will not be able to be as lively in this discussion as I would like. But please understand that I didn’t mean any disrespect for the couple dozen real bloggers out there who have been hard charging for many years out there, nor was I suggesting that just us and Jeff Quinn be allowed into media day. Some of the comments about this post came up in my google notifications, and some of the people whining about what I said are just the people who would be included in what I suggested, because they have been blogging for many years and have thousands of readers per month, they attend the blogger conventions and have been active in the gun blogger community. I was talking about the guys who installed wordpress and registered a domain a month before the show, or "blog" three times per year for a print magazine website that has 16 people visiting it every month, and who **will not** post anything about media day or the show. Jeff knows what I am talking about and I am surprised you don’t. I suggested at the end of last year that NSSF google around and see who actually did post blog stuff about the show to qualify them for media day next year.

Please say Hi if you are going to media day, or stop by the booth. If you mention this post you get a t-shirt you can burn in efigy for a youtube video due to your outrage at my inflammatory and just plain not nice comments. We are booth 1925. -ph

Oh, poor Paul, having to work such long hours, in Vegas, of all the horrible places in the world, shooting guns, and playing with guns, and rubbing shoulders, and all that hard work that comes from pimping his own company.  Don’t’cha just feel horrible for him? 

And obviously he was not talking about the “couple dozen real bloggers out there” when he said things like “nobodies” and “wish I were internet journalists” and “wanna be internet media professional”.  I mean, duh. 

And, oh noes, someone said something mean about him and it showed up in teh Googolz!  Whatever shall he do?!

Oh, and if you were one of those people who somehow took offense at what Paul said previously, you are just a whiner, and your opinion is meaningless. 

… *sigh* 

Paul, you are being a dick.  Don’t be a dick. 

Hm… speaking of…  In yet another attempt to show Paul Helinski how the internet works, here is me, throwing down the gauntlet to my readership. 

To all you lucky bastards going to SHOT Show this year, take heed!  I have a few Eastern TN Monster Hunter International patches left, and I will send one patch, free of charge, to the first two people to send me a picture of the following:  you, standing at the edge of the GunsAmerica booth (with their sign/logo visible/legible behind you), holding a sign/placard/piece of paper with “Don’t be a dick, Paul” legibly written upon it.  You can anonymize yourself however you like (I will be posting the pictures here), and be as creative with that as you like, but, hey, free patches! 

You see, Paul, I am very much a “nobody” – my site had all of 15,000 unique hits last month, which, for me, was almost something of a record.  However, I have heard of this thing called “RSS”, and I have heard of this other thing called “Twitter”, and I know how to tinker around with this crazy thing called “metadata”, and, most importantly of all, I know how not to be a dick so people actually read what I write.  And those are skills and abilities that people can learn or have regardless of whether they have been doing this “blogging” thing for 15 days or 15 years. 

So stop being an elitist prick.  Yes, you apparently have an accomplished web business (which very few of the people I read have heard of, but that is a separate problem), and, yes, you have been writing for however many years, but none of that matters if you unnecessarily alienate your readership or your customer base, and none of that grants you the position to justifiably demean up-and-comers… or, better yet, those who will one day replace you. 

Times are changing Paul.  “Nobodies” can create WordPress weblogs yesterday and have enough readership to seriously impact your business.  Time to get with it. 

Oh, and nowhere in that comment did I see an apology.