One of the things that fascinates me about the never-ending Hijacking a MacBook in 60 Seconds or Less saga is the disparity it highlights among those covering it.

The story started with a Washington Post hosted weblog, Security Fix by Brian Krebs. It’s a sloppy piece that, after a month and a half of about a gazillon page views, still has this copy error in its closer:

…it might not be terrible idea to take advantage of the button your laptop that allows you to turn off the machine’s constant search for wireless networks…

Leave aside that he’s bizarrely talking about a button on my laptop when he means a setting in System Preferences that is off by default. What about the mising “a” of terrible idea? That is whack, WP!

Krebs’s reckless claims about a possible compromise of the MacBook and his “told you so” finger wagging made a lot of people angry, including John Gruber of Daring Fireball who took the 60 seconds piece apart. After that it was blogger vs. so-called blogger.

No, I didn’t alter this photo to give that last guy demon eyes or to give his neighbor George Ou a Chuck Norris expression. That’s just what they look like.

George Ou of ZDNet BLOGS REAL WORLD IT faced Gruber directly, only to be mocked mercilessly by Crazy Apple Rumors Site and others for his overreaching arguments and penchant for boasting of making “phone calls.” It was a blood bath.

The Mac weblogs outclassed the IT crowd at every turn, and in every way possible. (For one thing, it’s hard to get past the jarring superiority of the Daring Fireball design compared to the dorked-up WordPress skin of ZDNet BLOGS, but we do our best.) The macland writing is better, the jokes are better, the logic is better, the research is better, the insight is better… it’s no contest.

But it’s not just a Mac vs. IT thing. George Ou confuses “blog” and “blog post”

In a follow up blog, I’ll go over some TV and HDTV tuner cards.

…and that’s just triflin’ and ignorant. MrLittlePants’s mom made this mistake in one of her first posts at Eat — we nipped that right in the bud. Yet here is a paid weblog writer, chugging along without knowing exactly what “blog” means.

This is what happens when you try to buy weblogs into existence.

The strength of the medium has always been that individuals don’t need corporate support to publish. Weblogs grow up through their own merit (or, in most cases, don’t). Gawker Media is busy blowing weblogs up in the lab trying to make a winning commercial formula. If they find one, it won’t turn out to be a BLOGS section of a traditional publisher housing a bunch of assigned dweebs.

So please stick to that whole fact check, copy edit, blah blah blah thing. There actually is a future in it. (You just have to do it faster.)