Mark Cuban and Sharesleuth Linkfest

Mark Cuban and his Sharesleuth.com have been a hot topic in the Blogosphere lately. Whether you like or dislike Cuban (and most of the recent coverage has been pretty negative), he seems to inspire strong feelings in people. Here are some of the choicer pieces from the last two days for your reading pleasure:

From Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine:

The Online News Association just announced that Mark Cuban will be their keynoter this year. Yow. Now on the one hand, Cuban could be perfect, for he has been pushing back at reporters and making his interviews with them open, even over their wailing and whining. But on the other hand, Cuban is most decidedly imperfect, for his latest venture, Sharesleuth.com, raises no end of troubling ethical and journalistic, if not legal, questions about his media activities.

Jarvis has a lot to say about Cuban, and little of it is flattering. Read the whole thing here. And while you're at it, check out the comments.

Equity Private at Going Private has been a pretty vocal critic of Cuban for some time. But EP must have had an extra couple of shots of espresso today (possibly administered intravenously):

Presently, Cuban reminds me of Ununpentium. Both are entirely synthetic, highly dense elements that shouldn't really exist in the natural world, created almost by accident and only recently via the fusion of a series of other dense elements (isotopes of Calcium and Americium for Ununpentium, the shareholders and management at AOL and Yahoo for Cuban) through the judicious use of spin (a cyclotron, for instance- or perhaps a bloodless public relations firm and a penchant for controversy), require large amounts of expensive equipment to feed and maintain and that still have no use whatsoever other than for basic scientific research (chemistry or forensic psychology, depending which side of the metaphor you want to use) and to keep various wing-nuts chattering. So far no one has created a particularly stable isotope of Ununpentium (or Mark Cuban).

Hold all calls, we have a winner. Read the whole thing here here.

Mark Glaser writes a fairly evenhanded piece and gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly of Cuban and Sharesleuth.

Finally, Gary Weiss brings us this gem:

Jarvis points out that Cuban is keynote speaker at the Online News Association annual meeting-- which is something akin to Jeffrey Dahmer being guest speaker at the Culinary Institute of America.

All in all, much better writing than I could have done. But I think I'l intitute a new rule - no more reading about Cuban with a mouth full of coffee - replacing keyboards gets old real fast (but I have found out that coffee comes off a monitor pretty easily if you move fast enough)