Hey Buddy That's Just Your Opinion. Duh!

This morning, I was reading Robert Scoble's shared items in Google reader, and noticed an item Robert had shared from Blogger Steve Garfield. Garfield's post was a response to a piece that Scoble had written reflecting his view that kyte.tv was going to kill Qik and Flixwagon, in the cell phone video space. Steve disagrees with Robert's analysis.

Now I don't have a horse in this race. I haven't yet used any of these products and have no idea which is better.

But what killed me is how Steve starts off his rebuttal, first quoting Scoble and then taking him to task.

"I don’t see how Qik or Flixwagon can beat Kyte anymore in the cell phone video game. What do you think?"

I replied:

Robert,
Your title of, "Why Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space," is your opinion, will probably get you a lot of views, but you can't know this as a fact.

So here's the issue. Attacking someone's *opinion* piece with the retort that it is just their *opinion* is just plain dumb.

Now I don't mean to be too personal with Steve. Lots of people use this rhetorical tactic, which is in fact why I find it so annoying. And perhaps Steve was just having a bad day, so I will give him a pass. This is not about Steve Garfield specifically, but about the type of response technique he uses here.

And yet, as I have learned in my last 6 months of blogging, this is a fairly standard response. Here Steve says "you can't know this as a fact." Indeed. That's what freakin' opinion is! How in God's name can you know as a fact, something that is a prediction. It wouldn't be an opinion if it was known as a fact. It would be some freakish super power – some mystical heretofore unknown future telling ability.

And yet this seems, in the blogosphere, to be the starting point for a huge swath of comment response.

Now again, to be fair, the rest of Steve's piece seems reasonably argued, though again I am quite ignorant when it comes to this arena. Indeed poor Steve is getting singled out and caught in the shrapnel from my growing annoyance over this type of argument. There are many thousands of others perhaps far more deserving than Steve, so I apologize in advance.

Anyway, this is to all the other blog commenters who include in their rebuttals this kind of empty response. It would probably strengthen your argument to omit the obvious fact that an opinion is, well, an opinion.