Hey Jacques,
I just read your post and as per my email, I sent you my article for feedback. I DO want to do a better job in writing stories that are useful to the HN community and this is why I reached out in the first place. It was never my intention to undermine any aspects of the community, if anything I asked you for your advice in honor of your position as a community leader. I have no problem nominating my own stories, but your nomination and feedback tells me if an article is a good resource for entrepreneurs and programmers. Thanks in any case for your initial email on trends. For those of you who do want to let me know what stories you'd like to see written in 2010, I'm grateful for your feedback.
I'm not a community leader by any stretch of the imagination, as I already wrote to you, just someone that in episodes spends way too much of his time on HN.
My 'nomination' will never be given to stuff I'm asked to submit because that already stacks the deck, I'm no longer unbiased towards what you wrote.
I'll post the stuff that I find on the net while surfing, irrespective of the source of my relationship with a source.
As a rule, if someone mails me their submissions I'll read but not upvote, unless it is excellent stuff.
If I come across readwriteweb articles that really interest me - and not through my inbox - then I'll definitely post it, or upvote it, but otherwise definitely not.
I understand that the pragmatic view is that 'everbody does it' but I simply don't feel comfortable with doing this.
It suggests some kind of collusion, possibly in the long term a quid-pro-quo and I like to be independent.
Over the years I've had plenty of press on my projects but not once was there any kind of behind the scenes dealing going on, and I frown on the cozy relationships that some press people build with people in the industry. Having press contacts is one thing, getting too close is imo not good.
As for HN, I'd expect readwriteweb.com content to be caught by enough people to be submitted anyway if it warrants that, I doubt you'd need to go out and solicit it (I could be wrong there), so for that you really don't need me or any other HN user specifically.
The best 'nomination' you can get here is to simply post your stuff and see what sinks and what swims. It's far from perfect, good stuff will fail plenty of times and fluff will rise to the surface but on the whole it is better than anywhere else, and to carefully read the comments, there is plenty of really good feedback there.
Dana Oshiro