Dell has, according to a press release, started up a new blog devoted to helping small businesses save through IT. There's only one problem: nowhere on the press release does it tell you the address of the blog. Now this is not entirely Dell's fault - PRDomain is stripping out links - but either way, it turns what might have been a useful press release into a bit of a joke.
Because he comes out with stuff like this:
“Setting up a server is like playing an old Infocom adventure. It’s an endless series of puzzles and even when you think you’ve solved them all…you’re eventually totally screwed because three months ago, you didn’t FEED CHEESE SANDWICH TO DOG.”
…in a blog post. A blog post that NO ONE IS PAYING HIM FOR. Giving away good lines like this is a piece of largesse that other freelance writers would baulk at, trust me.
Because if you do, you end up with the unpleasant spectacle of racists like Richard Barnbrooke starting a blog which looks like a Telegraph editorial page.
CrunchGear's John Biggs takes a look at "Gizmodo’s douchery and blogging":
"I doubt Walt Mossberg would run around turning off TVs or getting really drunk. I doubt David Pogue would take pictures of booth babes. But these sophomoric shenanigans — along with rumors, rants, and fanboyism — are sadly the bread and butter of blogging. Otherwise a blog is just a press release regurgitation machine."
And that's the problem. If all you can bring to the table is bad behaviour, all you are is a badly-behaved press release regurgitating machine. You're not the reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson.
Having said that, I think John underestimates the level of debauchery that professional journalists are capable of. While, as he puts it, "Business Week rarely have to sprinkle out sawdust in the break room", I can think of more than a few occasions when tech journalists I know were guilty of puking (or worse) in the kitchen sink. The big difference? You knew when not to be an asshole. Clearly, no one at Gizmodo is teaching the kids that.
Well, it's at least half true: Robert is leaving Podtech, although he hasn't yet confirmed that he's going to Fast Company as TechCrunch reported, but given the circumstances, it seems pretty likely.
I'm currently experimenting with using The Rubicon Project for filling the ad spaces on this site, so if the ads look a little... weird... then that's why. I'm going to give it a month and see how it compares to just using AdSense - it will be interesting to see if a third-party ad brokerage can actually outperform just the single source of advertising. It will also be interesting to see how people react to the ads...
The user experience has been a disaster (Scripting News):
"The NY Times has totally ignored the NY Times River, which makes the Times work on mobile devices with ease of use that they so often report is eluding them"
I don't know how many times that it's worth saying this, because Dave isn't listening but... "River of News" approaches don't work for everyone. In fact, for the majority of people - the kind who aren't constantly scanning the feeds - River of News fails miserably. It had no concept of importance other than "Most recent", and in news that's almost never the most important factor to someone.
If a bomb goes off somewhere in London, it's more important to me than other events. I want that front and centre of my news, more than anything else - more recent but unconnected stories are no use to me. If they push the important stuff off the front page, then I am missing things which I need to know.
River of News effectively abdicates responsibility for judging what's important to a reader. Whether that's done by human editors or machine algorithms isn't important - what matters is that in order to well-serve readers, it must be done. River of News simply fails to do it.
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Dave Winer
Shared Items are a very nice feature of Google Reader, and I wish more people will make use of them - they effectively allow you to make your own edited stream of interesting articles.
Now that I'm back using Google Reader again, I've added the list of Shared Items to the side of my blog, over on the left there. This is basically a list of stuff which I think is interesting, but which I either don't have time to comment on or don't have much to say about. You can, however, subscribe to a feed of the full text of the shared items here.
The small picture (Scripting News):
"As Pete Cashmore on Mashable says, it's because the subscriber numbers don't reflect actual readership. The people who subscribed may not even be aware that they are subscribed. Or put another way, we haven't learned yet how to measure what's valuable, we only have the crudest ways to measure value, so crude as to be meaningless."
Dave is, of course, correct. However, this is exactly the same situation as print magazines, which have massaged subscriber numbers for decades - adding to them using "bulk" copies (mailed in large numbers to companies), and other tactics.
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