My On Notice List
I think I was born to be a get-off-my-lawn grumpy old bastard. Its mostly because my tolerance for stupidity is pretty low and my cynicism is usually pretty high. This coupled with a strong desire for everything to be exactly to my liking can make me cranky, perfection seeking and downright unpleasant. But usually I’m a really nice guy. Except when irritated.
So lately here are my “on notice” items that are irritating the fuck out of me:
Mashable/TechCrunch/Most Tech blogs except Read Write Web – top 100 lists with zero content, re-blogging press-releases without any original substance, one-up-ism’s, self-serving twitters, petty fights and more. Tech journalism needs to grow up, get substantial and actually look at the place of technology in the world rather than rehashing startup pitches with little analysis. Read Write Web is the best at actually analyzing stories. Mashable the worst. TechCrunch inconsistent but getting somewhat better in a random-walk kind of way.
By extension, cult-of-personality blog empires that lambast cult-of-personality tech-companies - This one is obvious. Has anyone figured out what some of these personalities actually DO? They show up at parties and in photo-ops, but what do they do? And don’t throw stones….
Ars-Technica and Blogs that have no full-text feeds - It is 2008. To not have full-text feeds is an a front to your readership’s intelligence and stupid ploy at page views. You know what I do when I see no full text feeds? Unsubscribe from the site. I don’t visit it, look at an ad and then click on it. I don’t read it: period. RSS is meant to improve your content’s reach into the lives of people, not to act as a teaser for content on a site that is ugly and slow with a gray background.
Valley Clique Culture and those that cover it - Cyprus. Enough already. Who cares? Those that went and those that are jealous that they weren’t invited. That’s who.
Newspapers - You’ve been given 15 years now to figure out how to change your business model around. In that time, a small San Francisco company killed your classified ad market, you guys lost the best people in your offices to startups and other journalist empires with more capital, and still surround yourself in oligarchic Taj Mahal’s with mahogany offices with the insistence that the public “needs” you. Right. The New York Times is going the right direction. The next move: get rid of the print product. Shutter the presses and move on.
Simplification of situations - This is a broad one. Journalism is always stuck in a binary opposition stance to make points easier to digest. However, you’d think that journalism that is based upon, and exists within a truly complex system like the Internet would try to get out of this. No, it doesn’t. There is only surface examination of anything with online discourse, and even extending into engineering, product design, business and more. The world is complex and connectionist. Every action has tangible and intangible effects on every other actor in the system it inhabits. By segmenting off a very narrow segment of any given problem, one is not actually solving anything, but rather just adding another layer on top of the original complication.
Too often I see product pitches, criticism of the music industry, politics, news, etc fall into this trap. Nothing is simplistic. The answer is never “simple.” The answer is never a unilateral declaration of intent.
It is ALWAYS complex, and this is something I don’t often see online.
Press Release Bloggers - Bloggers who get a press release, expand one sentence from it into one paragraph on their blog, and then post it. With very little to no understanding of what they are posting about on a technical level, and zero analysis. I saw this with the WiMax announcements last week. People basically reblogging a press release with maybe a Wikipedia level understanding of the history and context of the announcement and little else. I didn’t post on WiMax. Why? Because I don’t care (yet) and don’t know enough about it to post it. I did get the same press releases in my inbox the rest of the blogosphere did. It’s called restraint and self-respect. Learn it.
Digital Camera Chronology Bloggers - Kind of falls into the above. This is a category of bloggers who solicits for free products, gets them and then takes photos and posts them as a blog entry. Therein lies the end of the analysis. Engadget and Gizmodo do photo-posts, but then usually follow it up with cogent analysis. The wannabe gadget/tech blogs just post photos.
Disclosure: I’m a contributor at Mashable.com, and I might be a bit more objective about Mashable than you are about R.E.M. (a band which I’ve liked since the 1980s), since I’ve only been contributing there for a couple of months.
I’m know it’s not perfect, but I think you should look at the stuff that Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and Steven Hodson are writing at Mashable – there’s more analysis there than I think you’re giving them credit for. Have you read their posts? There’s other good stuff there as well. I can appreciate that not everything there will meet your interests – I just think you’re painting a picture with a pretty broad brush.
I do agree with your assessment of ReadWriteWeb – great blog, great writers. For that matter, I agree with pretty much everything that you’ve written in this post, at least to some degree.
Thanks for providing the space for comments. Cheers.
Again, I mostly agree. My biggest gripe about TechCrunch is the total lack of journalism. They say the cover startups, but they always post GYM news because they don’t want to miss out on the traffic. Lame.
And ink-on-paper newspapers aren’t going away any time soon. You and I may not read them anymore, but my understanding is that there are still a sizable number of people who have job unrelated to Internet technology and apparently this minority is propping up the industry.
BTW, wouldn’t this make you a get-off-my-bandwidth, crotchety old man?
Bloglines needs to go on to your list, Ethan. It used to be reliable, but these days misses updates and is becoming painful to use.
On the other side, and if you’re in the UK, the BBC’s iPlayer (http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer/) is getting better and better.
Let’s add to that excellent list bloggers who inject non-blog information into their feeds. Whether that is Twitter postings, del.icio.us bookmarks, or whatever, there is no value being added. Create a separate feed for that stuff so people can opt out.
More on my blog:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/dont-pollute-your-stream/
Cheers,
BW
Add industry blogs posting pictures of other execs “offices” to your list
http://www.hypebot.com
In terms of tech blogs, they’re arguably giving people want to they want given their popularity. From my own experience, I find that trying to write with insight and perspective is satisfying but often attracts less traffic than some quick post based on the news of the day.
That said, traffic is just one metric when it comes to why anyone blogs but it would be nice if insight – or, at least, efforts to do so – were rewarded once in awhile.
Mark
I have to agree with this post. I run a couple tech blogs myself. I have some rules for them:
Content must be original- No re-posting of others blogs, no images from some other website, no video from other video makers, original content, let other people be the second source.
No Ads- This contradicts your RSS party line about not going to sites, because the sites I run all have no adds and thus I feel people should come check out my site to see original images and videos along with original text, the way I intended. But at the same time understand your desire to not have to sift through the crap.
Aite, off my little soap box… Hope the lawn is cut grumpy old man