] HipMojo.com » Sad State of Blogs

Sad State of Blogs

There are a lot of great things about bloggers and blogs, but there’s also some pretty horrible things, and one of them is the “press publish as quick as possible to lead the pile-on on TechMeme” ranks pretty darn high on that list.

Let me first say that everyone makes mistakes, but this past week, I could not help but scratch my head and say WTF when word broke out that “YouTube would be introducing HD soon”. The story began on CNET, then Tech Crunch ran with it, leading the TechMeme pile.

CNET is starting to get more and more into blogging, rightfully, Tech Crunch practically created the tech blog [as a business] genre, but now it’s just noisy. TC was once a great site that is becoming less relevant as Web 2.0 startups become less important and as an influx of new writers dilutes the voice and raison d’etre of the blog (not a knock at any single one writer, who individually are pretty good but together create a cacophony of web startup noise).

Anyway, some disclosure: YouTube is one of the biggest distribution partners we have at WatchMojo.com. To borrow from the cliche, as a result, when they sneeze, we catch a cold. More importantly, I guess, is the fact that CNET’s story broke as a result of something that was supposedly said at Giga Om (a competitive blog to Tech Crunch)’s New Tee Vee Conference in San Francisco. I was at the shindig and I can distinctly tell you that based on Liz Gannes’ interview with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, the conclusion anyone could possibly come away with was “YouTube will probably never offer HD clips”. Some how, some way, CNET’s Needlemen, Tech Crunch’s Duncan Riley and then many others published “HD clips coming soon”. I’m not sure if Riley was there, I think Needleman was…

I was flying back to Montreal and missed the entire brouhaha, but my colleague mentioned that HD YouTube would be coming up with HD clips soon, based on Chen’s comment. I looked into the story a bit and laughed it off saying this is how rumors and false stories begin. I was in the freaking audience for God’s sake and Chen said nothing of the sort. He explained that breadth of content is more important than quality… and given that true HD entails content to be shot, edited and published in HD means that YouTube’s kind of content is anything but worthy of being published in HD.

But forget about the merits of the HD discussion…

The main reason why this is relevant frankly is that Google’s PR machine quickly corrected the story, and New Tee Vee’s Gannes herself clarified what Chen said. But this probably got corrected because Google effectively controls information “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

Why am I making a point out of this story 4 days later, simple: any other company, in particular those who rely on blogs to get the word out on news and announcements probably don’t get the courtesy of fixing miscommunications… and the reason for that is simply because most bloggers together only think of quickly publishing news stories and regurgitating analysis and not digging deep enough to offer accurate information or add insight. That’s a shame, because people like Tech Crunch’s Riley and most other bloggers hail from industry and are probably not journalists alone… so they end up doing a disservice to themselves and readers by focusing on speed blogging.

There are countless of great blogs and bloggers - and TC and Riley deserve to be in that category, CNET and Rafe Needleman need no intro either - but TC’s success has created a very bad precedent to get otherwise smart people to avoid digging the story deeper for the hope of getting Dugg (TM) or linked up on TechMeme.

That’s a sad state of affair for blogs.

Tags: , |
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Nov 18th

8 Responses to “Sad State of Blogs”

  1. Duncan Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 12:07 am

    If you check the CNet post you’ll find that they spoke with Chen directly who confirmed this, it wasn’t something he said at NeeTeeVee but obviously it fit in with the conference that day which is why you’d note I link to both NeeTeeVee + CNet on the post.

    As for speed blogging or what not, ultimately YouTube going into HD is a big news story so we ran it. Nothing to do with Techmeme or any other thing other than delivering major news to our readers. What we do is a mix of new and exclusive, and a mix of what’s going on elsewhere, and this is nothing different than to newspapers; ultimately we try to pick stories that will be of interest to our readers…we might not always get it right but we do try :-)

    I also did provide analysis, noting the quandary HD presents YouTube given their desire to be available to everyone, so I’m a little confused as to how it was simply regurgitating as well :-)

  2. Proof Read Much? Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 12:48 am

    “but my colleague mentioned that HD would be coming up with HD clips soon, based on Chen’s comment.”

  3. Rafe Needleman Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 2:12 am

    I was in the audience. I talked to Chen afterwards in hallway. I don’t know what disservice I did by reporting our conversation.

    Chen never said YouTube was moving to HD. He did say it would be displaying higher-quality videos, which is what I reported.

  4. Duncan Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 2:41 am

    It’s just been pointed out to me privately that Chen told CNet that it was “high-quality” video coming to YouTube as opposed to HD although I’m struggling with the difference between HQ + HD (can you have HQ and LD…wouldn’t that be an oxymoron?) I stand slightly corrected in terms of exact wording. My bad.

  5. F.D. Athow Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 7:52 am

    I agree with your analysis and yes, it is something that happens all too often. But I don’t think there’s much that can be done simply because of a vicious circle.

    People tend to visit websites that churns out articles often.

    The problem is that quality articles takes time to be produced or you end up with grammatical mistakes (loose for lose for example).

    Worse though is that bloggers even from recognised sources rarely go to the original sources for example, relying instead on secondary data, which does not improve things.

  6. Ashkan Karbasfrooshan Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    Net-net, let’s face it, no disservice is done… this was more of a comment on “any other company” would be screwed by a “mis-quote” or miscommunication and by the time they tried to fix it, bloggers would move to something else because the TechMeme storm would be over something else.

    I’ll take mistakes here and there any day if it means more coverage by more voices, don’t get me wrong…

    Thanks for the clarifications and comments…

  7. Michael Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 6:33 pm

    “Tech Crunch practically created the tech blog genre.”

    That was a joke, right? Dave Winer, Om Malik, SiliconBeat, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Gillmor, Fred Wilson, etc. etc. They all predate TechCrunch, some of them by a country mile. And I’m sure I’m missing lots of other biggies.

  8. Ashkan Karbasfrooshan Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 6:36 pm

    Michael, I added “[as a business]” - that was clearly the context. Dave Winer etc., are not really blogging as a business, are they?

    As such, companies do not really go to Dave Winer to get the word out on product launches and what not. They might, and many have… but blogs like TC, GigaOm, etc. are used to get the word out.

    I think people are missing my point: which is blogs are not really into getting news out, they’re into getting stories out ASAP, with the risk of some/much of it being off/wrong.

Subscribe:


Leave a Reply

*
To prove that you're not a bot, enter this code
Anti-Spam Image

Subscribe:


« « previous post | next post » »
Admin

Shortcut:
HipMojo.com

Subscribe:

Search Site:

Categories:

Archives:

Blogroll: