Jack of all trades?

Steven Hodson, over at Winextra often makes thought provoking posts on his blog, which is why I am a regular reader of his. (Disclosure: Steven is a friend of mine, and I have enjoyed participating in the community forum he runs for many years)

Today was no exception.  Earlier in the day I had read the scobleizer entry on Robert Scoble’s experiment in travelling with a politician on the campaign trail. Something about Scoble’s post bugged me.  I wasn’t sure what it was – it seemed reasonable enough, explaining where he’d been, what he saw, and how he thought the experience would fit with his future endeavours.   There was little of the usual whining.

Then I read Steven’s post, posing the question Is there really any depth to blogging?  I realized what it was that had been bugging me.   So following Steven’s advice I thought about it for a while as I shopped with my wife for gardening supplies, and did some yard work. (Like she was just going to let me sit down and type this instead of shopping – yeah right…)  So eventually I got to sit down and write about my thoughts.

Firstly, there is a reason why Dan Balz and his colleagues were able to sit down and pump
out column inches immediately after seeing and hearing the things they did.   Dan and others are political correspondents. Dan has been involved in the paper’s political coverage as a reporter or editor for the past 27 years.   He knows exactly how the events unfolding before him, fit in with the way he has reported them in the past.   He knows exactly how he needs to report them to fulfill his objectives, and those of his employer.

Dan Balz is not a tech geek blogger, he does not write reviews for Vista loaded Acer Ferraris, he doesn’t write about football, crashing his car, losing his camera, or the political arguments he has with his family. He and others of his profession write about politics.   They live and breathe it.   Somehow Scoble thinks he should be able to keep up with professionals at the top of their game, during the build up to an event that occurs only once every four years.   Maybe Balz even “tries to read your blog, but can’t understand it.

Secondly, where is the stimulus for Scoble to publish?  He already has the scoop, the whole thing was done with the utmost secrecy.  How many other tech geek bloggers accompanied Edwards on his campaign as Scoble did? If Balz were to delay and think things over for any length of time, then he would be scooped by the NYT, WSJ or some other member of the press entourage.

The reason Scoble gives for his presence is that he was there to report on “the Tech side” of the campaign.   Meanwhile he drip feeds his readers tidbits such as “Edwards likes Diet Sunkist” – I’m sure that will get the political staffers knocking your door down to get you “that unique interview that is different from the ones CNN can get.” If there were 4
other A-list bloggers on that same trip, and ratings and ad revenue depended on it, would you take a week to “process the video and audio stuff” you got?

Readers might like to know whether Edwards check his Gmail account religiously every 15 min, or gets some flunky to do it once a day. How much time does the man himself get to spend on matters relating to his facebook or myspace pages? These pages appear to give some kind of blogger cred to Edwards in Scoble’s eyes. Safer to stick to the Sunkist eh?

Perhaps Mr Scoble should follow the advice of readers of his blog and stick to writing about tech matters, which funnily enough he can probably start typing about the minute he finishes his interview/test. Maybe for his next experiment he could run with a sniper or IED guy in a combat zone.   Tell us how cool under pressure those guys are, and how he’ll never be able to calmly sit down at a laptop in the middle of a war zone after a firefight and write a blog like a milblogger can.

No strings attached

Well the whole of teh intarweb it would seem is running hot with the whole M$ Ferrari free review unit ethics debacle.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think there is a problem with microsoft doing this.  Their ethics are only questionable in that some bloggers then have a hard time dealing with the equipment (too time-consuming to return with a no thank you note).

The ethics question only really comes into play with regard to disclosure. An ethical blogger will disclose the fact, no question.

To me it’s more a question of credibility.  If a blogger posts on their site that they have received a shiny ferrari laptop running vista, and it was the best ever user experience they have had, and go on to say how they came to have it and in fact they still own it, or gave it to their ex, or the homeless shelter or whatever, then that’s all dandy.  People may even rush out and buy one based on their recommendation.

If in a month’s time they mention the new office chair they have, and how great it is, and how wonderful the manufacturer is for sending them the chair, unsolicited and allowing them to keep it, or give it to their kid sister or the kid dumpster diving out back, that’s fine too.  i may even check it out, my wife needs a new chair.

Then say, hypothetically like, they post about this great cell phone that arrived in the post, unsolicited, and how vodafone sent it asking for a review, and how, by the way they are allowed to keep it.

If one were an astute reader, and perhaps even a conspiracy theorist, then one may believe that they can see a pattern forming.  The blogger’s ethics are unquestionable – full disclosure every time – great – fantastic even – stand up guy!

But would you buy a used car from this man?

I’ve read bloggers that do this often, many times they don’t disclose, certainly they didn’t in the days before the practice was widely known.  Their ethics suck.

I’m sure most of the people MS chose were good solid bloggers that have a good history of disclosure and well thought out reviews.  It would be a huge PR blunder not to.

Most will probably finish up with reputations intact, but it is up to us – the readers to let them know we don’t like being duped.
 

Geek Violence

Ed Bott really has got his nickers in a twist now. He

“calls BobH on his bad manners”

by saying

Well, Bob, %!@# you. And of course, by “you” I mean the generic “you.” Which is to say, you.

Even after BobH apologised to him and begged forgiveness. Now Ed says he would have punched Bob in the nose, given the opportunity!

Well Ed, your exception taken to Bob, was that he prefaced his comments with a generic “you” that you took personally (Disclaimer: I don’t know Bob).

I see Bob has plastered his same original comment on other blogs too. Perhaps you should go back to reading comprehension class and note that I used the clearly generic “one”, in a hypothetical sense.

The fact that you (specific, not generic) are so obviously pained by these comments suggests that perhaps you do have niggling doubt in the back of your mind somewhere about accepting/keeping/giving away/smashing etc the review unit.

If you truly seek to comprehend what I wrote in my previous comment, then you may notice that I did not mention ethics, but rather reputation and credibility.

Surely it is ethical to disclose that goods or services have been provided free of charge for the purposes of the review. The question for your readers then becomes one of whether or not there is bias in the review.

Would you donate the laptop to a charity anonymously, and not post mention of it in your blog? I doubt it. Somehow the posession of that laptop no matter how brief is likely to be used in way that elevates your social status.

On the question of ethics, would you consider it ethical to accept an unsolicited laptop, even to donate it to a worthy charity and NOT do a review about it, either good or bad?

Whatever…

OSX on a Zune?

So are the A-list blogs still “citizen journalists”? Or have they crossed over into becoming mainstream media?  Is there any requirement for them to verify claims made, or can they just post any old drivel?

Engadget, another one of the top blogs seems to be so hard up for news that they posted a rumour about the M$ zune being hax0red to run linux. No pictures, no source code, no verification. No shit?

That’s all very nice and all but at least I have an actual picture of OSX running on a zune. Yay me.

It didn’t even void the warranty

Yeah right…

Y’all are seriously sick

I just checked out the latest post on BoingBoing, reviewing their stats for 2006.  Given that this is supposed to be *THE* A-list blog, for the sWANKy hipsters of web 2.0, the list of top search keywords makes for telling reading.

The web is more than just pr0n

Yeah right….

Would Alan Freed do it again?

I see that Ed Bott has his panties in a bunch over criticism of the Windows Vista marketing effort.

Good Lord!

Payola was wrong when it was DJ’s in the 60’s and it’s wrong now.

If one were to accept a high price piece of equipment in exchange for a favourable review, then clearly, one should not be surprised if the impartiality of the reviewer should be called into question.

Would the reviewer be quite so glowing in their praise if they had paid their own money for a licence to install the software on their own personally purchased software?

It doesn’t matter which company uses these tactics. The company has the resources and is within their rights to offer “promotional merchandise”.

It is up to the reveiwer to decide whether or not their reputation is worth the 30 pieces of silver. Just don’t be surprised if the audience votes with their feet when they find out the truth.

I didn’t post the original comment, but if you want to call me an anonymous coward then go right ahead, but NOBODY paid me, either in cash or in kind, to make this comment.

It is human nature to ignore the gift of $1000 worth of equipment whilst making an independent assesment of the merits of a sponsor’s product, even when the individual concerned dtakes every possible step to maximise their cents per click from a randomly placed advertisement.

Yeah right…

Old School Vs Web 2.0

The outlandish comment storm surrounding Scoble’s Immigration post, reminds me of a feature that the old school “discussion boards” (how quaint does that sound to you sWANKy 2.0 hipsters?) or my fave NNTP protocol, had; which is the threaded discussion.

In a comment he posted to the Winextra blog, Scoble made the statement:

This medium is about conversations, not one-way messages.

Well, conversations tend to meander along at their own pace, and the attention span of the 2.0 generation is remarkably short, so it seems somewhat as a surprise that web fora (or is it forums- which seems far less pretentious, but somehow wrong…) and blogs/blog comments don’t have some way to thread their circuitous path, keeping point and counterpoint cleverly grouped.

Perhaps the light-speed attention span of the average 2.0er is beyond even composing a clever rebuttal to the OP (that’s original post for you non-nntp types).

Which all just goes to prove the wisdom behind this old school newsgroup saying in the picture.

5,000 people read my webpost and 4500 of them trackedback to them in rebuttal of what a complete nonsense it was.  This makes me an influencer…

Yeah right…

Z-List Pride

Just saw this over at http://bigmarketing.wordpress.com
It seems kinda interesting, in a google-bombing kinda way. If you’re too lazy to click the links, like I often am, then to quote:

In the spirit of the Z-List started by the Viral Garden, I have provided below some links to worthwhile yet not as familiar blogs. Brilliant idea in building links and driving traffic through community. Consider me now an official Z-lister. To become a Z-lister, just copy the list below and post it in your blog. Then watch the community reciprocate links back to you.

Creative Think
Soloride
BIG Marketing For Small Business
Movie Marketing Madness
Blog Till You Drop!
Get Shouty!
One Reader at a Time
Critical Fluff
The New PR
Yeah Right
Own Your Brand!
OTOInsights
bizandbuzz
Work, in Plain English
Buzz Canuck
New
Millenium PR
Pardon My French
Troy Worman’s Blog
The Instigator Blog
AENDirect
Diva Marketing
Marketing Hipster
The Marketing Minute
Funny Business
The Frager Factor
Mindblob
Open The Dialogue
Word Sell
Note to CMO:
That’s Great Marketing!
Shotgun Marketing Blog
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
darrenbarefoot.com Two Hat Marketing
The Engaging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
Conversation Agent
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence &Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly
Jeremy Latham’s Blog
SMogger Social Media Blog
Masey.com

This is bound to get me some good linkage, rather than just a shameless plug for all these other dudes.

Yeah right….

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