Exclusive: Techbloggers Have Sold Their Souls

On WebProNews, Robert Scoble demonstrates why the leading techblogs are becoming less critical and more susceptible to hype -- they're bargaining with PR flacks for exclusives:

I've noticed that PR types are getting very astute with dealing with bloggers lately and getting their wares discussed on TechMeme.

First they'll call Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Make sure he's briefed first (Mike doesn't like to talk about news that someone else broke first, so they'll make sure he is always in the first group to get to share something with you all). Then they'll brief "second-tier" bloggers like me, Om, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web, and a variety of others. Embargo us all so we can't publish before Mike does.

One of the reasons mainstream tech magazines like PC Magazine are so boring is because they're completely dependent on early access to new hardware and software, so companies like Microsoft and Apple use this carrot to keep them from being too critical. They've become product catalogs, which is one reason people look to blogs for a more candid and free-wheeling assessment of new products. While magazines were running cover after cover singing the praises of Windows Vista earlier this year, bloggers were putting up danger signs about upgrading to the new OS on existing PCs.

Now, according to Scoble, A-list techbloggers have become just as desperate for inside access, even to the point of honoring an embargo intended to benefit another blog. What are the odds that TechCrunch will break the exclusive that a new product sucks rocks?

Tech · Journalism · 2007/10/18 · 18 COMMENTS · Link

Running for President, One Spam at a Time

I don't know who I'm going to vote for in the 2008 presidential election, but I've given small donations to both John Edwards and Barack Obama in response to specific initiatives I thought worthy of support, so I'm on their mailing lists. They both send personalized emails frequently, like the one I just got from Obama:

Rogers,

I'm leaving the Tonight Show studio and I wanted to share something.

Jay Leno just asked if it bothers me that some of the Washington pundits are declaring Hillary Clinton the winner of this election before a single vote has been cast.

I'll tell you what I told him: Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare "Mission Accomplished" a little too soon.

We started this week $2.1 million behind the Clinton campaign -- a lead they built in large part with contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.

We don't accept money from federal lobbyists or PACs. But we've already cut that advantage in half with small donations from people like you.

Let's close the rest of that gap now. Please make a donation of $25:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Thank you,

Barack

I know that a candidate has to chase dollars all the time to win, but I hear from Obama a 3-5 times a month, and it's always money money money. He never just wants to talk about how his day's going. I'm beginning to wish he took money from lobbyists.

Politics · 2007/10/18 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Ellen DeGeneres Has Gone to the Dogs

Last week, Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch about Richard Figueroa, a photographer who was making obnoxious legal threats about a copyright violation of an Ashton Kutcher photograph. Figueroa mistakenly believed the photo, which showed up in a Google image search incorrectly linked to TechCrunch, was published on the site.

As Figueroa was calling TechCrunch advertisers and urging they boycott the site, Arrington published Figueroa's emailed legal threat, which included his address and phone number.

I don't know the law in this area, but when you speak critically of someone on a high-traffic web site and include their address and phone number, you know with absolute certainty what's going to happen next. Some readers with too much aggression and too little decency will call the person and harass or even threaten them. I think you bear some moral if not legal responsibility for inciting the behavior.

The same situation took place on a much larger scale with Ellen DeGeneres and a pet adoption agency this week in Pasadena, Calif. The agency took a dog back after DeGeneres broke her adoption agreement and gave it away to friends, and she made the dispute public in a sobbing rant on her daytime talk show.

You'll never guess what happened next. Mutts and Moms, an adoption agency run by a pet store in Pasadena, Calif., is getting death threats, according to founder Marina Batkis.

... Baktis expressed concerns for the safety of herself and her animals. "I haven't eaten, I'm sick and I've had heart palpitations," she said, sobbing. "My life is being threatened, this is horrible. I rescue dogs. I can't believe this."

DeGeneres, who has a net worth of $65 million, has unleashed a mob of irate viewers on a couple of women who run a strip-mall pet store. As one commenter wrote on the Washington Post web site, "it may be the most ridiculous use of celebrity I have ever seen. By the way she's carrying on you would have thought the dog died."

Sad as it is to see a two-week bond between family and dog severed by an adoption agency, I hope Mutts and Moms and Attorneys can make DeGeneres a couple million lower on the Forbes chart next year. Profligate wealth is wasted on the wrong people. If I were Ellen DeGeneres -- a phrase I don't get to say nearly enough -- I would just buy the strip mall and become their landlord, or if that fails start a pet store across the street that sells chew toys and catnip at predatory loss-leader prices. Failing that, I'd solve the problem with ninjas.

Television · Pets · 2007/10/17 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, has a killer hook. Changez, a Pakistani graduated top of his class from Princeton working at a financial firm in Manhattan, slowly becomes radicalized by America's response to the 9/11 attacks. Sitting down at a restaurant in Lahore, Pakistan, with a mysterious man who appears to be an American military operative, Changez tells the story of how he came to renounce the U.S.

The novel, briskly told in 184 pages, neither sensationalizes the subject matter nor uses it to lecture. Hamid tells the story in second person, with Changez as narrator and the reader in the position of the operative. "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?" it begins. "Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America." As his story unravels, it becomes clear that something terrible is going to happen between Changez and the American, a cat-and-mouse game that's all the more intriguing because it isn't clear who's predator and prey.

Changez' job in Manhattan is to evaluate the financial condition of troubled companies with a ruthless eye towards the bottom line, cutting costs and downsizing workforces to grease the wheels for a buyout. "Focus on the fundamentals," his company drills into his head, putting a different spin on the novel's title than the scowling young Muslim on the cover.

The particulars of the narrator's daily life in New York are secondary, at least in my mind, to his attempt to explain to an American why he renounced the country, returned home and took action against it. Hamid's storytelling is most compelling when Changez wrestles with feelings that would inspire the disgust of his American colleagues:

The bombing of Afghanistan had already been underway for a fortnight, and I had been avoiding the evening news, preferring not to watch the partisan and sports-event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below. On those rare occasions when I did find myself confronted by such programming -- in a bar, say, or at the entrance to the cable company's offices -- I was reminded of the film Terminator, but with the roles reversed so the machines were cast as heroes.

Least compelling was his romance with an American woman that's one-sided, charmless and grim.

The war that nearly happened between India and Pakistan after the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, an event I had almost forgotten, figures heavily in the book. Changez returns home as one million troops mass on the border. Hamid describes Lahore, the hometown of Changez and himself, in an unexpected way that demonstrates the glope-sweeping breadth of the Muslim world: "Lahore was the last major city in a contiguous swath of Muslim lands stretching as far west as Morocco and had therefore that quality of understated bravado characteristic of frontier towns."

Wounded national pride figures strongly in Reluctant Fundamentalist, which ratchets up the tension towards a thrilling end. Hamid began the book before 9/11 to tell the story of why a secular Muslim, living large among America's elite, might resent the country. 9/11 changed everything.

Books · 2007/10/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

RSS Best Practices Profile Published

The proposal to endorse and publish the RSS Profile has passed 8-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Christopher Finke, James Holderness, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin, Paul Querna, Jake Savin, Jason Shellen and myself voting in favor and Matthew Bookspan voting against.

The RSS Profile makes it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0, offering advice on issues that arise as you develop software that employs the format. For 18 months, the board worked with the RSS community on interoperability issues, receiving help from representatives at Bloglines, FeedBurner, Google, Microsoft, Netscape, Six Apart and Yahoo. The profile tackles the most frequently asked questions posed by developers:

1. How many enclosures can an item contain?
2. Are relative URLs OK in item descriptions?
3. Is it OK to use HTML in elements other than an item's description?

For the answers, read the sections on enclosures, item descriptions and character data, respectively.

Sam Ruby announced this morning that the Feed Validator now tests for conformance to the profile, offering 11 new checks for improving interoperability.

If you'd like to comment on the profile and the new validator checks, post on the mailing list RSS-Public.

As part of the vote, the following sentence has been added to the About this document section of the RSS specification: "The RSS Profile contains a set of recommendations for how to create RSS documents that work best in the wide and diverse audience of client software that supports the format." No other changes were made and all edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.10.

With the publication of the profile, the board is eager to work with companies and individual developers on the adoption of its recommendations and is looking for people who can write foreign language translations of the document, which has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Rss · 2007/10/15 · Comment · Link

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

Today's tip from computer book author and technology expert Rogers Cadenhead (i.e. me): When signing up for a social networking service such as Facebook, pay careful attention to questions involving gender when setting up your personal profile.

I just discovered, in my own Facebook profile, that I'm interested in men:

Apparently, when I joined Facebook in May I got confused over a question involving gender, thinking it was asking for my own. Because I had no takers, I didn't realize the mistake for months. I have corrected the error, but I'd like to take a moment to thank Steve Kirks, Frank Paynter, Rick Scully and my other 12 Facebook friends, who accepted me for who I am -- even though I'm not.

Social Networking · 2007/10/13 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Web Traffic Counts: Is Compete Any Good?

I occasionally cite web traffic stats from Alexa and Compete, two services that measure traffic across the entire web. It's probably worth pointing out that I have no idea at all whether they're accurate. Compete publishes a monthly count of site visitors based on data from two million U.S. Internet users, so I can compare its numbers directly to the stats I get from Google Analytics. Since the latter is based on actual traffic, it's a reliable metric.

For the Drudge Retort, Google Analytics reports 337,985 U.S. visitors in September and Compete reports 42,815 people for the same period (12.7 percent of Google's total).

On SportsFilter, Google Analytics reports 263,677 visitors and Compete reports 67,906 people (25.8 percent).

On the soon-to-close Cruel.Com, Google Analytics reports 109,334 visitors and Compete 22,028 people (20.1 percent).

I wouldn't expect these numbers to be the same, because every web stats program has different methodology for counting eyeballs. But if Compete was measuring my U.S. traffic accurately, I'd expect the percentages to be close. They're all over the place.

Publishing · 2007/10/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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