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February 19, 2007

Destroying Your Blog's Raison d'Être

You don't read often a blog post that destroys every reason for which the blog exists. Gadget lovers, those who buy the latest shiny MP3 players, phones, laptops and digital cameras had to read this piece of text last week in Gizmodo:
I gave up two years of my life writing about gadgets for this site. Waking up every morning at 5 AM, chewing up press releases to find the rare morsel of legitimate information, chasing down "hot tips" that ended up being photochops of iPods with reflections of genitals in the touchscreens. Oh, and the worst: fielding emails from PR parasites eager to suck away precious time in a half-hour phone meeting while the Senior Vice-President of Smoke Blowing tells me about how his company's software—based on an idea cribbed from Google—is going to change the way I look at something I didn't care about in the first place. (Inevitably, "forever.")

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose. (...)

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you.

While it's harsh to judge your readers this way, it's a very good idea to put some distance between you and your daily activity and to be honest. With yourself, your readers and the things you consider important.

4 comments:

  1. I don't know - he had some good points, though admitedly he probably should have presented it with a bit less bile.

    The iPhone is such a great example - it looks amazing, and I'm sure it will be. But it also has some problems that, in many real ways, don't make it much better than most current products. But we KNOW there will be more versions, some probably rather quickly - buying a Gen 1 iPhone is going to be something people will kick themselves for later because the Gen 2 will have better iTunes support, or real 3g functionality, etc.

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  2. Next gen products are impossible without 1st gen products and a test group (early adopters). Even with the expensive price tag, companies often lose money on their 1st gen models (Zune). But the early adopters are willing to pay it, and there's nothing wrong with that.
    But I agree with the point that early adopters shouldn't complain when their new toys have problems, and sites like Gizmodo should keep the marketers honest.

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  3. I consider most of the technology we have within the past few years to be getting worse along the path. People will pay 200 bucks for a product that is sub par while the 500 buck model is the same but less battery and more flashy. The greatest plight it seems upon humanity is the people themselves as we no longer expect quality from our products...maybe I should be blaming that one country that buys a new cellphone model every few months. Why is it that with so much of our technology we don't expect quality but now expect more to download a new driver/firmware when we get the product out of the box. We have standards that have been out for a while now but the largest leaders/corporations can't seem to grasp something open source projects can get a hold onto...Thinking of Microsoft Internet Explorer and CSS2, you should never have to put hacks into something that can't keep up with standards. Sorry bout the rant

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