Incremental Blogger

Robert Scoble writes a fairly long post about blogs and the PR industry and how the PR industry is promoting things the wrong way when it comes to tech blogs–or the blogs are getting pulled into their strategies. I think Robert’s trying to get at ways that can make blogs better and more interesting–possibly returning to their roots.

Here’s the thing I think Robert skips over: It’s not just the PR people that are disrupting classic tech blogs, the journalists are too. In fact, over the last few years, I’ve argued several times that much of the talked about online growth has been around journalistic endeavors. The writers and publishers have moved online. No problem here; they should have. However, it’s meant that with this transition there’s been money in the game and quite understandably people have migrated from being tech enthusiasts to journalists. Can’t blame people for moving to where the money’s at. But with this transition I think the flavor of tech blogging has gotten muddled.

In no particular order, here are my pet peeves about how this trend towards tech journalism has tainted some tech blogs–particularly the largest ones:

1) The journalists blog like journalists. What do I mean? They report what’s going on. OK, that’s fine, however, quite often their sources are another blog post from some other person journalistically blogging about someone’s comment or news leak. So what you say? Well, more often than not, the journalist blogger will repeat the key news (quite respectfully usually) reporting the key facts that the original blogger found. You know what? A tech blogger wouldn’t just do this. They’d simply say, “Look at this. So and so found out some info” and then provide a link to it. They might go on and add some commentary, but they wouldn’t think they’d have to lay out the whole story, which the original site did just fine. A journalist is going to repeat the whole story and effectively try to keep the reader on their site. A tech blogger will link.

2) Publishers of sites that want to make a living often do things to keep people on their site only. Tech bloggers aren’t as concerned with this. Ways of doing this are:

a) Link to their own articles rather than outside original sources.
b) Provide partial feeds so the reader has to go to the full site to see the full article.
c) Don’t link out, even if they credit another source. Big media blogs do this more commonly, but I see this enough to irk me more than I’d like.
d) And from the point in #1, journalists repeat news from other sites when a link will do.

3) A journalist’s mission is to report; a tech blogger’s mission is to spread their enthusiasm and knowledge for something. It’s not that a tech blogger is simply more benevolant. I don’t think that’s it at all. It’s just that a tech blogger knows they are biased–because they are enthusiastic about something–and shares it. A journalist focuses on reporting. (I will add that for some strange reason tech journalist bloggers seem to rant with some of the loudest. I don’t get this at all. You’d rarely see this in print media, though maybe on the radio or in video. Still, I don’t get it.)

4) Journalists like to point out the conflicts. Yes, tech bloggers will too. However, a tech blogger is just as likely to share info that resolves some conflict or problem. The reason? A tech blogger wants to nourish something. A journalist wants to get the next big story and attract readers and get clicks on their ads. Conflict keeps the click flow going–today. Archiveable information isn’t as much about clicks right now.

5) A journalist is more concerned about the number of readers; a tech blogger is more concerned about the richness of their community.

Yeah, this all is probably a bit of an oversimplification, but hey, I’m an engineer-minded, tech blogger and not a journalist-slash-analyst-slash-PR rep blogger, so I’m allowed. And, you know what, for some reason a smiley face just seems like a highly appropriate way to end this post :-).

The OLPC and original ASUS Eee PC have really shaken up the market so says Gartner. In fact, Gartner is predicting that in 2008 5 million of these diminutive PCs will be sold.

As Gartner sees it, these devices, which were originally intended for the education market have found a welcome audience in the consumer space. In fact, they think that 70% of the device sales will be to consumers. And Gartner sees people buying these as secondary devices, too. Not primary machines. Sound familiar?

Of course, what’s so hilarious about all of this is that these devices were exactly in the ballpark of UMPCs, which haven’t had the sales volume many would have expected. The reason? Price, price, price. Seems that if you take a UMPC, remove the $50 (if that) digiitzer, and add a keyboard, then that’s good enough to drop the price by 1/2. Amazing, isn’t it?

What’s also funny in a not so funny way is that UMPCs were originally intended for consumers, although for some mystical reason (probably because of their high prices), marketing switched to high-end or IT customers.

So here we are, seeing these low end PCs potentially increase in sales by a magnitude in what Gartner predicts to be 4 years. Simply amazing.

Now Gartner is including a wide range of screen sizes here: Anything from 5 inches to 10 inches. This doesn’t include MIDs. I assume it includes the good ole UMPCs though.

What else sets these devices apart besides their low cost? Gartner predicts most of them will have diminutive power to match their diminutive sizes. Makes sense. The online summary doesn’t say it, but I think this includes limited onboard resources too.

So here’s what’s even more interesting: For some reason, Gartner thinks that these devices will be accepted by consumers because of their ease of use. I don’t get it. What will make them any easier to use than any other device?

In fact, because of their limited resources, Gartner believes the provided OS will either be Linux or XP. Yep, no Vista here. Too big and too slugish for these small devices I guess. Of course, there’s no way XP is going to be selling into 2012–well I mean most people will have Vista on their primary machine so having a secondary machine running XP is going to get confusing, so I’m not sure what Gartner is thinking here. I’m guessing they are just seeing the XP/Linux trend throughout 2008.

To me, I don’t see XP being any easier to use than anything else. So I think this whole ease to use argument is not going to pan out. Low price, small screen, small keyboard, limited resources does not make something easier to use.

Now the Linux people have an opportunity here to show how to create a good secondary device. But I’m not going to hold my breath. It’s not going to be about five quick icons on the screen–although that’s fine.

I challenge anyone here. I don’t think I’ve see one company hit the ease of use sweet spot for secondary devices. As someone who wrote ShareKMC, which is about two devices working together, I can’t say I really understand what this behavoir needs to be, but I know it’s not there. I’ll put it this way, even the iPhone, which is a great little device and fairly easy to use, it’s not a great companion device. (I should add a link to EverNote here as a product that’s might help out here, if only it shipped with most of the devices.) My guess is ease of use isn’t going to be a shining feature of any of these devices, unless something changes on the software side. Crudely this would include a custom shell and maybe 4 to 5 really well tuned apps for the form factor. And NO, I’m not talking about an old fashioned media player with a 3D graphics shell. And to do it really well, I think there ought to be one or possibly two small tweaks to the hardware. I’m not going to go into details here, but I think anyone that really thinks about this stuff will see some really obvious things to do.

[Found via Gottabemobile]