We (the Blogosphere) Stand on Guard for Thee (Apple, Google, et al)
When the bandwagon starts rolling when do you decide to jump on? To be specific, when news such as Apple’s new iPhone or Cisco suing Apple for the use of iPhone name emerges does it make sense to blog on it when a post frenzy has already happened. In other words, how much additional value can anyone offer that hasn’t already been written? Some people such as Rick Segal and Dave Taylor have decided to wait a day or so to give themselves some time to think before offering their insights/thoughts as opposed to piling on the news.
Taylor, for example, made some excellent points about Microsoft’s controversial decision to give bloggers free laptops with the new Vista operating system several days after the news broke. After the hue and cry had settled down about whether giving away laptops was ethical, Taylor took a different approach by calculating the amount of money that Microsoft spent giving away the laptops (approx. $150,000) and why Microsoft decided to go that route rather than give away 7,500 copies of Vista for the same price.
The answer, according to Taylor, is “Microsoft Vista is in fact a bear to install and has prohibitive hardware requirements. That’s the only conclusion I can draw, because if it were a breeze to upgrade from WinXP to Windows Vista, with all your apps backwards compatible, all your data intact, and all your files untouched, you’d be happy to install Vista on your existing PC and enjoy the new OS.”
Maybe Taylor’s wait and write approach is the way to go. Of course, this means you risk missing out on being part of the news/conversation as it happens, but it also gives bloggers the opportunity to perhaps offer some much-needed insight rather than a quick reaction.
Note: I’m trying a different format for my posts by separating the paragraphs after a friend suggested the the wide text column was difficult to read. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
January 11th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Over the years, I find my approach has evolved.
When there weren’t all that many blogs, five or so years ago, a lot of us would jump on breaking news and post our own quick links whether we really had much to offer or not.
It was kind of a “share the news” approach, which still persists as a valid idea. A number of the longest-running blogs (particularly in tech geek circles) still follow the format of numerous, short posts throughout the course of the day. Think of how Dave Winer’s Scripting News works, for example.
I’ve heard people deride this approach as “linkdumping” as if there’s something inherently wrong with that. To me, it’s just a continuation of the early style of web logging that gave rise to much of what we see around us today. I mean, where did social bookmarking ideas come from, if not from the original idea of what a blog - a web log - was for?
These days, my own approach tends to be rather more Quaker-influenced. I’ve often heard it said that Quaker meetings are conducted such that participants know to “Speak only if you can improve the silence”.
Of course, in the blogosphere, this has to be updated - when I choose to join any particular dogpile as news items burn through the blogvines, I try to post only if I think I can improve the noise
I’ll let you know if this strategy ever starts working.
January 11th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
It’s a difficult choice sometimes whether to jump onto the bandwagon because you want to spread interesting news, or let others do it for you.