p2pnet.net News:- Bill Royle’s Techfocus has just turned three.

You’ll recall he decided to ban the RIAA (and, for good measure, the MPAA) from its site via a simple .htaccess file. And it worked.

In the meanwhile, Royle uses his three-years-on piece to get a few things off his chest.

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The State of Tech News
By Bill Royle - Techfocus

I’d like to share a few things that I’ve noticed in the past year:

1. There are a ton of great news sites out there, but there’s a difference between sites creating, and sites copying. Techfocus started that way, to be fair. We’d copy and paste the guts of a good article elsewhere, then source it, and be done. That works to a degree, but in truth it doesn’t bring a lot of personality to the site. That’s why you now see content here, short or long. We have something to add to the conversation, and considering the quality of some of the tech industry’s leaders, we often do it better. As for the sites which are doing simple excerpts, that’s fine - it’s just not the way we’ve chosen to go.

2. Technical news is becoming very incestual. The big boys of tech news publishing, such as CNET, ZDnet, and CNN - they might as well be just one site. You get the same stories, or virtually the same story - and it’s all because in some way they each have a business agreement. And when you throw in all of the smaller tech news sites doing the Control-C method of "creating" content, it makes for a pretty bland news day. When you add in the fact that many of them are "reviewing" products for companies that buy advertising on their sites, it’s clear that much of the milktoast they put out is just that - bland and tasteless.

That’s part of the reason you see less articles per day here now. I can go to ten different websites, and I’m reading the same (or virtually the same) story ten different times. Now, more selection goes into what goes onto this site, and we work hard to make our content different than the daily drivel you get out of many of the large sites.

3. There are too many experts and analysts these days. One such example is a tech prostitute named Rob Enderle. He’s quoted in trade publications and cited as an "expert" or "analyst" in places such as eWeek, ZDnet, and CNET. Sounds great, right? Problem is, he’s been funded by the same companies who he’s critiquing. Even worse, the publications that he is in are primarily owned by the same parent companies.

Here’s the problem - there are a bunch of people out there just like him [Enderle], commenting on technology that they have a stake in seeing do well. If you’ve been feeding off the trough of a company, don’t publish a review of laptop or recommend the stock of that company and expect that you’ll get any respect - you shouldn’t. So, readers - when you see the word "analyst" or "expert," check and see what work they’ve done.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2004 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1449 times