Press Manipulation and Blog Wars

Via Gizmodo, on why society is doomed:

We get suckered in to covering CES like it’s the second coming every year; we brought something like 14 people this time around. For what? So we can cover stuff we normally would pass on in hopes that we can get it up three minutes before Engadget. Companies cocktease us and make us go and do pointless liveblogs of their boring press conferences only to announce minor upgrades of the same garbage they released last year. This is worth 14 round-trip airline tickets and a dozen hotel rooms for a week?

Dude. I didn’t go to CES this year for a reason - what’s the point? To see a bigger screen TV? Another iPod accessory? More digital photo frames? For an airplane ticket, take taxis around town, stay in an overpriced hotel room, wait in long lines for everything, get headaches from all the smoke and dry air in Vegas, etc.?

I stayed at home and made money instead of spending it.

This isn’t sour grapes - I could have gone to CES if I wanted to go. But seriously, with every other tech blogger going there and covering the event… there was ABSOLUTELY NO NEED FOR ME TO GO. One blogger is just as good as another blogger is just as good as another blogger if they’re all covering the same thing. Tech bloggers are a commodity - they’re all publishing to the same people.

“I have a blog that gets thousands of hits every month” may sound impressive to someone else, but not to me.

When press agencies contacted me before CES, I told ‘em I was sitting this one out - knowing full well that they’d never send me something to review, anyway. And even when review units are sent to my doorstep, I turn around and give a lot of ‘em away to the community… including full-blown computers.

Covering events is important, but I’d much rather cover events that few others in my community are covering.