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Tech Porn
Somewhere along the way, perhaps the day that [Techcrunch] guesstimated that the launch of Apple’s iPhone had generated 700,000 sales (only off by about half a million!), or maybe it was when [Robert Scoble] turned his once-informative blog into the de facto Facebook FAQ, it dawned on me that what passes for tech journalism online has evolved into a relentless drumbeat of hype that is, essentially, nothing more than product public relations and marketing. I was going to say “free” public relations and marketing, but I don’t even know that to be true — so unreliable are the reputations and protestations of transparency from “journalists” who have popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. As Jack Shafer says in [a column] today decrying the imminent demise of the reputation of the Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch’s notoriously heavy hand, it takes decades for a media source to build its reputation. There simply hasn’t been enough time to know how reliable most tech bloggers are. But even if no money changes hands, that doesn’t mean there isn’t implied value exchanged in the form of favors or just increased audience and ad revenue from boosting the current hot toy.
A few weeks ago there was a dust up on the Net because some sites in the Federated Media fold were on the take from Microsoft for a “conversational” brand campaign and did not disclose this to their loyal readers. But that was a pretty obvious case — easy to pick out. What is not so obvious is the general culture of under-the-radar, one-hand-washes-the-other marketing that masquerades as breathless enthusiasm for an endless parade of unproven, fly-by-night technologies and products that, more often than not, barely deserve a moment’s attention.
The parallel to porn is not just hyperbole, either. A few years ago there was some (quiet) contemplation about what lessons mainstream businesses could take away from the phenomenal success that porn merchants were experiencing online. Well now we know: hook your audience on an endless diet of novel stimuli, stuff them with information and images of the things they like faster than their brains can assimilate or filter. All you have to do is target the right audience with the right stimuli — young women get gossip about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, geeky males get stories about Facebook and pictures of a $600 cell phone. Pass the Kleenex, sit back and rack up the pageviews.
But there are signs of tech porn exhaustion out there — after so many hyped blog posts and twits and product announcements about this new platform and that new device, it’s getting harder to get hard about the latest new thing. All the boobs are starting to look alike. I’ve felt it myself and seen other bloggers start to complain about the attention deficit we’re suffering from but it took a blog post from [Jason Calacanis] — no stranger to the game of hyper-promotion — lamenting about Facebook and blog “bankruptcy” for it to rise to public consciousness in the blogosphere. Calacanis’ way of dealing was to impose attention filters in the form of abstinence — from Facebook and blog comments. He’s on the right track, he just has to go farther.
I’ve unsubscribed from all the tech news feeds I used to read. No more Techcrunch. No more Lifehacker. No more Scoble. I’ll wait to read about new tech trends in the New York Times and Washington Post because by the time they filter down to those hoary media venues their value will be pretty-much proven. I’ll be behind the curve, no doubt, but it’s a small price to pay to reclaim a sense of integrity. In the past week, since beginning my “abstinence” program, I’ve re-read The Great Gatsby and read Camus’ The Stranger for the first time. Let someone else burn their attention enumerating the many corpses of the Web 2.0 also-rans, I’ll be reading a book.
Posted in Technology 08/1/07 | 
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Well said! I for one am also lamenting the Google-fication, or, should I say, AdSense-ification of every farking blog out there. You visit a site and you have to scroll past AdSense ads to get at the content. Well, I refuse to do that now. I simply move on to the next site.
Everybody and their dog wants to make a few pennies from AdSense (and truthfully the vast majority of blogs make very little revenue) so they punish those that actually generate revenue through their visit to their blog by force-feeding huge blocks of ads.
I sense another bubble about to pop…here’s hoping…
By the way, I just finished reading the Lord of the Rings in lieu of mindless StumbleUpon-ing. Who would have thought that one could actually enjoy some spare time that is NOT in front of the laptop?
Comment by Craig — August 3, 2007 @ 8:16 pm
Craig — you’ll get more value from LOTR than from anything you read online — including this blog
I hear you about the Adsense crap — I recently dropped the ads from appearing at the top of posts because, like 90% of all blogs, I wasn’t making any real money from them and they annoyed the hell out of *me*. I’ll probably drop them entirely from the site. Feh.
Comment by SD — August 4, 2007 @ 9:23 am
I agree.
Its getting way too much at the moment, everything is hype.
And if i found something that was probably worth thinking about getting i couldn’t read the article because of all the AdSense balloons that i opened with one of the 450,987 mouse-over hotspots.
Thanks.
But no thanks.
You have just got yourself a new regular visitor.
Comment by Robert — August 4, 2007 @ 12:20 pm
Robert, welcome aboard!
Comment by SD — August 4, 2007 @ 12:27 pm
“All the hype” unfortunately comes from the only sector ( market segment ) really doing anything ‘new,’ or innovating, despite the success or failure of the results. Those of us that spend a great deal of time online are subjected to rapid prototyping at an increasing rate. Fortunately the majority of our expense is time. Nothing more or less. I don’t mind investing in ‘curiosity’ for free. I’m sure most don’t.
The majority or products and services ( major brands ) aren’t contributing anything new to the marketplace developing online. Some have figured out that they need to create experiences and not just ads however, there’s nothing truly new with regards to their respective products and services. It has been a slow acclimation process. And as the internet gains footing as a medium, let’s not forget, it’s still very small compared to the existing media platforms. And as is the case with all technology, it’s the education of the consumer that defines the true value. As soon as twitter was launched, RSS lost it’s luster. As soon as another social network gains momentum, a blogging platform loses some regular publishers.
The initial agenda is still the greatest contributor to the problem, creating original and relative content, which you’ve done again.
Having said all this; as always–great post.
Thought for the day:
Why is it that a blog isn’t perceived as a social network connected to the largest participant network available?
Comment by marc rapp — August 4, 2007 @ 6:36 pm
Ads belong AFTER the content not BEFORE. I conside it very bad form if I go to a web page and I can’t see any content because the top of the blog is so cluttered with ads.
Comment by HMTKSteve — August 4, 2007 @ 7:04 pm
Marc,
Thanks for the kind words. As far as innovation — I think the innovation in the Web 2.0 sphere was realizing that content creation could be offloaded to users and these “vanity” platforms would attract enough eyes to make ads a viable mode of monetizing. So long as you keep the eyes within your “business” — and that’s the answer to your question of why the blogosphere itself isn’t considered a social app: because it can’t be branded and some 24-year-old can’t sell it for a billion bucks.
HMTKSteve,
Re: ad placement, I agree completely — but this is the advice that our good friends at Google give AdSense publishers about where to place ads:
[AdSense FAQ]
Ads get the highest clickthrough when they are placed in the body of the post and made to look like they’re part of the content. Skeevy, no?
Comment by SD — August 4, 2007 @ 9:03 pm