CES 2008 – Blogging officially arrives at CES with some mixed reactions.
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Tag Archives: blogging
Scoble on Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea”
OK, so I’m not getting to meet Donny Deutsch here at CES (because he’s not here). But glad to report that Scoble and the Bloghaus Bus o’ Bloggers will be on “The Big Idea” the show tonight on MSNBC.
Blogging is a pretty big story here at CES and I’m hoping to get some comments next week from CES CEO Shapiro about his decisions to bring bloggers in as a “separate but equal” press category. In fact the second hand stories I’ve heard indicate that the press actually was complaining they couldn’t get in the blogging lounges which were generally less crowded and more comfortable than the press rooms (they are allowed them in now).
I just talked to Plantronics who is sponsoring the lounges. She said last year they did have a blogger lounge but it was out in a tent and not as comfortable as this year’s lounges. Thank you Plantronics.
Another blogger upgrade are all the “blogger only” parties here. Intel sponsored the one yesterday at the Atomic Testing Museum, and Monster the night before at a Paris Hotel Suite. Hey Silicon Valley – YOU could learn a lesson on how to treat bloggers from the CES sponsors, though CES has the advantage of filtering folks via the cost to get to Las Vegas. This effectively reduces the number of folks who, for example, might just start writing the day before they got here. I’m hoping to ask CES if they did any screening for eligible tech bloggers. I understand there are about 200 registered here as “bloggers”, but most of the blog folks are here as Press because they are with other media outlets.
Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?
Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging. I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists. Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).
I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings. Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.
It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” – to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.
Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people. Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not. Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.
Fred Wilson at 30,000 feet – brilliant!
What a GREAT blog post from Fred Wilson as he flew to Portland! He rapid fires 30 things including his thoughts on the bubble 2.0 (maybe about to pop, maybe not), and most importantly offers up this billion dollar company idea:
15) Why hasn’t anyone been able to aggregate all of my comment activity across the entire web and turn it into a feed that I can put into my lifestream on Tumblr? There are a bunch of companies working on it, but I don’t think anyone has nailed it yet. And I am not just talking about blog comments, I am talking about ratings and reviews on Amazon, Yelp, Menupages, Digg, etc, etc.
Fred, I don’t get this either because the technology is definitely in place and although I think this would take a pretty substantial server infrastructure – to cache and search a lot of content regularly – it seems like the payoff would be the best social networking environment out there.
I’m saving up my money so, someday, I can be a cool VC guy like Fred and ride coach class even though I don’t *have* to ride in coach. Kudos to him for that. Frankly, I have a feeling the people back there are more interesting anyway.
Joe Duck 