There are a lot of great things about bloggers and blogs, but there’s also some pretty horrible things, and one of them is the “press publish as quick as possible to lead the pile-on on TechMeme” ranks pretty darn high on that list.
Let me first say that everyone makes mistakes, but this past week, I could not help but scratch my head and say WTF when word broke out that “YouTube would be introducing HD soon”. The story began on CNET, then Tech Crunch ran with it, leading the TechMeme pile.
CNET is starting to get more and more into blogging, rightfully, Tech Crunch practically created the tech blog [as a business] genre, but now it’s just noisy. TC was once a great site that is becoming less relevant as Web 2.0 startups become less important and as an influx of new writers dilutes the voice and raison d’etre of the blog (not a knock at any single one writer, who individually are pretty good but together create a cacophony of web startup noise).
Anyway, some disclosure: YouTube is one of the biggest distribution partners we have at WatchMojo.com. To borrow from the cliche, as a result, when they sneeze, we catch a cold. More importantly, I guess, is the fact that CNET’s story broke as a result of something that was supposedly said at Giga Om (a competitive blog to Tech Crunch)’s New Tee Vee Conference in San Francisco. I was at the shindig and I can distinctly tell you that based on Liz Gannes’ interview with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, the conclusion anyone could possibly come away with was “YouTube will probably never offer HD clips”. Some how, some way, CNET’s Needlemen, Tech Crunch’s Duncan Riley and then many others published “HD clips coming soon”. I’m not sure if Riley was there, I think Needleman was…
I was flying back to Montreal and missed the entire brouhaha, but my colleague mentioned that HD YouTube would be coming up with HD clips soon, based on Chen’s comment. I looked into the story a bit and laughed it off saying this is how rumors and false stories begin. I was in the freaking audience for God’s sake and Chen said nothing of the sort. He explained that breadth of content is more important than quality… and given that true HD entails content to be shot, edited and published in HD means that YouTube’s kind of content is anything but worthy of being published in HD.
But forget about the merits of the HD discussion…
The main reason why this is relevant frankly is that Google’s PR machine quickly corrected the story, and New Tee Vee’s Gannes herself clarified what Chen said. But this probably got corrected because Google effectively controls information “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Why am I making a point out of this story 4 days later, simple: any other company, in particular those who rely on blogs to get the word out on news and announcements probably don’t get the courtesy of fixing miscommunications… and the reason for that is simply because most bloggers together only think of quickly publishing news stories and regurgitating analysis and not digging deep enough to offer accurate information or add insight. That’s a shame, because people like Tech Crunch’s Riley and most other bloggers hail from industry and are probably not journalists alone… so they end up doing a disservice to themselves and readers by focusing on speed blogging.
There are countless of great blogs and bloggers - and TC and Riley deserve to be in that category, CNET and Rafe Needleman need no intro either - but TC’s success has created a very bad precedent to get otherwise smart people to avoid digging the story deeper for the hope of getting Dugg (TM) or linked up on TechMeme.
That’s a sad state of affair for blogs.
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