A few days ago, Gizmodo blogger Adam Frucci wrote a post called the Seven Types of Employees You Meet at Best Buy. The seven types of employees include car audio thug, marginally cute customer service girl, grizzled old home theater/computer sales lifer, pervy Geek Squad guy, sad department manager, slick careerist manager, and terrifying loss-prevention guy. This blog post got the attention of some of Best Buy’s top brass because the Best Buy CMO Barry Judge retaliated to the blog post.
Below is an excerpt from Judge’s blog:
“We couldn’t resist taking a stab at classifying the seven types of Gizmodo bloggers, but then we realized there’s really only one type of Gizmodo blogger. Here’s that description:
You’ll find this guy on his couch, sporting an ironic t-shirt with a delivery-food stain of some kind. He ‘commuted’ minutes earlier by rolling out of bed and over to his laptop in his shoebox-sized Brooklyn (Williamsburg) apartment littered with empty Redbull cans. He came to Gizmodo 9 months ago after deciding that “traditional media” wasn’t edgy enough (read: required pants and didn’t like it when he powered down walls of TVs). He only puts on pants in order to put electronics down them, and he gets very upset if you mess with his Star Wars legos. He genuinely believes that the hot PR girl is into him and not just trying to get a post. He overuses the word ‘fail.’”
Gadget writer for Wired, Brian Chen put together a video on how to hack a netbook to run Mac OS X. It turns out Apple wasn’t too appreciative for this video. At first Brian thought Apple was planning on suing Wired, but it looks like they just received some sort of take-down notice. For the purpose of experimentation, Brian loaned his MSI Wind Hackintosh for Wired’s Giz Gallery.
The video gives a step by step guide on putting the Apple operating system on the netbook. This includes surfing over to The Pirate Bay to get the Mac OS X software, installing a code to make the USB drive bootable, and opening the netbook using a screwdriver to swap the WiFi card.
Although the video has been removed from Wired, Gizmodo captured the video and archived it for us to see. Gizmodo pointed out that since Apple sent Wired a takedown notice and stirred up some controvers, more people will see it now.
Last night, TechCrunch reported that content sites will see a 50% drop in revenue next quarter. Its sources included “content site owners” and an unnamed sales exec. No real stats were shows to back up the claim. Today, Gizmodo reported that Macworld was canceled because of Jobs’ declining health. It also got It’s information from an unnamed “reliable source.”
The problem with this kind of “reporting” is that it gets picked up and cited by main stream media at Internet speed. TechCrunch’s posts are syndicated by The Washington Post. Gawker, the owner of Gizmodo has a number of newspapers following its stories. When these large blogs report unsubstantiated rumors just to get page views, bad things happen.
Apple’s stock was shaken by Gizmodo’s rumor. And I am sure thousands of small content site owners have started to worry thanks to Arrington’s prediction.
A blogger’s “insider source” is as useless as a political analyst is to main stream media. Most political analysts have no idea what the hell they are talking about. They just speak gibberish and make claims based on absolutely nothing.
The same goes for a blog’s “inside sources.” They are supposedly authoritative people with solid information. But there is never anything to back up the information.
As far as I am concerned, Gizmodo’s Apple insider source is some clueless kid who works at an Apple Store.
I’m impressed with Gawker Media, a network of blogs started by Nick Denton. If I miss a major event like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Macworld, or the Detroit Auto Show, I always looked at the newspapers for the pictures. But between Jalopnik and Gizmodo, I did not have to attend the Detroit Auto Show or CES to get a feel of what is happening at the event. These two blogs have the most number of pictures I have seen for any of those given events.
The automotive industry in America seems to be in such peril and this is reiterated all over the media, but the Detroit Auto Show is the automotive industry’s time to shine. The angles and photography of all the cars I’ve seen on Jalopnik are just amazing. A lot of these pictures get uploaded in real-time. Looking at these pictures makes me feel like a kid again when I used to attend the show almost every year.
I believe that the reach Gawker Media has makes them qualified enough for an acquisition as big as Weblogs Inc. Its too bad that some of their editors tend to be big on pranks, thus causing Gizmodo to be potentially banned from further CES events.
