Dave Winer, a fellow who’s been blogging almost as long as I have, is on-target in his criticism of the Industry Standard’s behavior during the bubble:
Read this op-ed by former Industry Standard editor James Ledbetter to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom.
Which goes to show you that stopped clocks are right twice a day; in this case, Winer’s down on all journalists, all the time, so this criticism (link via Doc Searls) doesn’t stand out especially. Doc maintains that his Cluetrain Manifesto was an attempt to promote alternate mythologies to the Entrepreneur Hero, but I can’t say he succeeded, since the Cluetrain reads like so much snake oil to this disinterested observer.
That being said, a lot of us techies are circumspect about another bubble, especially the efforts of some to create one around WiFi, blogging, and related mobile computing and personal publishing stuff. The folks who create military tech feel an obligation to somehow ensure that it’s used responsibly, and those of us who create the civilian variety would at least like to see that it’s not used simply to fleece mom and pop out of their life savings, as it was during the Bubble when investment bankers touted tech stocks they were underwriting to their brokerage clients. New regulations in the securities industry will help keep this form of abuse to a minimum, but we also need a tech press that’s capable of delivering reasonable criticism of business models and technologies instead of just cheerleading everything that comes along.
I don’t see that sort of a press developing, and if it did, it would certainly start in Silicon Valley. The local paper, the Mercury News, is as clueless about technology as the Des Moines Register, touting the Allen-Boxer Broadband Bill as if it were actually worth the paper it’s written on.
Investors aren’t going back into the market until they’re confident, and a robust business press is key to developing this confidence. I suppose it will have to come from the blogs. The business press reads us — Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show invited me to appear based on these musings — but we’re going to have to do a lot better than cheerleading for WiFi or knee-jerk boosting Open Everything to win credibility.
This is going to take some time.
I’m unclear about a point you’re trying to make… do you think that the discussion around wi-fi is a bubble created by people trying to promote it? My impression is that it’s a very from-the-ground-up phenomenon that’s succeeding despite the efforts of (for example) 3G telcos and cable companies to stymie its growth…
The idea that WiFi is an alternative to DSL and cable Internet is wrong, although WiFi is a real nice deal for what it was intended to do. I like it almost as much as my other favorite invention, twisted-pair Ethernet.
Dan Gillmor and Glenn Fleischmann believe what they’re saying as strongly as you believe what you’re saying. They’re also critical about aspects of the ground that they cover. Most importantly, I don’t think either of them are in the pay of shadowy VCs who are using them to manipulate the stock market. In what way would you like them to expound on their beliefs differently?
I don’t have a problem with boosterism. There’s stuff in the world I really really like, and I’d like to say so. I have a problem with second-hand, ill-thought out boosterism, and I have a real problem with journalists uncritically accepting biassed points of view. I simply don’t believe that’s the case with either Glenn or Dan. What constituency, exactly, are they the useful idiots for?
Gillmor serves the Open Source movement, eating away at Intellectual Property rights that are some of the keys to ongoing technical innovation, and Glenn seems not to understand the limits of WiFi, as he proposes it as a broadband technology against DSL and cable.
The problem with tech journalism is that the journalists don’t know enough about the tech to cover it intelligently, so it’s up to us techies who know how to write to carry the ball.
I don’t know how to write, but WiFi is not going to beat out wired anything. That’s just crazy. It’s great for ultra-high-density urban sites if there’s an antenna on every lamp-post but I’m in Dallas. What do I do?
The only problem I see with what Bennett’s saying is there’s no critical mass of blog readership, not even approaching it. There’s NO way to market blogs that I’ve found, since it’s completely personal. The minute Belo or SJMN starts promoting it, there goes their readership, clicking off their ad-laden sites. Maybe we should all get stickers or something. Or do an Open Source directory or something.*
*Couldn’t help myself…sorry, Richard.