First Post!!1!

It's delicious all right!

Get It Try It

Sune gets first post to The Technological for 2008. Seems Derik DeLong of the high class Mac Users site's been hunting pests purveying contradictory thoughts already. And he thinks he's found one in good old Rob Enderle.



Oops! What is 'schandenfreude'? Perhaps the dimwitted DuhShort means 'Schadenfreude'? Perhaps the dimwitted DuhShort doesn't know you're supposed to capitalise all German nouns as well?

No matter. We're talking Maccies here so you can't expect too much.

But what's the big deal with Enderle? Simple: he got taken for a ride by that turncoat Daniel Lyons. He bought into the continually profitable Forbes blog now exploiting the Think Secret scandal. He seems to have thought - for all of 48 hours at any rate - that Lyons' latest joke wasn't a joke. But he was enough of a grownup to admit it.

'I spend a lot of time, and I have to admit take a little pleasure in, pointing out hoaxes to others. So it is incredibly ironic and quite humbling to fall for a hoax myself.'

That was five days ago.

Today - five days later - DuhShort wakes up, checks the news outside Peoples Temple, and discovers the tidbit. Let's see: Rob Enderle is behind two days; DuhShort falls behind by five - and can't even spell 'Schadenfreude'.

There's irony there all right.

What's really ironic is that good old Rob actually raises a number of interesting questions in a very eloquent piece - but of course that's of no interest to the fetid DuhShort.

With the coming of the .com age, we saw change. The change shifted advertising dollars significantly and allowed new properties to rise, most notably Google, and others to fall. (The world's newspapers largely seem to be on life support now.)

We moved, and many older reporters lament about this, from covering the facts to being sensational without a lot of regard for the facts. I think this has created a world that could be more easily manipulated. This is offset significantly by the number of small sites that cover topics, but were a company to aggressively go out and buy a lot of these small sites, shifting them to their purpose, it could control a substantial amount of opinion and, done right, might not have to disclose its ownership.

This is why the Think Secret thing is kind of scary. We don't know how often things like this happen because there would be every reason to not want to disclose the change. What if, instead of shutting the site down, Apple had taken it over? Given sites that cover Apple appear largely funded by Apple advertising (which may simply be because that is where you'd put those ads, but might imply a cause and effect), you might wonder how independent they really are.

It wasn't so long ago that I watched the editor-in-chief of PC World resign, and then get reinstated, when Apple appeared to apply excessive pressure on that publication. Fortunately they did the right thing, but Apple is used by a lot of us as a good example of how to manage message and image, and what they do others will likely try. In this instance they got caught, but it begs the question of how many times this is not caught.

Ouch. That's too close to home, Rob. Better we castigate you and print nonsense about you being two days out of touch when we ourselves are five days out.

Pass the Kool-Aid, Dork.

See Also
Rob Enderle: Falling for the Dan Lyons Apple Hoax