Knock it off tech writers, Spring is about life not death |
Spring is supposed to be the time we think of life. Starting new projects, breathing fresh air into older ones, the smell of freshly mown grass, baseball, apple pie, the Easter bunny! It’s not October, not Fall, not Halloween. Not death. You wouldn’t know this by paying attention to the headlines for the top stories at Techmeme the last few weeks though. Word to fellow tech writers: can we please lighten up the premature death headlines a wee bit? I tried leaving a hint here.
Have you noticed an increase in headlines for top stories using death as more than a metaphor? Hyperbolic headlines are part of the business, I get that, but don’t understand the need to claim products, services and companies as “dead” until they are in fact dead. Maybe I should do that as a joke with every post for awhile? Just increase the number of things prematurely labeled dead.
Here’s a few recent headline examples taken at 9:50am every day at TechMeme and I’m sure more can be found:
April 7, 2007
Microsoft is dead. There are so many things dead wrong with Paul Graham’s post that I’m not going to even try listing them. Graham isn’t a dumb guy, he’s got an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard. Too bad this is the dumbest essay from smartest person I’ve read in a long time. Doubters should look at Microsoft’s bank account. As Jim Rome would say: scoreboard.
March 30, 2007
Death of the cell phone charger. The ability to send battery juice over the air is intriguing, but can we walk into the store and buy this technology yet?
March 26, 2007
Yahoo Mail goes to infinity and beyond. And then Google responds by saying Gmail will be “infinity + 1.” While this one admittedly isn’t about death, both these companies are trying to outduel each other by offering more free email hard disk space. How pointless is that? A neverending big penis contest between the two might as well inspire death headlines. This is one where creative metaphors would be welcomed. Even in the Spring.
March 25, 2007
How to save newspapers (Newspapers are dead). Newspapers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Yes, they need to do a better job making their publications web-friendly. Geeks like me prefer to get news online (via RSS primarily), but there are plenty of people still getting their news offline. Plenty of people, my wife included, who enjoy reading on paper. Dead? Hardly. Print falling out favor? Yes. Dying? Can’t even go that far.
March 20, 2007
Web 2.0 over and out. It’s curious to see a venture capitalist calling for a pulse check on Web 2.0. Yes the term and a lot of the so called innovation was DOA, but there are still deals being made, sites being created, millions of dollars changing hands. Heartbeat detected.
March 14, 2007
Slacker, the real iPod killer. Huh, Slacker? I just love when writers declare something a “killer” when it’s brand new. Not. It’s only a killer after it’s killed something. Gein and Dahmer were killers, not Slacker. Yet.
March 8, 2007
Playstation Crushes Second Life with Superior Platform. Mashable’s “crushing” of Second Life when Sony hasn’t even released the beta of Home on the struggling PS3 must be metaphorical. ‘Superior platform’? Pete if you believe this then drop the happy grass already. We won’t know if it’s “superior” until people actually start using it. And as for Second Life comparisons? Can you build and sell your creations on HOME? No. Can you convert in world currency to real world dollars on HOME? No. Will any part of HOME be open source? Not based on Sony’s history of proprietary fixation. Premature declaring “crushing” Second Life because of Sony PS3 HOME? Extremely.
Let me see if I can recap the carnage. Microsoft is dead, cell phone chargers are dead, Newspapers are dead, the iPod is dead, Second Life is dead. A tech battlefield littered with corpses. Worse than the latest Romero flick. Night of the Living Tech Dead.
Want to be a top headline tech story at TechMeme? Evidence would suggest prematurely declaring something dead in Spring — at least this spring — could be a good strategy. Wait, no, stop please. I’m claiming death to proclaiming death prematurely in hyperbolic tech headlines.
Now where did I put that unused coffin, Easter Bunny?
Did this post make you go hmm?
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TDavid, as you usual, you’re spot on. Always a pleasure reading your stuff.
I, too, am very very sick of not only the constant “death” trumpeted in blogs (and, to be fair, in MSM nowadays, too)… but in the hyperbole and over-the-top constant link-bait, too.
Granted, I’m minorly hypocritical here; I recently wrote a blog entry on “Vanessa Fox Nude!” complete with bad porn puns and so on (she’s a colleague of mine who — as a joke — really does own vanessafoxnude.com!). But on the whole, I try to keep things in perspective on my blog and not continually harp upon completely ridiculous zero-sum claims, battles, wars, etc.
There are a lot of people in the world. A lot of folks with online and offline needs, and soon to be a lot more of them (people and needs). There is room for #2, #3, probably even #7 and number #42. McDonald’s may be the fast-food “winner,” but I’m guessing Burger King and Wendy’s are doing just fine. Best Buy and Circuit City and even a mom’n'pop electronics store all seem to be doing quite good business near my apartment.
Microsoft isn’t dead. It’s not even dying. It may be challenged, it may be quite often (as a company) clueless and even acting like a jerk, but that’s not death.
I don’t know whether Paul was just shooting for link-bait or whether he was just slinging around hyperbole due to being a lazy or thoughtless writer, but I think folks — no matter how well intentioned or popular or whatever — should get called out for this kind of crap. The world isn’t black and white, winner-take-all, and writing (online and offline) should reflect reality, not warp it.
Comment by Adam — April 9, 2007 @ 3:26 pm PST
Hehe, thanks Adam. We can all use a little more smile in our day to day flow. The problem is all of the stories I linked above were from writers who seemed to be serious. I wish these people were being satirical. They’d at least have a good excuse then.
Maybe I’m being a bit premature on it being Spring though as our Mariners actually got snowed out over the weekend in Cleveland. Yowsa!
Comment by TDavid — April 9, 2007 @ 4:51 pm PST