So, I started helping Josh with The Apple Blog. It’s fun and hopefully it will help build a bit of branding for myself.
I read assloads of internet news all day everyday. On my iPhone, on my various computers, on the toilet. It’s retarded.
However, in all this time I never realized just how redundant all this shit is until I started actually looking for things to write about. I call this, Regurgitated Internet News. It’s nothing new and most people already complain about it. I’ve probably even complain about it before on my blog.
The basic premise is that there’s only a very small (like 1 or 2) sites that actually break technology news. Although we like to pretend these are homegrown blogs, they’re not. They’re the big names like Techcrunch. Everyone else just repeats these stories with a little blockquoting and a little commentary.
I’ll see an article about how the new iPhone firmware has 3G enabling sliders on AppleInsider, then I’ll see it on every other god damn site on the internet within seconds. Some of them pass it off as if they broke the story. The vast majority off absolutely no interesting commentary to go along with their rehashed article. I know, I’ve been guilty of this in the past I’m sure.
It’s something that Tyme and Scirvs were complaining about with the 9rules submissions last week.
This issue gets even worse when you couple it with the fact that everyone is competing for Digg and Reddit type promotion for their regurgitated stories. Sure, I’m cool with posting your shit on Digg if you really have something unique to say about the subject but not if you’re just blockquoting. All you’re doing is adding another layer of annoyance to get to the real fucking article.
Again, nothing new. Everyone complains about this. It hits home now though.
My goal with contributing to The Apple Blog is not to fall into this mess. While to a certain extent, if you’re reporting on Apple news you simply have to regurgitate some stories (when 25,000+ people subscribe to your feed, you have to give them something), but we can also rock out some really nice commentary and tutorials.
That’s what I plan to do.
2 Responses to “Regurgitated Internet News”rss
Ralph, on May 12th, 2008, said:
This is a very nice post, thanks for posting about it!
Steve, on May 20th, 2008, said:
Regurgitated news is nothing knew, what frustrates me is the blatant lack of acknowledgement for the original author. Like you say, far too many people pass off work as their own.
Not even this blog is immune to that…I checked my top commentator link on here a few minutes ago and someone had hijacked it with a link to an anti wrinkle cream site (:
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