When it comes to writing about Apple, deciding what you should and should not cover can be tricky.
You can take the machine gun approach: Anything said, written, rumored, or signaled via smoke should be dutifully blogged with a hint of snark and just enough insight to make readers think, "Heeeeeeey, that fella must know the inside dope." This, unfortunately, is what most of the tech press (mea culpa: sometimes including CNET) following Apple does these days. If you don't give readers their Apple fix, the other guys will.
iPhone rumors had the Internet buzzing.
Then there's the high-end approach: you have occasional access to Steve Jobs, so you have an outside chance of knowing what's complete BS--or hope you know. You only jump into the pool when you've got something no one else does. Patron saint of all things Appleness, Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal, is probably the best on the high end.
I mention this because Tom Krazit, my colleague here at CNET News.com and the author of the One More Thing blog, had to make a tough call this morning: Does he dutifully blog that Dow Jones is reporting Hon Hai Precision Industry "would be producing next-generation iPhones for Apple and is the exclusive contract manufacturer for the new phones?" Or should he take a step back, try to make some phone calls on this (not easy, since the company is in Taiwan where it was the middle of the night) and try to find out if this story, based on a single, anonymous source, is true?
Mind you, we often see reports like this come out of Taiwan and other Asian manufacturing centers, so our first thoughts were of the "here we go again" kind. But Hon Hai is already manufacturing the iPhone, so working on a next-generation iPhone (3G?) would make sense for them. But did we know one way or another? Nope.
Tom took the conservative route. Instead of fanning the rumor flames, and acknowledging how obvious a choice Hon Hai would be, he chose to pass and focus more pressing priorities such as the CTIA show in Las Vegas next week and Opening Day. Of course, getting up at 5 a.m. to cover Apple's Aperture news probably helped him with his decision.
Did he make the right call? I honestly have no idea. The old-school journalist in me says you steer clear of stuff you can't confirm and sets off warning bells (rightly or wrongly) in your gut. But the online editor in me who competes with a gazillion gadget blogs says, "Aiiiiieeeeeee!!!! We must have something on this! It has like a dozen links on Techmeme and growing! We MUST be in the river!"
But given the sheer volume of Apple speculation today, you have to give Tom credit for standing pat. In addition to the Dow Jones report, we had a Gartner analyst's prediction of iPhone shipment levels (OK, so that was Wednesday), meticulously rolled back by said analyst's boss, and more speculation by another analyst (but he's a Wall Street guy, so he must be wicked smart) that Apple will deliver the 3G iPhone in the second quarter.
So what do we really know? At some point, Apple will build a new version of the iPhone. It will do more stuff and have more features than the current iPhone. It will be manufactured in Asia, because that's where nearly all consumer electronics are made.
And it will be pretty.
Mashable is writing about a new news site called Newspond. Their "about" page boasts that the site is "the most advanced news site on the planet." That's certainly a big statement to make, given the competition that already exists. Its main function is similar to that of Techmeme, with some of the social features of Digg thrown in for good measure.
At first glance, it appears that the content that is floating to the top of Newspond is very different to what is atop Techmeme right now. It's not clear whether this is due to the sources that Newspond is drawing on, or due to differences in their algorithms. I tend to think that it is a result of the algorithm, since many of the sources for popular articles are comparable on both sites. I think that the content needs to be tweaked, although it may improve as the site matures.
As far as functionality and look goes, Newspond is at the top of the heap. Everything on the site moves so smoothly, and there are beautiful gradients and rounded corners as far as the eye can see. Comments slide out and boxes light up all over the site. The design of Newspond should be the poster child for Web 2.0.
I don't think that Newspond will dethrone Techmeme or Digg anytime soon, but they are definitely a start-up to keep your eye on. If any of their claims end up coming to fruition, we will be hearing from them a lot.
A time-lapse video of the Techmeme front page created by Amit Argawal (see his blog post) shows how bloggers herd around stories. This entertaining video, which covers 50 hours in the life of the Internet--interestingly, the two days surrounding the Scoble Facebook kerfuffle--shows stories popping on and off the front page of the service, and it graphically illustrates how bloggers and other journalists report on items that have just been covered by their peers and competitors.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Each outlet and blog has its own perspective and should serve its readers without worrying too much about what is showing up on other sites. But Techmeme, and this video especially, illustrates how bloggers often herd around popular ideas. In the sheer number of stories that circulate around topics popular in the blogosphere, it also starkly shows the diminishing returns of publishing a story on a topic everyone else has already covered.
The "Techmeme effect" is not like the Digg effect. Links that show up on Techmeme don't drive a ton of traffic to their originating sites. Top stories--those written on original news or insight--generate some click-through, but secondary references are not traffic drivers. You'll notice in this video that there are a few instances when the story evolves and new thinking pops an item into a top spot. That's progress.
Yet some writers, upon seeing a topic get traction on Techmeme, rush in to the fray to get their stories added to the growing list of links. Sadly, hardly any of the stories posted into a blogstorm pay their writers back in a meaningful way.
I like and use Techmeme, but I encourage writers I work with not to chase it. It's not worth it.
Related: The Five Members of the Techmeme Family, by Jeremiah Owyang.
Other sites that also work to aggregate the hottest stories on the Internet include Gabe Rivera's Techmeme and Tailrank. In my opinion, Technorati Topics comes up short, while Techmeme succeeds, simply because of the way that the stories are displayed. Techmeme reads more like a newspaper, with the most talked about stories of the moment on the top of the page, and its River feature, which shows the stories in chronological order. Technorati Topics lets the stories fall down the page, much like Digg Spy. The reason why this doesn't work particularly well for Technorati Topics is because so many blogs are included in its pool.
It seems as if Technorati is displaying every blog post from those in its pool, instead of the popular ones. It is really hard to tell from looking at Technorati Topics what the most important and popular stories are. While it may be entertaining to watch Technorati Topics for a few minutes to see some blog posts, the speed at which the stories fall down the page, along with the lack of filtering for individual posts, really hurts the service.
I have been a big fan of Technorati for awhile now, and it has been really painful to watch it struggle recently. Even though Technorati Topics will probably not be a smash hit it its current state, it's nice to see the site pushing out new features again and trying to get back on top. Hopefully this is just one of many things that Technorati has up its sleeves as it tries to get back on its feet.
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