Uncov, which had a brief life as an anti-booster blog about tech start-ups from April 2007 to January 2008, reemerged this week with fresh content, the same you-all-suck style, and a new model for producing content. The timing is obviously right--with tech in free-fall, why not join the fray and kick it when it's down? Uncov can be a cathartic reading experience. Or it might just annoy you. I find it entertaining.
Uncov creator Ted Dziuba has a day job and says he doesn't have the time to produce the snark on a daily basis, so he's added a "peanut gallery" feature to the site. Users who register at Uncov can write their own posts; everyone can read these submissions in the site's sidebar. The stories Dziuba likes get "promoted" to the main blog stream. In other words, Dziuba is embracing the citizen journalism model. Surely that begs to be mocked, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
The site reminds us of F***edCompany.com, Philip Kaplan's site that chronicled the bonehead moves of dot-coms in the last bubble. It was angry and mean-spirited, to put it mildly. And like Valleywag is today, people in the tech economy read it obsessively. F***edCompany (our style guide prohibits me from actually spelling it) got so nasty, personal, and frighteningly vicious, in fact, that it earned the honor of being the only industry site that CNET employees could not access from inside the CNET company network.
Previously: Web 2.oh no
Uncov paints Web 2.0 ideas with coats of withering criticism.
There's a new Web 2.0 reviews blog: Uncov. This one is different, though. It's nasty. The Uncov writers, apparently software developers, hate almost everything, including their paying clients. But their technical theories make their reviews a worthwhile counterpart to writeups you'll read here and elsewhere. It's fun to read how Meebo is contributing to global warming.
And I'll say this: Just knowing that there's a blog out there that exists solely to poke holes in Web apps reminds me how important it is to look at products in this market very critically. There are lots of great ideas where the implementation lacks, for example.
Found on: Valleywag.
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