Morrie the Toupee Salesman

One of the things I dislike rather intensely about the “blogosphere,” especially as evidenced by what appears on the front page of techmeme, is the “echo chamber” effect. A typical tech story generally starts as a press release, and then the usual suspects weigh in with their opinions. Techcrunch, Mashable, Readwriteweb, Gigaom, etc, etc would all publish articles that seemingly just rehash the press release, with little analysis and few differences of opinion. I’m sure there’s lots of smart people working at all these companies, so the seeming lack of diversity in thought was just plain disappointing. I’ve come to enjoy Valleywag very much for this reason, because among all the publications coming out of San Francisco, they seemed to be the only one that showed even a hint of subversion. Much of my cynicism was probably fueled by my digg experiences, a company and website that I really hoped would actually fulfill its mission of “democratizing media,” and instead did the exact opposite.

So the revelation this week, perhaps, that some of these sites were using a tool called Datapresser almost makes me feel good about these people again. Instead of a group of people echoing back and forth their own opinions, full of puffery and pomposity, I can actually imagine a different picture - young, generally underpaid individuals, smart and with interesting opinions, but under terrific pressure to produce as many posts as possible each day, according to a formula set by the people running things. Plus its a Canadian company making money off the whole thing.

So that’s kind of encouraging, in a perverse sort of way. Although there’s still some doubt in my mind that it might be an elaborate hoax. And while I’m being critical of blogs, there are much greater offenders in the print media (Hello Business Week…).