Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging >> The Far Side of Tech

In an attempt to move in a different direction from the rest of the blogosphere, I was going to write something about how strange it was that the ill-fated search engine Cuil was covered so widely in mainstream press. Unfortunately, it looks like ReadWriteWeb beat me to it.

I encourage you to read their piece, because it pretty much covers everything I had in mind. But I will say this: Cuil was the first story I heard on NPR when I woke up Monday morning, and I was constantly asked about it throughout the day by non-tech folk who had read about it in other mainstream sources. That sort of coverage truly surprised me because, for the most part, Cuil seemed like many other geeky startups that the blogosphere adores, but average internet users generally ignore.

The Trouble with Tech Bloggers…

But enough has been said about Cuil’s fail whale of a launch. Instead, check out this recent post by Sarah Lacy, who uses the Cuil launch to discuss a problematic trend in the technology blogosphere. She believes that the obsessive rush to break news before other sites, coupled with the obcenely short hype-cycle of online tech journalism, is ultimately not very useful readers:

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn’t it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we’ve got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that’s not Cuil’s fault. And I don’t think it’s serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

Specifically, Lacy points to many bloggers (including herself) giving a generally favorable preview to Cuil without actually using it, and then having to turn around and be extra nasty when they realized how little it lived up to the hype they helped create.

…And how we can move forward

This isn’t an entirely original criticism, but I think the Cuil case is fairly indicative of these larger issues facing the tech blogosphere. To her first point, I certainly agree that the rush to be first has led to some shoddy work, but at the same time it appears to be a logical evolution of competitive print journalism. The problem is that with online journalism a story can break any second, whereas print journalism generally works on a monthly, weekly, daily (and sometimes twice daily), news cycle.

photo credit: Steve and Sara

It would certainly be nice for tech bloggers to worry less about being first to post, but since being first tends to directly correlate to success on Digg, Reddit, and other social media sites, I don’t see that trend ending anytime soon. Sites like TechCrunch and Mashable aren’t ever going to get away from that grind, but it does leave the door open for bloggers of a different sort to offer more thoughtful analysis, a potential answer to her second criticism.

While these bloggers may initially miss out on the blink-and-you-miss-it relevancy cycle generated by the bigger tech blogs, social media sites, and Techmeme–I believe they could eventually prolong the cycle by daring to cover stories that (gasp) several days old. Even more shocking, they could even cover content that’s sometimes routinely ignored by the bigger tech and social media sites. (Scoble has an interesting response to Lacy’s post that offers some similar thoughts.)

Of course, my feelings on this matter come from personal experience. With this blog, I know that I can’t always break news like the big sites, but I can still attempt to create interesting content that isn’t necessarily beholden to their manic relevancy cycle or the gods of social media. I know there are many other aspiring tech bloggers who are working towards similar goals as well, so whenever someone mentions the decline of tech blogging I can’t help but think they’re just not looking hard enough, and that may be the real problem.

Few are.