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Today we learned that Windows Vista has slipped, again, and that the new Microsoft operating system won't be out till January 2007 -- despite long-held promises of a 2006 release.
Every new edition of Windows has been late, so, you know, this is predictable news -- on the order of "President Bush Declares He Will Stay The Course In Iraq."
What I found interesting was the 2006-model way in which I discovered this news today. I first found out on Digg, the new-model tech-news aggregator that is rapidly replacing Slashdot on many geek bookmark lists. When I checked out Digg a little before 5 p.m. Pacific Time, the top story, or close to it, was a link to a trade publication's short piece on the news. It took a couple more hours for the story to show up on Slashdot, which has its own editors picking stories, unlike Digg, which puts all its users to work.
And now, a couple more hours later, around 9 p.m. in California, we can read the canonical big-media piece in the New York Times. It's fine, and it provides a broader perspective than the trades, as it should.
But once you've got the outline of the event clear, it's far less interesting to hear the excuses of the Microsoft brass, as recited on conference call to the pros, than to read the breast-beating disgust of the anonymous Microsoft employee who blogs under the sobriquet MiniMicrosoft: "Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!" (I don't even read MiniMicrosoft regularly, but Dave Winer pointed to him, so I found him.)
This is just one little sequence relating to one little news event, but it's illuminating. As tech news goes today, so ultimately will go the rest of the news. It's not the death of newspapers or pro journalism, but it's further evidence that the pros face an extremely tough challenge: they're rarely going to be first, so they'd damn well better be good. But it's hard to hire enough good people to be good at everything; a newsroom has only so many seats, and the Web's supply of amateur experts, anonymous insiders and random kibitzers with an occasional insight is limitless. The pros had better prepare to be outgunned.
This competition will force journalists to stop being lazy and to find and reconnect with what is unique about their work, now that so much of what they used to do is being done for free, and often well, by amateurs. The best response, it seems to me, is what we have tried to do over the years at Salon: put more energy and resources and smart people into real investigative journalism, to find stories that just aren't being covered elsewhere, and that are less likely to be produced by lone bloggers.
The next phase of the game beyond that, which we're only beginning to figure out -- but then so is everyone else -- involves connecting that tradition of professional investigative journalism with the new dynamic of distributed information that the Net creates.
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Mike Arrington is the lawyer-turned-blogger-and-entrepreneur whose TechCrunch has become the Web site of choice for people attempting to keep up with the cornucopia of startup companies pouring onto the Internet under the Web 2.0 banner.
The amazing thing to me about Arrington is this: He somehow keeps the names of these companies straight.
A post a little while back, for instance, contains this sentence:
"Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo."
Skobee? Renkoo? Is Mr. Mxyzptlk in the house?
Joyent, Planzo, Trumba, Rojo,
Meebo, Goowy, Megite, Newroo --
Chuquet, Squidoo, Zingee, Stickam?
Favoor, Zazzle, Kiko, Simpy!
Chant them urgently, and you might find yourself conjuring a Morgul spell. [All names verbatim from the last couple months of TechCrunch.]
I remember when Yahoo launched (yes, I'm becoming a Net codger), thinking, "Boy, that's an odd name to try to build a company around." What I saw over the ensuing years was that it doesn't much matter what you name a company as long as the brand is strong enough -- people will just project the qualities they associate with you onto the name.
For that to work, however, you need users -- a lot of users -- so that you can fill the random syllables with meaning. That's much harder in today's overpopulated Web 2.0 scrum, full of hard-to-distinguish competitors featuring similar two-syllable names, curvy cornered designs, and rounded fonts.
I realize that many of these names are chosen out of desperation, since all domain names that actually communicate meaning have been squatted upon by speculators. And if your business is really all about adding a feature or two to the Great Big Web Application In the Sky (or, I guess one should say, Cloud), then your end-game plan is to be acquired by some large company that already has a meaningful brand and intends to toss yours in the garbage anyway -- so why waste too much thought on your name?
Still, Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy.
UPDATE: I had somehow missed this brilliant quiz, "Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?" [Thanks to Oscar for the tip, in comments]
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