You can't always take the blogosphere at face value

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 | By Vikki Chowney

The somewhat outrageous claims about Apple’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle (or the ‘book of Jobs’ as The Economist has branded it – very clever) stated that it would be powered by solar panels, include facial recognition and have wireless charging.  

And it didn’t end at the ream of tweets Calacanis shared with his near 96,000 followers, as tech press and bloggers also picked up on the ‘news’. Although the story was approached with caution by some, it was churned out as kosher by many more.

This isn’t the first time media has been caught out, but highlights that perhaps an inappropriate amount of trust is placed in the hands of high-profile figures from the Web 2.0 space.

The celebrity factor of high-profile Twitterati like Calacanis often means that one nod from them can turn a non-story into a big deal. It’s attention seeking at its best by the man who could write the book on self-promotion.

Gaming the system to get onto tech-trends site Techmeme or shoot up the ranks of Digg is common practice. And although there are many who would call it a huge success (all press is good press, right?), a lot of the reaction from the online community has been that of frustration with some denouncing Calacanis’s actions as childish.

How long will this go on for? Even if we discount the fact that most of the media that used Calacanis’s claims as a source should have known better for a minute, when will the cult of the A-list blogger be seen for what it really is? For the most part, it’s over-inflated hype with very little substance. And those who do have something to add are often overlooked or tarred by the same brush as a result of, albeit good-natured, stunts like this.

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