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Technology Reporting

Published by marco on

Tech reporting is spiraling ever downward: information generally starts out in the form of a carefully vetted press release and is copied verbatim to one of the big “news” sites (CNet, I’m looking at you), where it’s adorned with banner ads and clever user comments. From there, other sites copy chunks of these “articles” and paste them on their own pages with their own ads and their own clever users. As an example, there is this short article called Microsoft Takes Aim At Google (Slashdot). It is quoted in its entirety below.

“People are underestimating what Microsoft is doing with search technology, says Bill Gates. The head of the software giant told the BBC that its ambition is to be bigger than Google in search.”

Slashdot is one of the biggest, most popular tech sites on the Internet today. The number of users it commands has led to a name for what happens to a server after it is visited by the stampeding hordes of slavering geeks that are Slashdot readers: Being Slashdotted. As you can see, they have not acheived this fame by pithiness in writing style. This “news” is simply an “ambition” (on the part of Microsoft) that is dutifully reported straight out of a press release. Most of the commenters (the aforementioned herd) jumped in with nary a thought as to whether this was even “news” or not — though something similar seems to be reported every few days. There are some exceptions, like this author of this post:

“Yeah, and my ambition is to be an astronaut-playboy-robot-vampire that fights crime and plays lead guitar in his own thrash metal band on the weekends, but I don’t think my ambition is terribly realistic either.”

The original article, Microsoft aims to trounce Google (BBC) leads off with:

“People are underestimating what Microsoft is doing with search technology, says Bill Gates. … The head of the software giant told the BBC that its ambition is to be bigger than Google in search.”

Sound familiar? The Slashdot “article” isn’t even original content! The editors didn’t write a single word! Slashdot content quality is no better than a common blog with stuff like this.

Now let’s move a step upstream and see how the BBC fares. Slashdot copied their stuff directly, so it must be good. The BBC seems to be at the top of the food chain here, publishing the press release verbatim, without juxtaposing the text with reality. Google is king of web searching; Apple is king of desktop searching. Microsoft is not being underestimated — they just haven’t shown any strength in searching yet, despite repeated attempts and opportunity. It is not biased to point this out — it is simply being acquainted with the area being covered.

If you read the whole BBC article, you’ll see that the lead-in (Microsoft trouncing Google) is a tabloid-style header — only two sentences of the article deal with searching, they are both vague and Google is mentioned only once. The rest of the search “section” deals with platitudes about competition, devices talking to one another and noting that “[Microsoft is] in the best position we have ever been in”.

The signal to noise ratio is low — and getting lower every day.