Although it’s not a radical departure, blogging as a format — even personal blogging — has changed significantly in the four years since my last design. A venue for a simple feed of blog posts almost feels like it’s from a bygone era; although I’m not a big Tumblr user, it’s easy to see the appeal of blog-like content aggregation points.

The new (re)distribution of that content is a concept I tried to loosely work in here: besides only showing one full (and two abridged) posts on the front page, the layout now has a more naturally integrated Twitter feed on the right, and by scrolling down you’ll also pick up more of what I’ve posted elsewhere (like Engadget, for example).

Also changed: Mosso is now hosting this site. They also host our live event coverage at live.gdgt.com, and if they can stand up to one of my liveblogs, they can surely stand up to just about anything. Shout outs also go to John Wiseman / Brolly for the great work on building out the new template.

Please do hit up the comments and let me know what you think, or if you’re noticing any visual tics or anomalies.

What companies rarely realize, however, is that astroturfing is a myth, one which I’ve never heard of working to do anything except unravel companies’ reputations (see: Sony, Wal-Mart, and many, many more). Astroturfing is a concept that’s easily sold to gullible businesses (like Motorola) who are desperate for new, out-of-the-box ways to “engage with consumers” (i.e. get people to buy their products). But the truth is this: quality will always out. The internet itself has done more to ensure people are well informed than any single consumer advocacy group, and any idea that might spread virally is inherently too worthy and kinetic to funnel from a small, clumsy, group of phony commenter-consumer-bloggers.

Someone should let the folks over at DEI Worldwide, Inc., know this though, as they’re the ones behind Motorola’s assault. The IPs associated with the comments (and numerous others) came from 64.60.150.178, an address belonging to DEI, a marketing company which specializes in “engaging consumers online,” and which counts among its clients — you guessed it — Motorola.

Now, are you ready for the real kicker in all this? Remember how I mentioned Wal-Mart, which was astroturfed by PR mega-firm Edelman back in 2006? At the time, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) issued a release, stating:

“the lack of disclosure… is a violation of WOMMA’s Code of Ethics, which requires honesty and full disclosure in all marketer-sponsored communications. … Such transgressions… are of grave concern to WOMMA, which has led the fight for high ethical standards in word of mouth marketing and social media. Our Ethics Code sets clear guidelines for disclosure by marketers.”

That’s certainly an interesting position, considering the fact that DEI Worldwide’s CEO, David Reis, is a power-player in the marketing world and one of the co-founders of WOMMA. I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Surely in the spirit of honesty and full disclosure, Reis appears to have posted his personal contact information online, should you have any misgivings about companies misleading consumers in their marketing efforts. (Reis also claims to be a black belt, so if you spot me with a black eye, you know who did it!)

Damn, if our numbers are anything to go by (and I’m not saying they are), the adoption rate of Google’s Chrome among the geek-set has been absolutely astonishing. Tomorrow will mark gdgt‘s first week (in super soft launch mode, anyway), and about a week and a half for Chrome — and Google already represents more than ten percent of the thousands of views we’ve gotten.

Kind of reminds me back in 2004 when Calacanis wrote a totally breathless post about Firefox and Engadget, wondering if its 20% slice would become the norm in a couple of years (it clearly has). If gdgt’s first audiences are anything like the same super-early vanguard that Engadget’s audience was in 2004, it stands to reason that Google’s going to absolutely dominate the browser market in the near future. Of course, I’m also really curious to see some larger data sets on this!

Update: At the request of reader Leo, I’ve segmented browser stats by just Windows. They’re not all that different! (In fact, proportionally, Chrome performs a little better.) Here’s the top five Windows browsers for gdgt in week one:

1. Firefox / Windows: 57.91%
2. Internet Explorer / Windows: 21.21%
3. Chrome / Windows: 17.79%
4. Opera / Windows: 1.83%
5. Safari / Windows: 0.83%

But let’s be real, it wasn’t always frenemies uniting. We all had some some damned hard days in the crucible of that kind of competition, as Wired touched on, and I know I certainly had my fair share of lapses in judgment (like a boycott Gizmodo site, which I let myself get talked into by a particularly hateful former writer). Of course, it went both ways, too. Gizmodo and a lot of other sites were pulling shenanigans day in and out, with the traded barbs pushing everyone harder, thinning out mistakes which could turn into ammunition. The results were obviously felt as gadget sites got better, faster, and more accurate, but it’s a little funny, because that stuff all seemed so very serious then. Looking at it now, the storied rivalry retired, it’s almost kind of cute.

There was a line to be drawn, too, and to me that line was where real damage could be done. In fact, this May that line drew itself right in my inbox when a disgruntled former Gizmodo editor pinged me offering a tidy bounty: the full “back catalog of classified Gizmodo emails, some discussing Engadget,” as well as “access to Gizmodo’s tips account [that'd be where you could get all of Gizmodo's scoops, or even turn over their tipsters to the companies they're leaking about]” and the “master list of Gizmodo online sources, which is a great aid.” Without hesitation, I turned this person (and any data that could be made use of) over to Brian and owner of Gizmodo / Gawker Media, Nick Denton, for them to deal with as they saw fit.

Of course, Engadget (for whom I still write and advise) and Gizmodo wage on, trying to out-scoop each other every day of the week. There’s no doubt in my mind that Brian was an adversary so worthy I had to make him an ally — but he’s also a good friend, and someone who knew exactly all the kinds of crap we pulled with each other. But I think ultimately we’ve both spent enough time doing this stuff to know that tearing things down won’t ever be as productive or positive as what comes next: where we unite and build.

“Organizations… create these lists to solidify their power and influence, and to promote their own authority. [Nailed it!] This generally works, with the most exceptional examples like Time’s Person of the Year actually acting to amplify the publication’s own profile. …

For less-known organizations, like NowPublic, having a list like this acts as a phenomenal engine of promotion. … On the web, we call this link-baiting, but offline, it’s simply called flattery.

The rest is here. It was originally written in reference to two separate lists cataloguing web personalities. (And hey, guess what, I happen to make appearances on both, but the linkbait’s only taken on my about page.)

Without question, this has been the hardest decision I’ve ever made, but I know it’s the right one. And as much as I’m looking forward to new challenges (and grateful they’re not Motorola-related), I’m also really excited to see Engadget continue its evolution with Josh at the helm, and as part of the AOL Tech network (where I’ll continue to play an advisory role as editor-at-large). Pete and I are both pretty happy with how things worked out, and are definitely looking ahead. (You’re following us on Twitter, right?)

As much as wish I could, for the time being I really can’t talk very much about the details of the new company (which does not yet have a name). I’m pretty stoked though — promise, you’ll hear more soon.

• Joystiq’s first E3 (Engadget’s second) is where we all brainstormed with Cat Schwartz on the infamous DS vs. PSP video.
• The following E3, former co-editor Vlad Cole (now at Microsoft) was writing a book on all-Pizza diets. This, of course, meant Engadget and Joystiq editors all wound up eating basically only pizza. Not sure I’ve ever lost the weight.
• James Ransom-Wiley has been with Joystiq since early July 2004, making him the longest-tenured editor there. Go James!
• Contrary to popular belief, Kotaku actually started in October of 2004, seemingly as a response to Joystiq.

My favorite trade show of the year is usually E3 — partly because it means we get to regroup with Joystiq and do it up together. Looking forward to that next month, and happy birthday Joystiq!

Bonus trivia: Last E3 myself, Chris, and Pete were all ticketed for jaywalking — at a crosswalk. For some reason my ticket was withdrawn, but Pete and Chris still had to pay theirs. Pics or it didn’t happen, right? Here you go.

I think the question I’m most often asked by people not already in the industry is, “How do I break into writing about technology?” The answer is pretty simple: start writing, keep writing (even when the initial luster has worn off, even if you’re not collecting droves of readers and scads of review units), and with any luck you’ll hone your skill and catch your break — not unlike the path the crew at TeenTechBlog are already on.

Although to be fair, they do disclaim being guilty of the same, and I’m sure the site’s editorial staff doesn’t approve of that kind of advertising nor want it on the site. Trust me, I understand as well as any editor that the people making the content don’t always have much or any say in how their property advertises — but that’s both a double-edged sword and a conversation for another time.

So I decided to plot the numbers to prove the theory that Twittering was, in fact, causing my personal blogging to atrophy. I had a very clear image in my head of what the two lines would look like: the blog would be trending down ever so slowly, taking nosedives during busy months, while the Twitter line would be going up pretty fast. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I hit the render chart button and the following showed up.

Although it’s obvious that my microblogging activity has exploded over the past few months, I absolutely was not expecting to find that as each activity goes up or down, the other almost always moves with it in parallel. Clearly it’s not always directly proportional (as most dramatically evidenced in this March’s spike), but that’s easily attributed to the ease and speed of microblogging vs. writing a full blog post — which is probably what led to the assumption that one affected the other in the first place.

So totally counter to that intuition, it would seem that, at least in my case, microblogging and blogging are not at all in opposition. If anything, both are probably just tied to the total amount of free time I have at my disposal. Hopefully others will chart their respective micro/macroblogging output so we can see if this revised theory of blog-atrophy actually holds true.

P.S. -Big ups to Twitterholic for spying keeping track of everybody’s Twitter usage.

Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / underground publishing culture, it wasn’t until the first blog CMSs landed in 1999 and 2000 (like Blogger and Movable Type) that mainstream audiences experimented with self-publishing. Those blogging at the time might remember what a highly platform-based experience it was. RSS and other forms of one:any (not just one:many) aggregation hadn’t yet come into widespread use, meaning some of those early platforms fed right back into their own siloed communities. This was especially apparent in the case of LiveJournal, which was really popular back then. Way late to RSS, LiveJournal instead relied on a light social networking system that aggregated posts to groups of friends using the service. Sounds familiar. Of course, blogging eventually grew up and out of its early stages into something far more horizontal and platform independent, ensuring the activity of blogging didn’t tie users to just one system and set of relationships.

Although Twitter should be clearly wary of users eventually fleeing for a distributed, decentralized, relationship-based cloud of microblogging, I think most in the know would agree that ultimately it’s what the medium needs to make the next step. Because of Twitter’s dependence on relationships, though, that transition probably won’t come easily; perhaps that’s where services like FriendFeed and other meta-aggregators step in as the glue for disparate, distributed life-content apps. Or perhaps that’s the tack Twitter needs to build into its own business, ensuring it makes the transition from early platform to future technology leader.

Excellent.

The theory used to be that because exposure came party to an ephemeral medium (print), one could usually find value in bad press for its ability to act as a mechanism of discovery and interest-upkeep. This value thought to be inherently greater than any lasting damage, especially when that medium — print — is such a finite commodity, and getting any press at all presented a major challenge. And hey, either way tomorrow morning it’s out of sight, out of mind.

The democratization of niche micro-publishing, though, completely killed the concept of good bad press. Whereas before your press had positive or negative value equatable only to the number of eyeballs who bought and scanned that piece of paper, now any and all exposure you receive is equally findable, be it on the New York Times or on Jim’s Yet-Another-Wordpress Blog. In fact, scratch that — usually the more negative or salacious the exposure, the greater the weight it seems to carry (and thus more probable it is to be highly ranked in search). See: Sarah Lacy.

And, of course, all the upsides to the good bad press seem obviated; the medium is no longer ephemeral, there’s no barrier to entry for publishing OR consuming, and there’s certainly no limit on how many bad things can be said about you (or your company, product, movie, etc.). Anyone can hide from tomorrow’s paper, but no one can hide from nigh-immortal data that’s indexed, cached, and forever more findable.

What’s it mean? Well, maybe that’s not for me to say. But I certainly hope we, as a society that now both consumes and contributes to media at large, can think a little harder about things before hitting the all-powerful publish button.
Photo via Worth1000

So what actually happened is this garbage make your internet riches while you’re young site (that I won’t link to / support) did a list of the top 20 sites run by under-30s, and one of the metrics they used to judge rank was “annual turnover”. Apparently Engadget “turns over” $20m per year (which is news to me, I think I only had $5-10 in fruit turnovers in 2007), which was interpreted by another even crappier site as the net worth of those listed — which landed me on spammy list after list of millionaires.

I’d just like to take this chance to clear the air and let everyone know I’m keeping it real with the rest of the non-millionaires (for now). Sorry ladies.