Some Tech Bloggers Are Turning on Blogging
Claiming to be fed up with technology blogging noise, technology bloggers Michael Arrington and MG Siegler have written some noisy rants about technology blogging this morning. The New York Times' Nick Bilton set Arrington and Siegler off with this week's Bits Blog column, where he discusses last week's Path scandal. Both Siegler and Arrington thought Bilton added nothing to the discussion, so they used his column as an excuse to launch thousand-plus word commentaries on the degraded state of blogging.
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It's hard to ignore the multiple layers of irony here. Arrington and Siegler are the bloggiest of bloggers, weighing in on every technology news nugget on their respective personal sites, Uncrunched and Paris Lemon. Fellow "noise maker" Kara Swisher noticed. "The bitter little lemon lectures us all on degrading journalism via blogging. Finally, a topic he is an expert on! (Oh, the irony!)," she tweeted this morning. In his own defense, Siegler, argued that he and Arrington are outsiders, as former TechCrunch writers gone rogue, and that their anti-noise positions can be seen as after-the-fact revelations. "Over the past several months that I’ve been removed from the day-to-day of tech blogging professionally, I’ve gained some perspective from the other side of things," writes Siegler." Still, Siegler and Arrington both very much participate in—and sometimes add noise to—the conversation around technology.
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There's also the hard-to-ignore fact that both Arrington and Siegler invest in Path, the social network that started this whole brouhaha. Both give that disclosure in their posts. But, as Wired's Tim Carmody notes, perhaps they could have saved this discussion for a better moment. "If you want to make a serious argument about problems in tech blogging, start w/a story where you don't have a major conflict of interest," he tweeted.
