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Last month, I was surprised to learn the Oakland A's ties to the sports fan tradition of the wave. Never a big fan of the practice, I've grown increasingly annoyed with it as fans start it at inappropriate times, or it gets in the way of those fans who are focused on the game. When I wrote a blog entry here and on Athletics Nation about it, it apparently garnered the awareness of reporter David Pollak of the San Jose Mercury News. Writing a piece on the wave's official 25th anniversary, he contacted me to see if I could help him "have the totality of the anti-wave movement represented."

So, always eager to help, we did our part, and that story, now published, can be found both online and in the Sunday edition of the paper. While my entire reply could not be included, given its length, I was the only person who was a named opponent.

The quote was as follows:

"The wave is a travesty. Usually started by inattentive, inebriated fans who would struggle to tell you the current score, let alone the situation of the game, the wave violently distracts from the activity on the field.''

Fairly snooty, right? If you thought that was bad, you should have seen my rant where I also said it was better suited to LA and Anaheim Angels fans, or its ties to superstition. Any good fan will tell you the wave is simply bad luck.

The article can be found here:

It's 25, Was Begun By An SJSU Alum, and is Beloved, Or None of That
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/15763750.htm

Listening to ''Precious (DJ Dan 4 A.M. Mix)'', by Depeche Mode (Play Count: 6)

As you know, the A's are going to the playoffs again, after a two-year absence. For some who don't live in the San Francisco Bay Area or follow the team as I do, the club's being in the playoffs, and supposedly, on national television, will be the first exposure they've had to the A's, who often finds themselves on the short end of the media attention stick, in favor of Eastern clubs, primarily the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. But now, as the playoff picture has solidified with the conclusion of baseball's regular season, it's clear that the corporate bigwigs pulling the strings have opted to keep A's fans in the dark, in a never-ending quest for higher media dollars and ratings.

As a result of the Detroit Tigers' failing to win a single game against the AL Central doormat Kansas City Royals, the A's are set to take on the Minnesota Twins at the Metrodome starting Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by a home game here in Oakland on Friday. According to the postseason schedule, the two games in Minnesota are planned for the ungodly hour of 10 a.m. here on the West Coast, noon in Minneapolis, and 1 p.m. for those on the East Coast. The primetime schedule is instead dominated, not surprisingly, by games involving the New York Yankees or the New York Mets. In fact, even a hierarchy shows there, as on the days where both Subway teams have games on tap, the Mets draw the weaker of the television schedules, ceding primetime to their cross-town brethren in the Bronx and playing first, against the LA Dodgers.

MLB: 2006 Divison Series Playoff Schedule

For those of us who hold down 9 to 5 jobs and have been following our team for the full year, this schedule is an abomination. Barring staying home to watch the game, we will be barred from seeing them in action completely on Tuesday and Wednesday, and even Friday's game, at 1 locally, forces hard-working employees to take the day off. Instead of enjoying friends and family around the TV set, rooting on our team, we will be stuck at the desk in our cubicles, sneaking glances at the Yahoo! or ESPN scoreboard, or impossibly trying to avoid knowing the outcome until we find the games at home on our TiVo, but that won't work.

There's long been call for MLB, ESPN, Fox and the like to look into their East Coast biases, and their sucking up to big money teams like the Yankees, and each time, we seem to be shot down as conspiratorial loonies. This postseason's schedule is sad, frustrating, and ridiculous all in one, and should not be allowed.

Listening to ''Trishika'', by Telepopmusik (Play Count: 1)

During my Junior year at UC Berkeley, I acted as a reporter for The Daily Californian, the school's student-operated free newspaper, and covered crime, among other things. While on most days, this meant rounding up the occasional assault, alcohol overdose or wallet theft, there were times when sirens would sound, and we would go bounding off to find a dorm fire, a massive student protest or more dramatically, a potential homicide.

One fall night in 1997, I heard the sounds of gunfire, literally blocks away from my home apartment in Southside Berkeley, and flipped on the police scanner (on loan from the paper) to learn what was happening. It turned out that an unknown assailant had gunned down an older couple out walking their dog. The scene was nearby, so I grabbed my notepad and pen and ran toward where I had heard the shots. I arrived to find myself  only feet from from the paramedics and the victims, who were laying motionless in the street. I held my ground and remained nearby, even as the police put up the bright yellow caution tape around the scene, with me inside.

Somehow avoiding being kicked out of the yellow tape zone, I interviewed neighbors who had left their homes to investigate, and managed to get quotes that no other papers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune, would get, because I put myself in line to get the information.

Afterwards, having surveyed the scene and spoken with the police and witnesses, I was sure I had enough for a story. Hoping I could put the piece together quickly in time for the next morning's paper, I called our editor in chief, Ryan Tate, and finding the paper had already gone to press, offered to post the piece directly to the Daily Cal's online site, that night. But Ryan responded with a statement I probably won't ever forget, "Louis, nobody writes straight to copy." Everybody had to get edited, no matter how hot a story or how good they thought their writing skills. Though Ryan and I didn't always agree about everything, he was absolutely right.

In the blogosphere, this practice has turned on its head. Last night, when I was reading "Naked Conversations", co-authored by Robert Scoble, formerly of Microsoft, and now doing well at PodTech, this issue was brought to the fore, discussing how with blogs, you don't look for edited pieces that have gone through the PR and Marketing engines, but instead for first-person-led conversations that flow freely. Now, everybody writes straight to copy. While for some, they clearly need a good editor, others have flourished, being able to rapidly publish and get the word out.

The world of citizen-led journalism has changed the media, presumably forever. I don't get a newspaper because by the time it's there, it's old. We don't watch the nightly news because the pieces are often too short to get real information, and we don't really need to see a TV reporter live from the scene where something uneventful happened six hours prior. Our news comes from the Internet, from My Yahoo! and from RSS feeds and from blogs. The keywords I want and the sources I am looking for keep me updated all day long. That's due greatly in part to bloggers who write straight to copy - taking you straight to the story from their perspective.

It's been a long-held tenet of the journalism field that anonymous sources were to be protected by the reporters who worked with them, and that anonymous sources needed to trust their identities would be safe, even under threat of legal action. This high-scale drama has played itself out time and again as ink stained wretches have pledged they would rather go to jail than give up a source. In most cases, it can be said the threat of going behind bars is a scare tactic that has little chance of happening.

In the last year, a few notable cases have highlighted this struggle - from the Valerie Plame scandal, where Robert Novak refused to give up a confidential source, but was not threatened with being in the pokey, but Judith Miller was, to the ever-unfolding story at HP, where reporters' phone records were surreptitiously obtained. Now,  Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle have been jailed for refusing to testify on who leaked grand jury testimony around the Barry Bonds BALCO steroid scandal, which formed the basis for a series of high-profile articles, and later a book.

Regardless of how I feel about Barry Bonds and his sullying of the game of baseball through reliance on pharmaceuticals, it is my belief that reporters serve a critical role and that they should be able to utilize anonymous sources - so long as they work with their editor and can ascertain the data being reported is factual. If reporters either believe that the company they are reporting on (like HP) or the government (see Bush, George) can gain access to their phone records, or that they could later face jail time for working with anonymous sources, and this impacts their willingness to break stories and tell the truth, then the medium is in very serious trouble.

Instead of throwing Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada in prison, they should be applauded for getting the truth out there, and bringing to light one of the biggest sports stories of a generation - one that otherwise might not have had the awareness, and certainly not the detail, that this does. I sincerely hope that cooler heads prevail and recognize that they were serving a higher purpose - one that needs to be respected.

Related Links:

ESPN: Reporters who refused to reveal BALCO leak get prison

ESPN: Outcome for Chronicle reporters means we all lose

Listening to ''Sibeling'', by Depeche Mode (Play Count: 11)

From the e-mail today... despite the fact I'm married. Should I go for it?

Dear Louis ,

ABC Television’s hit reality television show, The Bachelor, is searching for its next star. After viewing your profile on LinkedIn, the casting producer has selected you as a potential candidate.

ABC is using LinkedIn to find its next Bachelor because this time around, they’re looking for an accomplished professional. LinkedIn is about your professional life instead of your personal life, so we don’t know if your marital or relationship status qualifies you for the show. However, your professional profile fits the bill.

If you think you’d make a great “Bachelor,” please let me know by reply, and I will contact you regarding next steps. LinkedIn respects your privacy and will not release your contact information, so you must reply to the email above for us to pass you along as a candidate.

If you know anyone else that would make a great “Bachelor”, feel free to let us know about them – ABC will pay a $5,000 reward for any referral that leads to the next star.

Wishing you continued professional success,

David Sanford
Assistant to the CEO
LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bigsanford

On the morning of September 11th, 2001 the chaos of that day presented a new challenge in a Web-connected world. As major news media sites, like CNN.com and the New York Times became inundated with user traffic, their domains became overloaded, and either didn't respond to requests, or reverted to text-only and headline pages, rather than their full multi-media. In their wake, those searching for any kind of news unavailable from one of the major news networks had to turn to unheralded news delivery systems.

At the office, we turned to the The Drudge Report, who offered any number of links to real-time data. For others, the earliest blogs rose to prominence, and people who usually focused on technology and the Web tried to take on history as it unfolded in front of their eyes. As covered in Wired's "9/11: Birth of the Blog", "When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it."

Among those Web pioneers chronicling the tragedy was Dave Winer of Scripting News. Lucky for us, his pages, unlike other prominent bloggers, have stayed live for the ensuing five years. You can see (in his bottom to top chronology) how what was supposed to be a very ordinary day was shaken off of its axis.

Years later, personally-authored blogs often break the news before the mass media can take hold of it. For some, blogs carry a higher level of veracity and community virtually impossible from an offshoot of Time Warner. For the next world-changing event (though hopefully of a different nature), we can expect how we obtain news and information to be vastly different. As I displayed with my e-mail to my father in a post from last night, there was always a willingness to share information and express personal feelings, but blogging has offered a new medium to reach more people, more quickly, than ever before.

At the end of my high school days, and throughout college, I was sure I was going to end up a reporter. I didn't know just what I thought I'd be covering, and at times my whims floated from covering baseball to becoming a technology reporter. While attending UC Berkeley, I covered a number of beats for the Daily Californian, including crime, the UC Regents and city council, and majored in Mass Communications, as well as Political Science. So what happened?

The Internet happened, and the Internet changed everything.

Alongside my writing efforts at the Daily Cal, I was also the paper's Online Editor, and helped the Web site grow from its earliest stages from 1996 to 1998. The site lives on today, but in a much different state, of course. But working on the site and seeing how Web journalism was rapidly extinguishing the one-time glory of newspapers, I no longer was wowed by the idea of being an ink-stained wretch toiling away for the San Jose Mercury News or MacWorld, as I believed the medium had to make a dramatic change to stay relevant.

After my time at the Daily Cal, I derived two versions of the resume - one for becoming a reporter, and a second, for becoming a Webmaster. In 1998, you can only guess which one gained a lot of interest, even for a student without a degree (yet), and which one didn't. By October of 1998, a month and a half into my senior year at UC Berkeley, I was commuting over the Bay Bridge to Burlingame every day working at an Internet startup, and the dreams of being a reporter were being replaced instead with the hopes of helping  a new company grow. Now, instead of calling companies and people to hear their side of things, I was on the other side - able to make news and not just follow it. Meanwhile, news media on the Internet has grown dramatically, eclipsing the one time leadership of traditional papers.

One gets the feeling that traditional papers are still very leery about the Internet. They are very afraid that their one-time cash cow, classified ads, is going away, replaced by CraigsList and eBay. And by the time their stories are published, the news cycle has already left them in the dust. So you are seeing an increased emphasis on newspapers' online reporters to get the story out early and continue updating it, if simply to keep pace with more nimble outlets. I read the San Francisco Chronicle and Mercury News online, but primarily to keep updated on the A's more than anything else. Especially in the Silicon Valley, technology news doesn't go their way first, and circulations are getting hammered.

An interesting discussion on that subject can be found in The Economist today, in a piece titled "More Media, Less News". As they write, "Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded." Simply put, if they don't find a way to compete with blogs and Digg and news aggregators, they're toast. I'm glad I went the way I did, even if it meant changing the dream, just a little bit.

Listening to ''Nautical Bodies (Original Mix)'', by Paul Oakenfold (Play Count: 8)

Earlier this week, online news service Topix.net unveiled a new feature that enables visitors to search the news for a search term over a 12-month period, and displays the results, as well as a graph showing the intensity and frequency of news coverage over that time.

If the tool continues to develop, it could become incredibly useful for public relations and corporate types who are looking to measure long-term success of branding and media coverage, or for fans of products and companies who would like to align events with anticipated response. In fact, PR teams, if the service is tuned for accuracy, could be measured in graph form, rather than through the old-fashioned clips or more manual reporting.

For the largest companies, like Microsoft or General Electric, the spikes in day to day, week by week, media coverage is less dramatic than that for specific keywords or lesser-known brands. But even for strong brands, like Apple, you can see spikes in activity around Macworld San Francisco in January, and the recently-completed WorldWide Developers' Conference (WWDC). (See the below examples for Apple and Zune.)



The Topix news search covers more than technology companies, of course. You can even see a buildup around senatorial candidate Ned Lamont, with a dramatic spike this week, leading up to and just following his defeat of Joe Leiberman in the Connecticut Democrat party primary. (Also above)

The tool is very interesting, and if you have topics (Topix!) you would like to track, be sure to bookmark the resulting page. But the news search function isn't ideal. While it does differentiate between blogs and more standard press, it doesn't quantify results or designate between a mention and a feature story. Maybe in later iterations, if there is sufficient interest, we can see that develop.

Listening to ''Love Shines Through'', by Marcella Woods (Play Count: 8)

By a significant margin, the story demanding the largest amount of buzz on the Web in the last 24 hours has been BusinessWeek's cover story on the latest generation of Web 2.0 leaders who have developed some of the Web's biggest brands in a short amount of time. This week's cover boy is Digg founder Kevin Rose, smiling giddily, with two thumbs up, and a headline saying he made $60 million in only 18 months. If only that were true. It's a great headline, one that has drawn a lot of attention, but it just isn't true.

BusinessWeek makes a number of critical errors in its jump to a monetary stat. It first assumes that Digg is worth a valuation north of several hundred million dollars. It then assumes that this valuation is liquid, and that Kevin can access his share of the large pie, netting him what they approximate as $60 million. Truth is that Digg is only netting the single-digit millions yearly in revenue, let alone profits, and it remains a very small company, run by a determined young entrepreneur, verging on the edge of becoming an Internet media powerhouse.

Those who remember the first wave of Web worship no doubt remain skeptical over BusinessWeek's adoration of Kevin and others who have made tremendous Web products and not yet made the connection from leading brand to leading profits. And now BusinessWeek has made Kevin, a good guy from all we can tell, the posterboy for the latest wave, for better or for worse.

Digg, scarcely known a year ago, in the shadows of Web giants like Slashdot and CNet, has developed organically to be a real kingmaker for all media. The brightest of old-school newspapers like the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the LA Times have incorporated new tech tools like Digg and Technorati into their Web coverage to assist with linking and the word of mouth that can springboard a story to the next level. But Kevin's not worth $60 million yet. He has a lot of work to do yet to achieve what is a tremendous potential.

All that aside, nearly all the leading publications have taken the Digg story and run with it. Here are a few of the best responses: (Jason Calicanis, GigaOM, Good Morning Silicon Valley, MicroPersuasion, ValleyWag)

Listening to ''A Rush of Blood to the Head'', by Coldplay (Play Count: 7)

Getting the scoop is a big deal for any self-respecting journalist, as in the competitive media landscape, any edge you can get through find out a news nugget or covering a story for your readers and viewers can drive up your sales, ratings, etc. Scoops lead to awards, and recognition, improved pay, and prestige.

On the Internet, the number of blogs out there is conservatively estimated to be in the tens of millions. While some aim to be personal journals or shout-outs to friends and family, others act as media augmentation or substitutes, covering general news, or specific focuses, in sports, technology, politics, etc. But as there are so many people talking and creating noise, some of the elements of offline media have themselves moved to the blogosphere, including the idea of scoops, sometimes good, and sometimes... not so much.

With the simplicity of posting entries to blogs, an idea or a rumor can go from thought to live in mere minutes. Now, instead of doing fact-checking, double sourcing and even proof-reading, blogs are rife with getting news out first, all in a plan to gain readership, get the most comments, or have their own story posted to Digg, Slashdot, or any other one of the popular news aggregators. It's something clearly feeding on itself.

You can even take it down another level. With Athletics Nation being a great test case, you see posters who are calling for the team's beheading after one bad game, a bad play, bad at bat, or a bad pitch. The idea behind being the first to make an outlandish claim, no matter how foolish, is that in the possibility you are right, people can look back at you and bask in your aura that you were right, and the first to do so. You're a friggin' prophet. And if you're wrong, make the same prediction the following day, and you just might get right the next time. By then, you are a hero who lives on the edge - albeit in the face of reality.

But whether you're a disgruntled A's fan, an Apple rumormonger, or a stock aficionado sure that your penny stock is going to make us millions, blogging has given us all new tools to decrease the news cycle - and some are doing so regardless of the consequences. I believe that as with most media, the cream will eventually rise to the top - those sites that dominate in credibility as well as speed will triumph over those sites and those individuals who crave speed over accuracy. You can only try to fool us too many times.

Listening to ''Pole Folder & CP - Apollo Vibe'', by Bedrock (Play Count: 5)

It seems that maybe I should create a new category beyond "Ramblings" focusing on "Media", given all the news shenanigans we've seen of late. As referenced last month in a piece I called "Launching Products In the Age of Instant Analysis", it seems there is a race on the Web and in traditional media to declare products unworthy, even if the reporter hasn't done the due diligence required to make such a judgement call. Yesterday, in an interesting turn of events, we saw this play out on one of my more-frequented sites, TechCrunch.

Reporter Michael Arrington, covering online photo services, in a piece titled "The Flickr Gunners", rated an array of offerings, from BubbleShare to Ookies, Smugmug and Zooomr. (I can't make these names up) Yet, if you look at the story today, his coverage of Smugmug is missing. Why? Because his analysis was clearly wrong, and when called on it by the site's owner, he deleted it - as if it were never there - without leaving the original text up to show where he made mistakes, or even showing a correction. While it's easy to do this on the Web, it's not best practices by any means.

He had written, "All I am going to say about Smugmug is that it isn't very web 2.0, but it is adored by lots of loyal users for having the best (and most customizable) layout for pictures. It also allows full quality archiving of pictures, and is the choice of many photo professionals for that reason. I am urging them to add the obvious web 2.0 features to round this out, starting with RSS feeds for photos and tagging." This review is nowhere on his site. That's because Smugmug actually has had the features he demanded they add, and they've been active for more than a year.

Smugmug's owner - smart enough to respond on the Web, as he should have, pointed out TechCrunch's failings, in a post called "TechCrunch says we're not 'Web 2.0'" Hours later, that part of the story went poof. Gone. In traditional media, the best practice is to issue a retraction or a correction, but note the mistake - and they are lucky TechCrunch isn't in print, for their readers wouldn't have had the chance to respond so quickly, and would have come away with a horrible review from someone who clearly hadn't done a thorough investigation. We're not impressed with the response.

Listening to ''Essential Hard Trance Vol. 3'', by DJ Irish (Play Count: 3)

The New York Post's Page Six feature has always managed to stir the pot, mixing celebrity sightings and gossip with unwanted photos and innuendo. Now, following an official law enforcement investigation, it sounds like at least one of the Page Six reporters was caught threatening one of New York's social butterflies with year-long harassment in the column, unless the "playboy billionaire" was willing to fork over more than $100,000 to keep his name out of the paper. Now finding its way onto the front page of the New York Times and the New York Daily News, both no doubt very pleased with their competitor's trouble, it's said that other notorious socialites have finessed their own coverage - though it's unclear whether payments were expected.

Mainstream journalism has taken a black eye in recent years with multiple plagiarism scandals, ranging from Jayson Blair to the recent resignation of a Republican flunkie the Washington Post had hired to bring on a conservative view to the paper, but to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars just to ensure a lack of bad coverage is eye opening. That a paper like the New York Post is behind it isn't a huge surprise. Long known for sensationalism over hard news, it's papers like these that give the craft a bad name. It should be interesting as the "facts" unfold to see what more we learn from the investigation.

Listening to ''Assorted Hard Trance Vol. 4'', by DJ Irish (Play Count: 4)

One of the more annoying trends I've seen as the mainstream and tech media try to embrace blogging is that everything is being rebranded as blogs, even if the content and frequency isn't changing. To me, main features of a true blog are that it's organized in chronological order (newest on top in almost all cases), is updated regularly, provides readers the ability to comment and have their comments displayed for two-way discourse, and features a time stamp. Yet, all over the place, you can see people say they are blogging, when in fact all they are doing is providing small articles.

In fact, many in the media have been asked to blog from their editors, and those who don't see benefits from a new medium cling to the old, in some cases issuing the minimum of updates to "check that box off" and keep their main attention on their mainstream articles. And as corporations increasingly move toward blogging, there is a very serious tug of war between those who want to spread and share the message and those who want to control the message. While some companies, like Sun, have offered employees open opportunity to blog on anything they wish, others like Apple and even Google (who owns Blogger - funny how that works) are very strict about their blogging policy. Do it at Apple and you are incinerated, while at Google, stories of new hires blogging have led to stories of new hires being fired. Only approved articles in a semi-regular fashion are posted to Google's blog sites, and even those posts do not allow comments. Cute. Isn't it odd that the owner of Blogger doesn't allow comments? What are they afraid of? Negativity? Too many comments? Look at Slashdot - somehow they can handle it.

Listening to ''Outside the Club, Z¸rich (Prelude)'', by D:Fuse (Play Count: 4)

On March 21st, I posted a piece discussing how technology companies need to adjust their pitches in a world of near-instant analysis, when it seems both the blogosphere and the mainstream media are in a race to announce their take on an announcement even before the ink is dry or before the product has reached its intended audience. Interestingly, Business 2.0 reporter Om Malik and I had a discussion about this on Sunday, in regards to a piece called "Trigger Happy", where he acknowledged that often the race to be first means that more research should be required.

Om's piece in turn led us to a parallel post from Robert Scobleizer, by far the most popular Microsoftee blogger, who argued that journalists who were not credible were incredibly irritating, and suggested that in retaliation for a publication's continually getting the facts wrong, Web users should not link to the site, or even mention it, and that in a vacuum, it would die. This piece, of course, quite controversial, came at a time when big companies including Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) were both being raked over the coals for exaggerations and untruths widely disseminated - including one that Vista would require a 60% code rewrite, and that Steve Jobs was jettisoning nearly one half of his Apple stock holdings.

In fact, more than a week after the stock transaction took place, only now are the wire services catching up to this would-be controversy. Though they are all now getting the story right, saying Jobs sold his shares for tax purposes, in the fast-moving world of tech media, the time to have made your mark has already come and gone. Those who followed the stock closely had already reviewed the news, analyzed it and moved on, and now we have to sit and watch as the Walmart (WMT) of news sources catches up. If you're going to lead the pack in tech news, be sure to get the facts right, and don't be afraid to let some stories go by. If you're a week late, move on.

In politics, the president-elect has historically been given their first hundred days to set policy without extreme analysis from the press, in what's also referred to as a honeymoon period, where they have the opportunity to name their staff, introduce planned legislation and define the goals of their time in office. In the market, product announcements have followed a shorter cycle, where first impressions and media reviews are eagerly awaited - to see if the product experience approaches the levels promised by the company, or if its feature set is found lacking. But now, in an age where professional media and amateur commentators alike are seeing an increasing demand for instant analysis and feedback, those introducing new products to the market may have their wares filleted before a single customer has gotten their hands on a working device - their product launches dissected for praise or scorn, for the presentation itself, even if those writing and talking haven't given the news a chance to sink in.

Take a look at some of the most recent and most widely discussed product announcements for how this instant news cycle has taken hold.

Yesterday, Google introduced its Google Finance feature in direct competition to Yahoo! Finance, and the entire blogosphere was aflutter with the news. But rather than pass the links along with objectivity, there was a great rush to judgment. Business 2.0 reporter Om Malik, on his site, GigaOM, wrote in a big headline, "Google Finance Disappoints". How long did he use it? A week? A few days, before his dramatic conclusion? No. He writes, "After playing around with it for about 15 minutes, it is obvious that it will be a long time, and I mean long time in Internet years that is, before Google Finance really catches up to Yahoo Finance, which in fact is the gold standard." That's right. 15 minutes. After 15 minutes of intense evaluation, he was ready to declare it a failure, and his rush to judgment was parlayed into an appearance on CNBC today. But his strenuous evaluation didn't stop other sites from expressing quite the opposite response. TechCrunch wrote, "This is a great looking product overall. And they’ve taken things at least a step further than Yahoo Finance in its current form."

People are entitled to their opinion for sure. I've expressed mine occasionally here on this very site. But can instant analysis be as foolproof as say, Consumer Reports?

One amusing result is that instant commentary leads to retractions. Just look how Henry Blodget first starts his review as "Google Finance: Yawn" and ends with "Wow". Quite the 180, and one that comes with actual effort to investigate.

At the end of February, you may recall Apple held a special media event to announce the new iPod HiFi, the Intel Mac Mini and some other smaller announcements. Before a single consumer had access to the items, again, the instant analysis crowd issued a decree of disappointment. CNET's Blogma site summed up the mood of some would-be critics with the headline "Bloggers underwhelmed by Apple announcements". The site's story says "While Jobs had promised some "fun" new products, bloggers, many of whom gave up-to-the-minute accounts of his keynote, were largely underwhelmed by what they heard".

Up to the minute accounts and instant disappointment before a single unit had hit the Apple store. Maybe Apple should just avoid shipping the systems altogether now that they know it was a failure, right?

And earlier this month, as mentioned previously on this site, Microsoft unveiled its Origami ultramobile PC platform at the Intel Developers' Conference, and feedback across the Web was negative. You can see the headlines... "Microsoft's Origami UMPC: What Were They Thinking?", and "Will 2006 be the Year of High-Profile Technology Busts?" It's as if the instant Web news cycle is so excited to be the first to declare the disaster that nobody has taken into consideration the fact the devices haven't even gotten the opportunity to fail in the market.

The technology market is not alone in this instant analysis. It's seen everywhere, from sports to politics to American Idol. But those tasked with creating innovation and selling it to the masses need to learn how to capture that energy available and harness it to their own benefit, before they too are swallowed up in a wave of discontent.

From the age of 10 or so, I read the local paper every day - whether that was the Appeal-Democrat, which served the Marysville/Yuba City metropolis in Northern California, the Chico Enterprise Record in Chico, or the San Francisco Chronicle when I started attending UC Berkeley in college. For a long time, I knew that I wanted to make a career out of news reporting for newspapers. I held an internship at the 35,000 circulation Chico Enterprise Record, and wrote as a staff reporter for the 23,000 circulation Daily Californian in Berkeley, covering the crime beat, and dabbling in city council news or the UC regents.

Even in college, one of my two majors was Mass Communications, and I entertained thoughts of an internship at places like the Sacramento Bee, when offered it by a visiting speaker to one of my upper division journalism courses.

But by the time I was a junior, the Web had struck full-force, and as the Online Editor for the Daily Cal, I was keenly aware that the Web was the future, and the newspapers, as we knew them, represented the past. With access to the Web, I could gain sports scores and stock quotes instantly that were seriously outdated by the time they reached the next day's paper. I could even read editorial positions on papers across the country or the world, well beyond the local smokeshop or newsstand. And when it was clear that there was much more opportunity to focus on my Web efforts than as a journalist, I followed that route into Silicon Valley.

Which leads us to today's topic. Newspaper circulations are falling across the country, and in those areas where Web access is most rampant, the decline was most steep. According to a report in November of 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle's circulation fell more than 16% in a six-month period. Now, with major transitions at Knight Ridder's newspapers, the Silicon Valley's last great paper, the San Jose Mercury News, is up for sale to the highest bidder, and people are concerned that its high journalistic ideals may fall by the wayside. However, the Merc, as it's known, has long been a Web pioneer, and I would assume its tech-rich reader base can put up with the idea of them skinnying down a few reporters and possibly going Web-only. With access becoming ubiquitous, and news on the Web being more timely, maybe it's a bunch of noise about nothing.

We stopped receiving the Chronicle by sophomore year of college, and have never resigned up for the Mercury News, San Mateo Times or a host of other available papers. Their time, like the telegraph before it, is over and done. It's time to grow and move on.

In today's rapid-fire world of scoops and exclusives, it's always a race to get ahead of the next guy - so much so that the historical efforts to fact-check and edit simple grammar or story sources just need to go by the wayside, in exchange for being the first to announce something - anything - whether it's true or not.

While we can routinely see the news and media skewered on Comedy Central, through The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, or analyzed for fairness by Media Matters for America, and discussed at Editor and Publisher, one of the more amusing sites on this beat is "Regret the Error", which focuses on the niche market of newspaper corrections and retractions.

According to Regret the Error, one site published a story that actor/comedian Will Ferrell had plunged to his death in a paragliding accident after a "freak wind gush". This set off rumors throughout the Web that it was true, despite the release being chock full of errors and misspellings. Turns out the release was initiated from a free online press release submission service - one likely that will now look a lot deeper at those that come across its desk in the future.

Slashdot is the premier site for geek-related news, insight and updates. After all, they bill themselves as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". Slashdot, one of the first and strongest community-focused Weblogs out there, has amassed significant pull and traffic - delivering what's know as the "Slashdot Effect", where a single story's posting can push so much traffic to the original URL that the site's server will slow down