In one of the best posts I’ve read at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington writes about Silicon Valley and its descent into greed-ridden PR hell. The Web 2.0 bubble, so positive and cute in its humble beginnings, is now turning into a money machine, and money machines are never pretty.
However, there’s this one thing about Silicon Valley that may be hard to understand when you’re an insider.
The thing is, nobody cares about Silicon Valley. Sure, the people who work there or trying to push some project there are probably deeply connected to it. But, those people comprise a very small percentage of the overall Internet population; or even the overall population of users of various Web 2.0 services.
What the majority of people cares about - and what I’ve always focused on here at FranticIndustries - is how to use Web 2.0 to do something useful. To improve their work, and their life. To get something for free. To find out about a cool new tool.
Who’s buying who; whose PR agent is pestering who, and who has more connections in the Valley - those things are irrelevant to the average reader, or even a reader with deep interest in IT technology.
That doesn’t mean that the Web 2.0 bubble is problem-free. The biggest problem is too much stuff. It’s hard to follow it all; it’s hard to choose what’s good and what sucks; it’s hard to determine how much of that stuff you really need. That’s why I’ve been really selective in choosing what I write about. If I don’t see real use for it, I don’t write about it: it doesn’t matter how much VC dollars have been invested in it.
It all depends on what you really want to write about. If you want to cover Valley gossip; great. There’s an audience for that. But if you want to cover cool new web products and services, you can also do it from a distance.
stan,
your post is a mish-mash of opinionated generalizations with no factual grounding whatsoever. all it offers is a shallow and uninsightful reaction to michael arrington’s post. i’m not trying to be an asshole, i just feel like you rolled out of bed, read arrington’s post, then spewed out a contrarian stream of consciousness quickly so you could jump in the shower quickly. and i just wasted 5 minutes reading it.
@matthew: you’re pretty much spot on about me reading Mike’s post, and then reacting with a stream of consciousness. It usually works quite well, in my opinion. Perhaps this time it didn’t. This I cannot dispute.
There is, however, one point in your complaint that I don’t really see in my post.
I’m not being contrarian to Mike’s post. What he wrote about SV is probably true. But, my post probably can be hard to understand if you look at it only in the light of that one post on TC, so let me say what was left between the lines in the actual post.
And that is: TC is lately focusing too much on valley gossip, VC money, being first (which often doesn’t make sense, since the service is not live yet and then hordes of visitors go nowhere). TC should, instead, stick to writing about cool new web startups.
I found this coherent enough and I agree.
@Marshall: thanks, but trying to be my own critic, I think I can understand what Matthew is talking about. I should have been clearer.