Corporate spin may get in the way, but the message is always there. If only we could work out what it is.
It astounds me how many of my colleagues in the IT media have jobs, considering their continual insistence on completely missing the point.
It's not all that surprising that a lot of readers of the IT media don't trust IT journalists. But being fashionably cynical--assuming everything you read is worthless because it's biased towards or sponsored by a particular product or ideology--is every bit as stupid as glibly accepting everything.
Unfortunately, IT journalists can sometimes go to either extreme when they're trying to interpret corporate spin.
There are hidden messages behind the pronouncements, but deciphering them can require a combination of in-depth knowledge, critical thinking, and thorough research.
I recently attended a media launch of Sun Microsystems and SBS' MHP (multimedia home platform) interactive TV system, due to be released late this year. The system will allow users with a digital TV set-top box to pull up additional information such as factoids about people or places in the news, and to send in feedback.
What really impressed me was that Sun engineered SBS' content management database so that the content can easily and quickly be republished to different media--such as a Web site, interactive TV system, or mobile device--by engineering a new conduit to suit each format. This is the whole point of middleware, after all.
However, some of the journalists attending the event missed this entirely, because they started asking questions along the lines of "What happens if MHP doesn't become the standard iTV platform?" The answer to which, obviously, is that SBS engineers a new conduit for that platform, which might take a day or two.
Sun and SBS foolishly decided they would demo the system, running off a live server at the SBS studios that was already busy running SBS' Web site. It didn't work. Fearing a publicity disaster, the PR people quickly huddled all the journalists together and explained that due to very high levels of traffic on Sun's Web site, roughly as much traffic as it handled on September 11, the server was overloaded and that's why the demo failed.
As much as I thought this was unnecessary--who hasn't been to a live demo that went awry?--some journos spent most of their column inches reporting the problem, all of them mentioned the September 11 comparison, but hardly anyone discussed the technology.
One exception was the journalist who suggested based on the failed demo that the technology was far from ready. (Aside from the obvious problem of generalising about a technology from one demonstration of one implementation, MHP has been in use in the UK for over a year.)
Going to the other extreme, in last month's column I mentioned Trillian, the instant messaging client that works with all the popular IM platforms. Over the last few weeks, AOL took steps to block Trillian users from accessing its network, announcing that Trillian was "hacking" its systems and presented a security threat.
A well-known columnist from ZDNet in the US took up this thread, saying that those Trillian users who objected were "crybabies", also calling them "hackers and thieves" and "parasites". He swallowed whole AOL's claim that Trillian "blocks" AOL's ads.
Given the current squeeze in online advertising, AOL can't be making much from delivering ads to IM clients, but it's the major soucre of revenue. Trillian doesn't block these ads, it just doesn't display them, which means users don't see the ads or click on them, which means AOL doesn't get paid.
AOL either has the choice of accepting that a small proportion of users won't be viewing those ads--as all the other IM vendors have done--or it can block those users, which can only impact negatively on AOL's numbers in the long run.
It's pretty obvious AOL is really concerned about its ad revenue, and the hacking claims are just a smokescreen for yet another money-grubbing exercise.
In the IT world, hacking is about the most immoral thing you could accuse someone of. It's disappointing to see a well-known and experienced journalist use his position as a platform to perpetuate blatant corporate propaganda, using such loaded and emotive language, with only a nod to criticising or even analysing the company's claims.
Whether you're a journalist or a media consumer, it's useful to have a good BS detector. But it's easy to slip into believing that nothing you read has any value--and that's utter BS.
