Puff the Magic Tech Page on Technorati

55 Million Blogs, and Now a Service to Track Them (NY Times): Another gee-whiz puff piece on this amazing “new” product called Technorati — where a quick search on the tag “technorati” immediately turns up another blogger who apparenty agrees with me that this servile, shallow article is kind of a surprise from a paper that has some decent tech coverage at times.

Have you noticed that serious tech reporting is starting to disappear from the major metro dailies, in favor of this type of Gizmodo-style “here’s the latest gizmo” catalogue copy, in which the proprietors of the thing itself regurgitate their own PR and the reporter just types it up?

Fox, to take another example, outsources their tech coverage to eWeek. Has eWeek’s coverage changed as a result? Can a good publication serve two masters?
Is there even a single user interview in there? Even a perfunctory gizmo story needs a token user or two to give some quote.

That, in fact, is what makes something like Gizmodo — I love to lambast Nick Denton, you may have observed, but I have never said he’s dishonest or that I don’t respect his business savvy — actually much more useful in cases like this, where the matter at hand is buying something or not — provided that flacks don’t go on there posing as “citizen journalist” users to plug their own stuff.

Now many American brands, and some brands in other countries, are starting to include blogs in their marketing plans, and are catering to them at a much earlier stage. By the time of its official introduction, a product may already have been in the hands of bloggers for several months. Feedback from their online discussions with other devotees can help inform a marketer’s subsequent advertising and media strategy.“A year ago, brands were saying, ‘Oh no, not the blogosphere,’ ” said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-tracking service that last week, in partnership with Edelman, provided results of a global survey of blog use. “Now they’re saying, ‘Great, this is an opportunity.’ ”

Technorati has a fascinating history, particularly when it comes to VC funding and competitive stragegy — and deeply misleading PR.

If you are going to write a profile about it, how about digging through the morgue a bit — or the blogosphere, even — instead of just rewriting the company brochure?

Yeesh. I thought summer intern season was over.

Giving Edelman free rein over a public blogging utility is like outsourcing maintenance at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant to the North Koreans.

And now Edelman knows what I think of them — or of their boss, at least.

I have actually worked with some very fine people from the sprawling multinational in the past.