I’m getting really tired of news outlets interpreting moves as significant when they’re not. I’m tired of sensationalist journalism when really, if people stopped being either lazy or stupid, they’d find simple explanations.
Two cases of this recently have set me off.
First a lot of noise around Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Bing’s nice. It’s a great progression for MSN in search. It’s a good search engine. It’s also got Microsoft behind it. So distribution through MSN’s portal services and email services and other channels means it’s going to be big, i.e. have a large footprint off the bat. So when people start talking about Bing being bigger than sites like Digg or twitter, or it being the 13th biggest site on the internet, I want to shout “Well DUHHH!”. It’s a rebranding of a popular service, ofcourse it’s going to be big.
The second is a couple of stories around YouTube stopping support for IE6. Journalists are claiming that this is Google stepping up the browser wars. I’m sorry it’s a browser that has since moved on, twice. MSFT has launched IE8 recently. YouTube links to Firefox, Chrome and… guess what… IE8 from the YouTube homepage in IE6, it’s not a browser war battle, it’s stopping support for an old, some would say bad, browser. Now if Google hadn’t linked to a newer (better) version of IE and just to Chrome, Firefox and say Safari, I can understand, but they didn’t. They gave people the choice to download an “E” thingy that they may be used to.
I’ve purposely not linked to the stories above because they’re crap, but for the record some of the offending parties include the big boys (like the FT) and the blogs (like Mashable).
The point is that people shouldn’t be subjected to bad interpretations of the news. With things like Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc, people can share good stories and call bull shit on the not so good stories easier than ever before, so news outlets should focus on reporting and simple, clear and genuine interpretation, not on sensationalism.
