| I wrote all of this content – 25 to 30 posts a day for two years, 9,000 words a day on the low end – first for Gizmodo. When I began we saw about 100,000 page views a month – about as many as a popular online store today. Near the end we dwarfed much of our competition, bringing in 5 million pageviews or more. It was great. Then I helmed another site, CrunchGear, and ran it in the same way. We were fast and loose, endlessly flip, and we just wanted to have fun. The motto “First Thought Best Thought” held true for us but not in any poetic sense. We wanted to get stuff up as quickly as possible. We created massive collections of posts on one topic, eventually creating multi-thousand word dossiers on various companies that could be read one post at a time. We had fans around the world who would send in funny videos, photos, and news tips. Our commenters would complain that we were biased or ignorant or malicious. We didn’t care. We just needed to get posts out the door Network Security. The writing I did was coyly called “service journalism” and sometimes I was able to surface niblets of news that actually changed someone’s mind or helped a small business. Once I wrote about a little piece of plastic that connected a WD-40 oil can to its little red straw. The plastic piece cost $5 or so and I wrote that it was really cool. A few months later the creator of the widget who owned a small plastic factory in Pennsylvania, called me to thank me for saving his business. We had real power but it manifested itself rarely. Luckily, we still do. There were also opinion pieces thrown in here and there on slow days but the readers usually ignored them. Alternatively, we would write unpopular pieces of opinion detailing our preference for one phone over another and unleash a firestorm of reactions with comment counts numbering in the hundreds. We were like maintenance men of a massive ant farm regularly dropping sugar pellets into the mix to keep the ants happy and then introducing a wasp or two to keep things interesting. When I started writing for blogs I treated the posts I wrote like a public chat I was holding with the audience. In one post I mentioned I needed to get new tires for my car so I needed to write about this Nokia phone with great haste. In others we simply repeated one word, “iPhone,” over and over. The intellectual would say I was experimenting with the form but, in reality, I was just messing around. Blogging was born of the forum cultures that sprung up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Forums focused on one topic – video games, watches, cars – and featured the regular chatter that most of us know (“Hey, anyone try RainX on their tinted windows?”) to exclusive content posted by rich or well-connected insiders. Many blogs started as forums and morphed into news organizations. One blog, called Bengal Boy, was run by a rich man in Hawaii (we think). He would hire models to hold the latest Motorola phones next to their (clothed) genitalia and to display them on their tanned bellies and his forum posts were legendary. Slowly he moved his content, such as it was, to a separate site that became a news source for all the other bloggers. While his methods were ridiculous we all felt his exclusive access to some pretty choice electronics was great freemax starre v3. His site is gone now, a strange fever dream memory of the heyday of early blogging. I wrote quickly and poorly. I raged against all I learned in journalism school – I have a Master’s in Business and Economic Reporting from the august but still scruffy NYU journalism department – and what I was produced was like no reporting anyone had seen. I could write a post in a few minutes, much to the delight of my New York Times editor. He could assign me two freelance pieces after lunch and get them back before he finished his post-postprandial coffee. But I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t concentrate. My long form writing style was shot. I tried to write books and they broke as I wrote them, cleaving into disconnected pieces as I typed. It was a handicap, this ability to write 200 words on anything in the world, and I felt a little empty. At the same time the demand for this sort of content was growing. People wanted to read about the latest stuff from a team of folks who knew a lot about it. We were confidants, pranksters, helpers, and hunters. One blog was literally called CoolHunting and that’s all it did – hunt for cool things. Anyone with an eye on Facebook will now realize that nearly everyone is now hunting for cool things. Back in 2004, however, it was novel tourism publication. Early on, people associated our writing with gonzo journalism. I didn’t. Hunter S. Thompson was writing in a post-television style, a whirlwind of images and disconnected conversation that was held together by the spectacle of his language and the fireworks of his prose. Thompson brought the rushed confidence and bacchanal of a movie star to the page. I fulfilled the desires of an inelegant but constantly media-hungry, Internet-based workforce by writing like one of their chat room buddies. We were providing a constant source of information unmatched in the media industry. Everything, from newspapers to television, to magazines, required processing time. A live shoot from a traffic emergency required a dozen or so engineers at the station to manage the feed and send it to your television screen where million-dollar anchors bantered about the weather. Newspapers had meetings where they decided the next day’s news and the magazine industry had long lunches where they planned next spring in the summer.
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