I never thought a day would come when I would need to write a third part to this impromptu series, but arrive it did. I was reading Living Digital today (September 2008 issue), and came across this piece on things to do (read: waste time) online.
Again, it gave a link to wikipedia.com
My first reaction was “Ah, now I can do a follow-up saying that even guys can get it wrong”. Really. That WAS my first thought – to show that anyone can get things wrong. I flipped over to see who’d written the article and to my surprise (?)
…it was somebody called Richa Sharma
Obviously some chick. Now when topics like these come up, people always jump up and start preaching about political correctness. ‘Political correctness’, IMO, is pure bullcrap. It also brings up the question of stereotypes – and something I said about that earlier – stereotypes exist for a reason. Bongs have funny accents when speaking English. All Tamilians like Rajni. Girls don’t follow tech that much. Screw political correctness. This is real life. In real life, it just happens.
Coming back to this journo in Living Digital, it wasn’t a one-off error either. At another point in the article, she’s talking about online avatar sites. And she links to some sites specifically stating that you can create avatars at these places. And which is the first URL?
secondlife.reuters.com
That’s Reuters’ friggin news page on happenings in Second Life, not the link to original site which should’ve been given (see the context of the article). That simply shows shoddy research. I’m not a bigot, but incidents like these make subscribers feel chicks would be better of staying in Living Digital‘s review pages as eye-candy than writing stories.
Update: Check out this month’s PC Quest. It’s a publication from the same media house as Living Digital (Cybermedia). PC Quest conducts an annual survey of brand power of different IT brands / categories – something which is highly respected in the industry (apparently). They’ve a category for ‘Best Blogging Service’. The winner is Blogger.com, and the runner-up is Blogspot.com. Get a clue – they’re the same friggin’ service! Not a typo, because they’ve gone into a whole analysis of ‘brand persuasion’ and ‘brand pull’ between the two even when they’re the same bloody service. Makes you wonder about how much they even KNOW about what they’re writing. You could talk of TypePad.com (the second runner-up) and Vox.com (another service from TypePad’s parent company SixApart) as two different services and compare them; but not the above two. Which shows that PC Quest’s India’s Favourite IT Brands survey is TRASH.
Mentioning the fact that they always referred to brands as loosing their market share (instead of losing their market share) – and the fact that they called Wikipedia.com a search engine – are just extra nails in their coffin.