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Boredom

I generally reserve my polemics for the weekends, but as I was scouting the airwaves for a story worth thinking about for more than a half-dozen seconds, I realized that I couldn’t find one. There are only so many posts I can write about how Facebook may or may not change the way we view the “social graph.” I can’t bring myself to read, let alone think about how great/terrible Leopard is. Google acquisitions and executives bailing ship at Microsoft have finally become trite.

What is interesting in tech this evening? Nothing, zilch, nada. The pages of Techmeme run stagnant with the same junk media that raises the hairs on the back of our collective necks for 12 hours then becomes old hat. Anyone remember when Google bought Jaiku?


Does Anyone Actually Care?

As the year draws to a close, the fires of innovation have dulled to embers and you have to wonder why. Does it have something to do with the cold? Or maybe it’s just a symptom of one jaded news man seeing the industry for what it has always been — a meandering collection of rehashed, reprocessed and repurposed stories about the same ten companies adding new features to products that only we care about.

So what is a blogger to do?

We should all take a good long look at what we spend our days reporting, for one. Really, when we hit that publish button, how many of us wonder whether our time might have been better spent penning the great (insert your country of choice) novel, or maybe saving a kitten from a tree?

Maybe all the industry really needs is for the year to end and some fresh blood to be sent pumping through its veins, but maybe the general malaise that has fallen over our little corner of globe is a sign that the times are getting ready to change again. For once, I am not going to venture to guess what that change will be but Ted over at Uncov is almost certainly more right than he is wrong. When calling something cliche becomes cliche, you know you are running into a problem.


Web 2.0 Roundup

So here is a call to action to get you through the rest of your day. Take a step back from your RSS feed reader and look for a story about something you actually find interesting. It might not get you on Techmeme, but I bet my ergonomic keyboard that you’ll enjoy it more.

Some of the best tech news I’ve found has been from writers so far outside of the Valley-haze that they don’t know that they should be reporting about the newest Web 2.0 wonder widget. After you find something that actually gets you to think, send me a link. I would love to hear the stories that are really getting you excited.

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