Especially the comments. Though donning your skeptic’s hat ain’t a bad idea when reading the posts, either. For example, is a startup written about on TechCrunch any better, or worthy of your time, than one that isn’t? 
They all start from ground zero; some just have money and influence, or a friend on the staff. I found it interesting when a key TechCrunch writer recently quit, saying he didn’t think he could write about "one more f**king startup." Thank you, because I don’t know how many more I can read about, either. (And the quantity is even worse on Mashable.) But I digress…
This post was mainly inspired by the drivel that runs through a lot of the comments. It’s reader beware, folks, as many of you know. What really irks me are negative comments from people who make up an identity to anonymously take a shot a one of their competitors. There must be a way for a site with open comments to make people verify who they really are (and out them, if necessary), or to at least police such comments better. Sometimes, readers do — but it’s not their job, now is it?
I saw such a comment on this recent TechCrunch post: Amazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It — #8, to be specific (which I won’t give more play by repeating here). First of all, the post itself was overly dramatic to begin with, leading many to comment (most of them constructively) that this really wasn’t as big a deal as the writer was making it out to be. And more than one implied "you get what you pay for." In other words, this occurrence is one reason why bootstrapping a startup may not always the best when you’re a web company — meaning, risking your customers’ experience with only a "three nines" service. But the cheap shot #8 guy takes, out of the blue, is a direct attack on an alternative to Amazon’s service, which is a much more robust offering. The comment offered nothing to the discussion — just a cheap shot. In fact, when at least one other commenter asked later for more information from the guy, he was nowhere to be found.
Now, maybe I wouldn’t take such issue to this if the competitor he was talking about wasn’t one that I know — Nirvanix, which just so happened to be one of my top picks of the presenting companies at the recent DEMO ’08 conference. But I decided to ask Nirvanix’ CEO, Patrick Harr, whom I had met at DEMO, what this guy was talking about. Here’s what he said, in his very responsive email back to me:
"There is no customer registrant under that name, nor beta customer with that name that has ever tested our SDN service. In fact, [the situation is] quite
the opposite. Our service is very stable. We consistently maintain 100%
uptime at 2.5 to 3X greater performance than Amazon. Just as important,
our architecture of distributed geo nodes with 99.999% data availability would
not have allowed this type of outage.
Net, net — the comment must have been from a competitor."
Or a disgruntled somebody-or-other. Harr also told me that DEMO went very well for Nirvanix, and that the firm "just won a big Fortune 10 company, and another Fortune 100 is almost signed." In fairness, the firm seems to be targeting large enterprises much more than it is startups — so one would expect its uptime would have to be better than Amazon’s.
[Too bad Harr couldn’t have been as responsive as he was to me in commenting directly on TechCrunch. That is, responding quickly to comment #8 in particular. The lesson for companies, especially if you’re a startup seeking to make inroads against big-name competition, is simple and clear: you’d better have somebody monitoring key blogs on a daily, ongoing basis!]
If you’d like a second take on Amazon Web Services’ downtime problems, here’s an article from the AP via Business Week: Amazon’s Cloud Storage Hiccups.
Another interesting thing about TechCrunch commenters is how often they go after the writers themselves — accusing them of a certain stupidlty limited view of the world. These writers get accused regularly of all sorts of improprieties, as they sit and type away there from their cloistered little Silicon Valley digs. Case in point: commenter #14 here. "Bad journalism," the man says. Does what they do even fit into the category of journalism? Well, there are those who would argue that one pretty hard. Yet, alas, that’s a topic for another post… But the fact remains: be skeptical when reading traditional media, and even moreso with blogs — and especially with open comments on either.
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