As the host of the largest blogger parties hosted at CES for the past two years, and owner of a first edition of If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks I feel compelled to weigh in on the Gizmodo controversy.
For those few of you who haven’t heard, Gizmodo wandered the CES show floor last week using a TV-Be-Gone to turn off the monitors of various exhibitors while they attempted to demo their products. Check out the video here, it’s truly an innovative prank — and would likely have been hilarious to all involved — in a few years. Instead, Gizmodo decided to prematurely open that bottle of fine wine before the cork had settled, and now we’re all paying the price.
The problem is thanks to the insatiable desire to linkbait, and the all-too-common inability for bloggers to keep anything them to themselves — I call it diaharrea of the keyboard — they of course outed themselves immediately. The result (as anyone with more than six synapses connected could tell you) is that the expo organizers are fuming, and so are many of the related exhibitors. The blogger in question is banned for life from the show, and sanctions are being considered against Gawker media which publishes Gizmodo.
In response to their critics, Gizmodo got on their editorial purity high-horse, while citing the great tradition of Steve Wozniak and his efforts with the Zaltair initiative. A key difference? Woz knew how to execute on a truly great prank. He didn’t go running around the day after claiming credit. In fact, he made a good prank great by deflecting any suspicion to a third party. As Woz said “You always get two pranks for one if you frame someone else.” The result is that immediate gratuitous revelation has turned a potential winning prank into a painful “incident.”
So, thanks to Gawker’s amateurish execution and immediate blabbing, bloggers of all stripes will likely now again face being painted as “irresponsible.”
