Slashdot Mirror
Toys For The Rich To Cultivate Product Popularity
ChipGuy writes "Newsweek is reporting on a new elitist club called the Silicon Valley 100, an exclusive group of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Marc Andressen, Esther Dyson, Chris Shipley, and Ross Mayfield. The Schwag Set will get a lot of free stuff which they will either recommend or not, to unsuspecting masses. Dan Gillmor thinks 'it is oddly creepy', and urges people on this list to 'bow out of this exercise entirely.' Om Malik says it ironic that 'the first product being offered is a shitter! What Crap!'"
Sorry, slashdot community :(
This is why the Segway is so popular....
Just what the rich need... more stuff for free. How about giving the products to random Joes on the street with the requirement of getting a review from them on it?
I wonder if one of the invitees responded with this Groucho quote:
I refuse to join any club which would have me as a member.
but do most of them contain grammer this horrific?
Not as bad as the average slashdot post.
As any PBS junkie knows, there is a market for everyday people willing to hawk a merchant's wares. What is disturbing is that it appears such people are in no short supply.
Word of mouth is the best form of advertising. What bothers me is that characters that push agendas under the guise of neutrality are becoming more prevalent all the time.
Here's hoping that one of the community's most revered icons never sells out.
wake up dudes, the world works in a hierarchical fashion not because it can but because in fact this works well. Look at how scientific research works. Sure there might be lots of little folks that could be great seniour researchers if only they could get funded. But it costs too much to identify these folks. Its better in general to go with a trusted senoir researcher than require omniscience on the part of funding agencies.
that was the long recognized flaw of the command economy in russia. it could not effectively gather the information that a market economy could
thus elitism as a filter to diseminate useful information about a limited availability product in an optimal fashion is not a bad idea.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ya know, I took one look at that petite little "wand", *sigh*. I was wondering, do they have an industrial version designed to handle a jalepeno anchovy pizza, chilli, hot-wings, and beer evening programming session?
Cause, um, yeah, I'm sticking with the scott tissue for now, it may be a bit unrefined, but it, um, gets it all.
Unethical?
I really don't think so, unless there are some extenuating circumstances that I'm not aware of.
It's also a marketing technique that has been used for years.
For instance, in the early 70's, Chevy and Ford used to provide some of the high-profile street racers in certain cities with tricked out "super cars" that would blow anything else off the road, all in order to get people to want to buy those products.
I don't see how this is "unethical" in the least.
Sure, I'm jealous as hell that I'm not one of the "special" people being targeted to receive anything, but I think you're taking things a little bit to an extreme.
$0.02 (CDN)
There is not a single damn thing that is new about this, or that makes it News For Nerds unless you count the fact that these guys are from Silicon Valley.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I certainly was planning to be open about how I got products if I talked about them. I suspect most of the other folks are too. I jotted a brief note in my blog about it like some of the others.
It's really not some sort of elitist club, not even a club, nor much that new.
I do agree that by giving stuff to folks who write or are influentical, they do increase the chances that they will get written about. I presume that's their goal. There are certainly no requirements that we speak fondly of the products, but the historical tradition is people are far more likely to evangelize a new product they've seen than they are to curse something new nobody knows about, so on the balance it's been a win for vendors to do giveaways like this.
I know in the old days of magazines it was worse. Most software reviews were good for the same reason. If an obscure product came along and was bad, they just didn't write about it. If it was good, they might write. If it was famous or the company pulled enough strings (ie. bought lots of advertising) that got them a review, even at places with decent editorial firewalls, though it didn't assure a good one. If you saw a scathing review, it usually meant the company was so famous they had to review the product, or the company had pushed super hard to get one, good or no.
Truth is though, I, nor most of the people on the list aren't bought so easily. If you hear about something from somebody, you should judge how much you trust them in general, not whether they got the thing free.
If you think about it, what logic in there is giving a false good review for a bribe, if the bribe is a free version of the product you don't like very much?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation