A Note on IESB
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I can take flat out lying better than I can hypocrisy, and I'm going against my own call for civility for a moment to call out IESB. There was a spat about two weeks ago, a very public back-and-forth dialog between IESB and Cinematical (AOL/Time Warner/Weblogs Inc. owned) over comments made by IESB's owner at Comic-Con. I don't know what the genesis of this was, only that at one point during a panel made up bloggers, IESB's guy got really upset over being put in the same boat as other media bloggers.
"It's not only established media ... we're not bloggers, for God's sakes" he said, "I'm not a fucking blogger. You know, we might have a blog, but we don't blog. [..] And I hate when the established 'quote unquote' media treats us as bloggers."
I wrote that I thought both IESB and Cinematical did a disservice to their readers by making their fight so public and petty, and I still believe that's true. I also believed that IESB was every bit a blog as was Cinematical, because they don't do anything different than anyone else. My belief is that with the emergence of professional blogging and the traditional media's attention paid toward online-only writing, the two at the top end have become essentially the same thing.
Then and there, I'd tend to just let it go. But a statement like the one made by IESB's Sanchez tends not to go away, but stick around in the back of your mind, waiting for the inevitable moment when it will become relevant again. Today is that day, whilst scanning headlines looking for news to post and comment on, I've seen the same story on about eight different sites all in the span of 24 hours (that's typical) and wouldn't you know it, IESB ran with it just like all the other crappy, useless, dirty and unprofessional "blogs" did.
What was the story?
There wasn't one. It was nothing more than a bunch of hyped up over-sexualized males gawking at new photos of Angelina Jolie, sprawled out on a red sports car. Their title: "IMAGES: Angelina Jolie HOT on the Hood of a Viper!". The first sentence: "What's hotter than Angeina Jolie sprawled over a red Viper in a cute little white dress? How about Angelina Jolie sprawled over a red Viper in a cute little white dress with two automatic weapons! AWESOME!".
Now I'm not interested in getting into a pissing match with another website, especially when my own is so new and in need of establishing a good reputation. However, this story, which I've seen on nearly a dozen prominent blogs, is truly the epitome of a blog post. No content, just pictures to fantasize over.
I have no interest in trying to take the high road, if a million other sites hadn't already published the pictures, they probably would have found their way onto my front page. I admit that, because this is a blog, and that's the stuff blog posts are made of. No content, all fluff.
Sanchez cannot claim to be a mainstream media outlet above and beyond blogs while sitting there doing blog posts designed to do nothing but generate hits. I don't care for that kind of dishonesty and for what it's worth, my respect for that site just went down a few notches.
Not for posting the pictures, but for feigning offense at being thrown in with bloggers while being a blogger himself.
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