Facecrunch: The Internet Technology News is Obsessed.

News Type: Opinion — Fri Nov 30, 2007 10:43 AM EST

technology, internet, web, blog, web-2-0, facebook, bloggers, wired, technorati, techcrunch, mark-zuckerberg, compiler, gigaom, valleywag, storm-in-a-teacup

ZekeTyler

If you follow the blogs which cover the internet tech industry you'll have heard one word too much lately; Facebook.

Coverage of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and all the antics surrounding both is reaching a deafening roar. With multiple posts daily, all of the top tech news sites feverishly cover any and all Facebook goings on to exhaustion. For example, leading tech industry news blog TechCrunch has covered 358 posts so far this month, 29 of which mention Facebook directly in the title, and a google search reveals that 301 posts from November mention Facebook somewhere in the page. That's over 84% mentioning Facebook in the article, or the comments which follow. It's staggering to consider one company merits such fervor.

TechCrunch is by far not alone in this, GigaOM, the technology blog from pundit Om Malik and co-authors, featured 166 articles this month, 91 of which have Facebook mentioned somewhere in the page. Over at Wired's Compiler blog, which covers web industry news, 15 of 120 posts mention Facebook this month and Valleywag, leading Silicone Valley gossip blog, managed 28 posts about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in the last week alone.

Looking at the graph of blog posts about Facebook, it's staggering to see the sheer number of posts talking about Facebook made by bloggers daily. With upwards of 2500 posts on many days this month, you would think that the sun has hit the road and has been replaced with the warm blue glow from the Facebook homepage.

It's completely and utterly disproportionate coverage like this that fuels ridiculous valuations like, oh, say $15,000,000,000 for a website. $15 billion, by the way, is also the amount that the U.S. government is dedicating to fighting HIV/AIDS in developing countries.

And for a final perspective on the relative scale of this coverage, Microsoft were mentioned 10.5 million times this month, Facebook? 12.5 million.

Simply, this amount of hype and singular focus only hurts the industry as it draws attention away from companies and products which may deserve coverage, yet are overlooked and ignored.

Many of the figures provided in this article were found using google with a combination of site:domain.com and inurl:yyyy/mm to narrow results. Due to this methodology, figures may not be 100% accurate.

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What's this?

Who's leading the conversation?

This visualization below allows you to see the impact that each user has on the current conversation. The top row contains the group of users who have had the most impact, the 2nd row the group of users who have had the 2nd most impact (et cetera). Users with similar impact are grouped together, and the average score of the group is shown to the left of the group. The author of the article is also shown on the left, in their corresponding group. Each user's score is based on the number of comments the user has made plus the number of votes their comments have received. The scores are calculated relative one another, so while their absolute value is not particularly important, their relative difference does indicate a larger difference in impact on the conversation.

1.4

{"commentId":1229546,"authorDomain":"zeketyler"}

ZekeTyler

While the title and article may target TechCrunch, I harbor no ill feeling towards Michael Arrington, or any of the TechCrunch co-authors. They're just the main culprits of putting a, frankly, tedious amount of Facebook noise in my RSS reader. That and their name lends itself very well to being mashed up, whereas gigaom, valleyway, etc. wouldn't have been as easy to meddle together.

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1 vote

#1 - Fri Nov 30, 2007 10:51 AM EST

{"commentId":1229682,"authorDomain":"thura"}

Thura

I did notice the number of FB news on TechCrunch, but these days I am just ignoring it. However that does look like over exposure.

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1 vote

#2 - Fri Nov 30, 2007 11:31 AM EST

{"commentId":1229711,"authorDomain":"zeketyler"}

ZekeTyler

There were 3, or 4 new items waiting this morning about facebook, which pushed me to look into how often this was coming up at TechCrunch and similar sites. What really got me was that graph from technorati, one of those days there were nearly 5500 different articles posted about facebook in the sites they track. Amazing.

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#2.1 - Fri Nov 30, 2007 11:42 AM EST

{"commentId":1231509,"authorDomain":"manmade"}

Jon Williams

It could make one wonder if seemingly ill-thought out UI/UX changes such as News Feed and the privacy issue around Beacon are not actually cunning PR stunts designed to curry outrage and column inches. And then FB listens to it's users and changes the feature, resulting in even more coverage.

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#3 - Fri Nov 30, 2007 9:06 PM EST

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Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought	PC World	Sun Dec 2	6
Facebook Users Beware - Private Purchases made public	Move On	Wed Nov 28	0
Is Facebook Overrated?	TIME	Wed Nov 28	1
Facebook Ads makes a flashy debut in New York	CNET News.com	Fri Nov 30	0
Breaking: Facebook Updates Beacon	allfacebook.com	Fri Nov 30	1

ZEKETYLER

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Facecrunch: The Internet Technology News is Obsessed.

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