Report from the line
So, it's been non-stop in line here. I haven't had my hands on a keyboard until 3 a.m. — Why did I wait in line in Palo Alto and not the more sexy San Francisco? Easy, I knew there'd be more geeks in line here. And the line did not disappoint.
Context & Ripple Effects
Robert Scoble has been camped at the Palo Alto Apple Store since the previous day (First in line), and this dispatch explains his site choice over San Francisco: he came for the density of geeks, treating the queue itself as the story rather than the phone. His overnight wait — no keyboard until 3 a.m. — turns the line into a live-reporting post.
The pickup shows how far this framing travelled on launch day: Engadget ran a multi-city lineblog and interviewed Steve Wozniak in line, Ars Technica filed from both San Francisco and Cincinnati, Valleywag flagged Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht taking the queue to CNBC, and Philadelphia's WCAU-TV covered a mayor catching flak over an iPhone campout. The queue stopped being customer behavior and became distributed news coverage.
First-order effects
- Bloggers like Scoble convert waiting time into continuous content, making the Palo Alto line a reporting venue hours before any phone is sold.
- Apple's launch gets round-the-clock unpaid coverage across blogs, cable, and local TV, with the campouts themselves — not just the product — as the hook.
Second-order effects
- Mainstream outlets follow the blogs' lead: a local station covering a mayor's campout and CNBC booking line-dwellers show television treating the queue as a legitimate news beat.
- Other cities' lines become competing stories in their own right, with outlets like Ars Technica differentiating by filing from multiple locations rather than one store.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, launch-day camping hardens into a recurring media ritual for consumer-electronics releases, with early adopters functioning as embedded correspondents and the line as a standing stage for interviews and stunts.
The trend: Product launches are shifting from single-store news events to participatory media spectacles, where the queue of enthusiasts doubles as the distribution network for coverage.