TechCrunched!
I'm still recovering from last night's shindig. You know, what's the deal with these parties? They are getting to be media events, that's all. Be seen, and see. Take photos or videos, get videoed or photoed. Talk about tech? I tried. But it was just too noisy to have a decent conversation on video.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch had already been framed as part of a Silicon Valley Web renaissance, and its February party invitation showed that its community gatherings were becoming part of its publishing footprint. The August event drew contemporaneous posts from TechCrunch and several other blogs, making the gathering itself a distributed media object rather than a private industry meetup.
Scobleizer’s account highlights the trade-off: the incentives to be photographed, filmed and noticed can overwhelm the conditions for substantive on-camera discussion. That matters for a blog-driven technology scene where access, visibility and coverage increasingly reinforce one another.
First-order effects
- TechCrunch gains an event format that extends its reach beyond articles, while attendees and bloggers receive a shared venue for visibility and self-documentation.
- Scobleizer’s difficulty recording useful conversations illustrates how the party’s media activity displaces the interview and discussion formats that technology blogs also depend on.
Second-order effects
- Other technology blogs are pushed to cover, photograph or attend TechCrunch gatherings to remain present in the same attention network, as the earlier TechCrunch party had already signaled.
- Event organizers can treat blogger attendance and cross-site photo coverage as distribution, making the audience around a gathering as valuable as the people in the room.
Third-order effects
- If these events keep functioning as coverage engines, technology publishing will be shaped more by the ability to convene visible communities, not only by the ability to report and analyze products.
- The growing overlap between social presence and editorial exposure risks concentrating attention around a small set of recurring industry conveners.
The trend: Technology blogging is expanding from website publishing into event-centered attention networks, where participation and documentation become part of distribution.