A good friend of mine put together a hoax that made an impact on the Tech world recently. He made a fake Sony Nexus X that was picked up by journalists throughout the world and spread far and wide. Pretty amazing what one guy can do in his spare time.
His take-away from this experiment was nothing short of awesome and it's why I post this here.
"During the 48 hours after the initial Picasa upload, I made a number of observations and realizations about a range of topics including tech journalism, entrepreneurship, innovation, and philosophy.
Tech journalism moves fast and cascades like a monkeyfighter. Not sure who fired the first shot, but after the post on XperiaBlog was published, dozens of articles popped up within 15 minutes time. Many of these outlets did the right thing and alluded to the possibility that the images were fake.
Now, I won’t name any names, but some prominent blogs actually titled their posts along the lines of “LEAKED IMAGES OF THE SONY NEXUS X”. Come on, guys. Let’s not do this.
One slightly off-putting thing about this entire episode was that not a single soul made any attempts to contact the owner of the Picasa album. Seriously. Not one comment reaching out to the elusive Mutul Yeter (whose name I actually misspelled). Man, if I was a journalist, the very first thing I would do is to make some sort of attempt to contact the person who posted the leak. Even if it was a long shot, I could be the guy who put the whole thing to bed. That has to count for something.
It wasn’t all bad news on the journalism front. Extra special shoutout to Android Police for their incredibly detailed detective work. These guys don’t mess around, which is why they are my favorite Android news site. I did not flip you guys the bird, but that had me rolling.
After the immediately observable stuff, I began thinking about these news articles as products of individual journalists. As of now, there are around 1,000 news articles on the “Sony Nexus X”. Let’s say it takes an extremely unscientific average of 15 minutes to research, write, edit, and publish this kind of article; that’s 15,000 minutes or 250 hours of human capital that I mobilized by sitting here and moving my hands a bit on a Sunday evening. This doesn’t even take into account the number of non-journalists who devoted time to reading about, discussing, or debunking this story (most likely during work hours). Let me reiterate: I, an individual with no previous worldwide recognition save for a frontpage Reddit post, managed to alter the behavior of people in Russia, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Italy within the course of 24 hours, all from the comfort of my home while exerting next to no effort. If you are nothing short of absolutely blown the F*ck away by this, then the music died for you a long time ago.
Anatomy of a Hoax - The Sony Nexus X
Dissecting The Sony Nexus X, The Fake That Launched A Thousand Stories | TechCrunch
Edit: this is probably better off in the marketing category.
His take-away from this experiment was nothing short of awesome and it's why I post this here.
"During the 48 hours after the initial Picasa upload, I made a number of observations and realizations about a range of topics including tech journalism, entrepreneurship, innovation, and philosophy.
Tech journalism moves fast and cascades like a monkeyfighter. Not sure who fired the first shot, but after the post on XperiaBlog was published, dozens of articles popped up within 15 minutes time. Many of these outlets did the right thing and alluded to the possibility that the images were fake.
Now, I won’t name any names, but some prominent blogs actually titled their posts along the lines of “LEAKED IMAGES OF THE SONY NEXUS X”. Come on, guys. Let’s not do this.
One slightly off-putting thing about this entire episode was that not a single soul made any attempts to contact the owner of the Picasa album. Seriously. Not one comment reaching out to the elusive Mutul Yeter (whose name I actually misspelled). Man, if I was a journalist, the very first thing I would do is to make some sort of attempt to contact the person who posted the leak. Even if it was a long shot, I could be the guy who put the whole thing to bed. That has to count for something.
It wasn’t all bad news on the journalism front. Extra special shoutout to Android Police for their incredibly detailed detective work. These guys don’t mess around, which is why they are my favorite Android news site. I did not flip you guys the bird, but that had me rolling.
After the immediately observable stuff, I began thinking about these news articles as products of individual journalists. As of now, there are around 1,000 news articles on the “Sony Nexus X”. Let’s say it takes an extremely unscientific average of 15 minutes to research, write, edit, and publish this kind of article; that’s 15,000 minutes or 250 hours of human capital that I mobilized by sitting here and moving my hands a bit on a Sunday evening. This doesn’t even take into account the number of non-journalists who devoted time to reading about, discussing, or debunking this story (most likely during work hours). Let me reiterate: I, an individual with no previous worldwide recognition save for a frontpage Reddit post, managed to alter the behavior of people in Russia, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Italy within the course of 24 hours, all from the comfort of my home while exerting next to no effort. If you are nothing short of absolutely blown the F*ck away by this, then the music died for you a long time ago.
Anatomy of a Hoax - The Sony Nexus X
Dissecting The Sony Nexus X, The Fake That Launched A Thousand Stories | TechCrunch
Edit: this is probably better off in the marketing category.
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