This was the year when tech writing plumbed new depths of stupidity, repetition, and sheer unadulterated circle jerking. It was the year when blogs picked up each other’s stuff, no matter how ridiculous, and strove to take it to the next level of dumb. You get what you pay for – and with tech writing, nothing could be more true.

There were three perfect examples of the tech blog world’s increasing descent into infantilism and irrelevancy. These were, in no particular order, the CrunchPad; the Apple Tablet; and pretty much everything written about the iPhone and market share.

Example One: The CrunchPad
TechCrunch – which almost defines awful tech blogging on a daily basis – was guilty of probably the worst example of narcissistic stupidity with its foray into actually trying to make a product.

Now making products is hard. Very hard. I have nothing but admiration for people who get up off their behinds and ship a product, because it’s a tough thing to do. Even the shittiest products usually take thousands of man-hours and thought to bring to market. In fifteen years of writing about tech, I’ve been privileged to know hundreds of people at companies all over the world who have managed to ship stuff. It’s tough.

So when Mike Arrington – the blowhard’s blowhard – decided he was going to create a product – the CrunchPad –  ship it at an absurd price point, and all within the space of a year I was prepared to applaud. Then I remembered this was Arrington we were talking about, and knew without a moment’s uncertainty that it was going to implode at some point.

Lo and behold, it imploded. Why? Because making stuff is hard and writing about it is easy, and Arrington confused being a big wonk in the tiny world of tech media with actually being a serious businessman capable of harnessing the energy to ship a product.

What the CrunchPad demonstrated perfectly was the tech blog world’s hubris and utter lack of perspective. Just because you can bang out 200 words about what some drunk coder from Company X said at a party doesn’t make you capable of defining, designing and building a product – nor of harnessing other people to do so. And, more importantly, making a product which you and your tech blogging friends think is cool is an almost guaranteed method of creating something that no one else in the world will want.

Example two: The Apple “Tablet”
More words were probably written about this nonexistent product in 2009 than about all the great hardware that every company not called Apple actually shipped. Google now lists 1.8 million documents referencing “Apple tablet”. That compares to 20,700 documents referencing “Acer Tablet PC”. One of these companies has actually shipped tablet hardware. The other has not. Can you guess from those Google figures which one is which?

“Nonexistent?” you say. “But I’ve read all the details on TechBlogDailyShit, it’s launching in March with an OLED screen and will kick Amazon’s butt/save the publishing world/cure cancer!”

No. No. No.

What you have read is a load of stuff that bloggers in desperate search for page views have made up on the basis of bar-room rumours, anonymous emails, stuff some random guy posted on Twitter, and just general shit. No one, outside of probably a hundred people in and around Cupertino, have a solid line on what Apple is doing – if, in fact, it is doing anything.

Almost everything you have read about an Apple tablet is geek wish fulfilment, from people who stared at a lot of Star Trek merchandise when they were young and really, truly wanted a tricorder. This is standard practice with a lot of sites that cover Apple: they assume Apple is designing products not for ordinary people, but for them, the tech blogging elite. Well guess what: they’re wrong! Apple wants its products to sell outside Silicon Valley, so it does not take Robert Scoble as its typical customer.

Outside of possibly the Wall Street Journal, almost no media sources are doing any serious investigative reporting to actually find out what Apple is doing either. Why? Simple: Doing real investigative tech reporting takes time, effort and balls. What’s more, if you’re a tech blogger you don’t have to do it because you can write some second-hand speculative bullshit about the “Apple Tablet” and it will get you lots of page views. This will lead to some “blog network” owner like Arrington or Nick Denton paying you more, because you are paid on page views. And all without you having to make a single call or talk to a single real person. Result!

Seriously, the standard of investigative tech reporting now is so low that it makes me long for the days of MacOSRumors. Those guys had standards compared to what we have at the moment.

Example three: The iPhone and market share
Here’s a strange thing about the world of tech writing: there is an obsession with market share winners and losers which isn’t seen in any other product area. Of course, companies talk about their market share in all realms, whether they make cars or sell groceries. But what they don’t do is imagine that they will DIE AS A COMPANY unless they have what amounts to a legal monopoly.

In tech, though, we do this all the time. Nokia is DYING because its market share is falling compared to Apple. Apple is DYING because its market share isn’t as big as Microsoft. Microsoft is DYING because twelve and a half customers have stopped using Office in favour of Google Docs. Google is never dying, for reasons I have yet to fathom – I suspect they are either the golden child, or they simply give out better freebies than anyone else.

Is Mercedes dying because its share of the luxury car market isn’t over 80%? No. Is Samsung dying because it doesn’t dominate TVs? No. Is Bosch dying because it doesn’t sell the majority of drills in the world? No. Only in tech do we play this bullshit game.

Tech bloggers constantly play the zero sum game. For Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. For Microsoft to win, Google must lose. For Google to win, Apple must lose. And nowhere is this more obviously seen at the moment than in the world of the mobile phone.

The funny thing is that prior to the launch of the iPhone, you really didn’t see much writing about the mobile phone market that worked this way. No one wrote screaming headlines about Sony Ericsson dying because Nokia took a few points of market share that month. People didn’t talk about the impending end of Nokia when Motorola was sweeping all before it with the original StarTac.

Only with the influx of “tech geek bloggers” post-iPhone did you suddenly get the same kinds of breathless bullshit that characterised the computer media applied to mobiles. All of a sudden, these guys became experts in the dynamics of the mobile phone market and brought the same depth of analysis to it that they’d brought to things like the question of whether Duke Nukem Forever would ever get released.

The fact that they called the iPhone “the Jesus phone” tells you all you need to know about their lack of perspective and ego. Mobile phones were dull and stupid and now the computer guys were coming along to SAVE YOU ALL.

Earth calling tech bloggers: shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Where next Columbus?
I’d like to end this post on a high note, but I’m actually not in the mood for happy endings. There are some really sharp writers in the world of tech, but the problem is that they struggle to be heard over all the bullshit. Old hands like Kara Swisher and Mary Jo Foley do real reporting. Newer guys like CK Sample at least know how to write stuff which is entertaining, fun and (mostly!) accurate. John Gruber is always good value, even if he’s wrong rather more often than his biggest fans would admit.

But most of the best tech writing at the moment comes from people who don’t actually do it for a living. Odd posts, here and there, that shine light on to some small part of the tech world that they deal with on a daily basis. I’ll leave you to find them, but here’s a clue: they usually aren’t linked to from any of the big blogging networks.

(Photo by Vicki’s Pics, under a Creative Commons license)

“I have no less than 5 sources saying an Apple Tablet announcement is due soon. Or something, as some of these press people (Apple diehards at that), who normally cared not about Tablets, and thought it was all just Microsoft vaporware, are suddenly so interested in the Tablet PC concept, and asking tons of questions. Pretty easy to read those tea leaves, so somethings up.

…And it exists, honest, seen a prototype. Instant On, ASUS-Tatung whiteish looking, running a reduced version of OSX, with some funky start-up PDA like Apple icon menu. Touch only (white touch pen), least the version I saw. Dunno if it will make it to market, but I think what I saw, is what these NDA-signing reporters have saw. Played with it for maybe 5 mins before it was wisked away.”

That sounds like a pretty cool tablet, right?

Only one thing: That post dates back to 2005. And apologies to Rob Bushway for dredging it up!

But what it goes to prove is simply that Apple Tablet rumours have been around a very, very long time. Nothing came of the ones from 2005, and it’s perfectly possible that nothing will come of all the current round of rumours as well.

Make no mistake: I’d love to see what Apple could do with a touch-based machine that’s larger than the iPhone, but small enough to easily carry with you everywhere. I’d love to see whether they can create something that could replace the notebooks I habitually carry, the laptop that goes with me most places, and all the other bits and pieces of my digital life.

But I’m not holding my breath. After all, if I’d had been holding my breathe on what looked like pretty firm reports on in 2005, I wouldn’t be breathing much now.

(Image of Robert Scoble with Tablet PC by Will Pate)

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“Google, which has an estimated 90% market share of UK internet searches, last year used a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it did not pay a penny in corporation tax on its £1.6bn advertising revenues in Britain.

The international corporate structure enables Google to avoid paying what could otherwise have been a corporation tax bill in the UK of as much as £450m.”

The hype machine is in overdrive. Google has confirmed that it has issued special Android-running “dogfood” phones to some of its employees, and every tech blog is speculating about when this will be released to the public and how it’s going to change the world.

I’m willing to bet that Google will not release a Google-branded phone in the next year, unless “Google branded” means what it did with the T-Mobile G1 – a subtle logo on a phone sold by other companies.

Why? Three reasons. Before we get to these reasons, though, let’s look at what people are actually talking about.

First, Google is not getting into the hardware manufacturing business, except in the way it already does with the Google Search Appliance. The Google Phone is, according to all the reports, made by HTC. It’s not built to Google’s spec, but instead is reported to be a rebadged HTC Passion, a phone that’s long been in the development pipeline.

Second, at present (as Google has stated in its public blog post) this is a testbed phone distributed to employees only. Phones like this are designed to be used for development purposes, and are commonly called “dogfood” – as in the old programmers phrase “to eat your own dogfood”, meaning to use software that is still in development to iron out issues. If you’re interested in how dogfooding works, that’s a great description of it in Zachary Pascal’s book about the development of Windows NT.

And, in terms of things we know, that’s about it. So is this a herald of a phone released to the public under Google’s name? I think not.

1. Google’s lack of experience

The first reason is simply that Google doesn’t have the infrastructure or experience to support a sizeable consumer hardware project. It has no support system, no outlets, no distribution – in short, none of the things that what would be a major hardware launch actually requires. Neither does it have any experience in consumer hardware products.

At this point, someone will probably point to Microsoft and Xbox as an example of how a software company can more into hardware quickly. But this ignores the fact that Microsoft had been in the hardware business for years, on a much smaller scale, with mice, keyboards, and other peripherals. This gave it a valuable set of experience of hardware and how to market and sell it. Had Microsoft launched Xbox without this experience, I doubt it would have been a success.

2. Where’s the network in this?

Second, there’s the Network Effect. No, not that network effect – I mean the fact that in order of a phone to be useful, you need a contract from a phone network.

When selling phones, manufacturers face two choices: they can either sell the phone “off contract”, at full price to consumers; or partner with a network, which buy phones (at full price) and sell them with the up-front cost hugely reduced, getting the cost back over the course of the contract.

This is why you can buy an HTC Hero unlocked in the UK for £369, or get it for free with a 24 month contract on the 3 network. Unsurprisingly, very few consumers choose to buy the phone for the upfront cost.

In fact, Nokia has suffered massively from this in the US, where its smartphones have tended to be sold unsubsidised and thus have had minimal impact. People don’t want to pay $500-600 for a phone – period.

That’s why the talk of Google selling its phone off-contract is, frankly, silly. Why would anyone other than the kind of hardcore geek who MUST have the latest phone pay full price to buy one with a Google logo on it, when they can get the same phone with an HTC logo on it for much less money upfront? Even if the HTC Passion becomes the Google Phone exclusively (something I doubt given HTC’s record), there are many other manufacturers of Android phones and many good devices coming down the pipeline – and consumers will buy them if they’re free/cheap upfront.

Some might argue that Google could reduce the up-front price of a Google Phone on the grounds that it will increase their overall ad revenue over the course of the phone’s lifetime. But this would be a massive punt for the company, as there is no way of definitively showing ROI on a project like this. While they could show that X number of ads had been served on their phone, how many of those ads would be served anyway on another Android phone, an iPhone, or even a Nokia or BlackBerry? Working out the incremental revenue delivered, which would be required to work out how much the company could afford to subsidise the phone, would be impossible.

3. What’s unique about the Google phone?

Third, there is the issue of uniqueness. In order to be a success, there would need to be something other than the Google brand that differentiated it. Given that Google doesn’t make hardware, that means one thing: different software. And that’s the one thing that Google cannot do with Android.

Why? Because the moment that it started keeping “good” Android features to itself, it would alienate current and future Android phone makers, and fragment the platform. And that’s exactly what it wants NOT to do at this stage of the game. Android is already beginning to suffer from fragmentation. Anything which increased this will be avoided.

Could it offer additional, branded-phone-only services? Yes – but what would be the benefit to it doing so, over offering the same services on subscription (or even free) to the wider Android audience? Google has historically trod a very careful line with its services, making them as widely-available as possible for a very simple reason: The wider they are available, the greater the potential for ad revenue from them.

Show me the money

Put simply, unless Google has some unique business plan or completely radical technology that no one knows anything about – in other words, unless they have some magic pixie dust to sprinkle – it makes no sense for the company to release a unique, category-dominated Google Phone. We might get an HTC Passion, Google-branded in the way that the T-Mobile G1 was, sold through networks – and hey, that might be a very good phone. But it won’t be anything like the predictions we’re seeing now.

Remember when the iPhone was early in its hype-cycle, and how it was referred to as the “Jesusphone”? What we’re seeing now is a classic case of “Jesusphone” hype, the need of the tech blogging world to find a next big thing and portray it as massively different to what we have. The truth is more prosaic, and more dull. Category-defining products happen rarely, tectonic shifts in markets come along only occasionally. But hey, it keeps the geeks amused.

Update: John Gruber digs a little and finds the Google Phone identifies itself as “Nexus One” (smart reference). He’s also hearing that it’s GSM, but only works on T-Mobile’s 3G band.

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First up, Erick Schonfeld claims that current “reports” confirm their own original excitable post, quoting this bit:

“There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.” [My emphasis]

Leaving aside whether Google’s post actually “confirms” what TechCrunch is saying (my take: No), there’s an obvious issue here. Far from Google “dictating every last bit of it”, now it’s rather a different phone. Erick writes:

“The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google. It seems to be a tailored version of the HTC Passion or the related HD2 (Unlocker scored some leaked pictures back in October which are of the same phone).”

So which is it? Because, unless I have completely lost my ability to read, “[Google] dictating every last piece of it” is not the same as “with a lot of input from Google”.

And it wouldn’t even be the first time that HTC has tailored a phone to another company’s specifications. It’s common practice for HTC – witness the T-Mobile G1 as just one example of many.

(As an aside, the photos that TechCrunch are using under all its stories headlined about “The Google Phone” are the Unlocker ones which John mentions. In other words, TechCrunch has no pictures of the “real” Google phone running Google’s tailored software, despite the implication of putting the months-old pics next on the new stories.)

“It changes everything! Well, no, maybe something else did!”

Erick’s colleague John Biggs is even more breathless about the “Google Phone”. It’s “going to change everything”, he claims, with the caveat “mostly” because even he can’t go with a headline that implies Google is going to solve global warming with a mobile phone.

But why does John think it’s a big deal? Simple:

“But what if Google starts to sell this thing? This is “a big deal” on the level of Neo learning Kung Fu in The Matrix. This means Google is making hardware.”

Of course, Google has been “making hardware” – as in rebadging other people’s hardware with its own custom software – since 2002, when it first launched the Google Search Appliance. But let’s not let facts get in the way of page views. Let’s be kind, and assume that John means “Google is making consumer hardware.

John’s main point is that this represents part of a wave of service providers making hardware, and it’s actually this wave that changes everything:

“But suddenly service providers are doing hardware. Amazon has the Kindle, Barnes&Noble has a lumpen Nook, and now Google has a phone. What’s next? The Credit Suisse Fondue Set?”

Ummm… but wait a minute. So in fact, the Google phone – unreleased, it should be remembered – is what changes everything, yet in the same article he’s naming examples of other things which already exist that are in the same category? Can anyone else see what might be wrong with this picture?

Even assuming he was right, surely it would be the Kindle which “changes everything” given that it was the first of the named products to get to market – and arguably, given that it really was designed and built to Amazon’s specs is a far better example of the breed than the unreleased Google phone?

Contradictions, schmicktions!

Two stories, both of which contradict the points that they’re trying to make within a few words of making them. I don’t want to draw any wider conclusions about the “State of Tech Reporting” on the basis of this, primarily because I think that anyone who relies on TechCrunch for tech reporting is, at best, obviously unfamiliar with the site’s record.

But what both Erick and John display is a classic case of what happens when reporting collides with enthusiasm. In the rush to get the exciting post up and out, they simply haven’t thought about what they were writing.

They’ve put on the blinkers of enthusiasm when writing, and have ended up with stories that add up to little more than the sound of two men fapping. But hey – it gets the page views. And we get the media we’re prepared to pay for.

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“‘Our human filters have turned into a great way to discover content that interests us, but the amount of tweets coming in through Twitter today is astounding, and it continues to grow. While new features like grouping and lists have been designed to tame the clutter, at the end of the day, there will be more streams and content to weed through,’ said my6sense founder and chairman Barak Hachamov.”

If ever there was a statement that epitomised the dumb approach to social media, this is it. Filters, by definition, filter things out. If you’re having to filter what your friends pass on, they’re not being filters – or you’re following way to many people you don’t know.

In almost every case of Twitter overload I’ve seen, the latter is true. I’ll say it again: follow 4,000 people you don’t know, and you’re following sources, not filters. Follow 200 people you do know, and they might just be genuine filters.