Quick Poll! Did Gizmodo Ruin CES?

When you devote the better part of a week of your life to attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you want there to be lots of news--and you want that news to be about cool new products. CES was at least as much of a zoo as ever, and while the product news was high in volume, this year's edition was a disappointment in terms of truly exciting stuff. When I asked folks what they thought the big news of the show was, the most common answers involved not an exciting product launch but all the scuttlebutt about the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD wars. Which was kind of depressing.

And now that the show is over, we have more non-product-related drama in the form of "Gizmodogate"--the news that contributors to the gadget blog used special remote controls to shut off some of the hundreds (thousands?) of TV sets that festooned booths at the show. Everyone in the blogosphere seems to be taking sides, from the New York Times' David Pogue (anti-Giz) to ZDNet's Larry Dignan (pro-Giz). And Gizmodo has apologized...at least sort of.

And me? Well, the prank was clearly self-defeating, given that CES says they're banning one Gizmodo blogger and may take further action against the blog and its parent company, Gawker Media. But yes, it was damn funny--and if you ask me, both CES and Las Vegas could use more fun and surprises. (They're both rife with "entertainment" that's monotonous and canned.)

I wouldn't have done it; I wouldn't have wanted it done to me. But if I'd been one of the companies whose chains Gizmodo's bloggers yanked, I'd hope I'd have the good graces to be briefly annoyed, then cut them some slack and move on. Much as the companies probably would have if Allen "Candid Camera" Funt were still with us and had pulled this stunt. Life's too short to waste brain cells on staying angry or exacting revenge--and it's better PR to show you have a sense of humor than to be publicly pissy about something which was, at worse, briefly annoying. No orphans died; no widows had reason to weep.

(Full disclosure: I'm friendly with Gizmodo editor-in-chief Brian Lam, and the site has said enough nice things about me that "harry mccracken" is a Gizmodo tag. So I can't analyze this situation as a dispassionate bystander.)

But enough about what I think. What do you make of Gizmodo's practical joke?

Comments

I too like Gizmodo. But I think it was a stupid prank. I think the better question to ask is not "Did Gizmodo Ruin CES?" - that's ridiculous of course it didn't - you should ask was it appropriate of Gizmodo.

I voted "It was neither hilarious nor offensive"

buckwalter

January 12, 2008

8:19 AM PT

I think that it was funny when they were hitting random TVs, but screwing with presentations is going over the line. If someone is interacting with the demonstration, that is going over the line.

On a side note, I hope the CES crowd learns to disable all IR ports next year.

Yert

January 12, 2008

11:04 AM PT