Lots of sturm und drang in the blogosphere today over what Gizmodo pulled at CES: as editor Brian Lam confesses on the blog, they wandered around the giant tribute to commercialism and technological excess with a TV-B-Gone remote TV killer in their hands and had some fun with it. Plenty of people are claiming that they have ruined things for other bloggers — despite the fact that, as Valleywag points out, Gizmodo weren’t there as bloggers, but on regular old media passes — and Jason Calacanis in particular has been twittering about how this is a new low for Denton and gang.
Puh-leeze. Not surprisingly, Denton is unapologetic (although Lam says he’s sorry about disrupting the poor Motorola guy so many times during his presentation). Most of the events in the video are completely harmless, with TVs winking out as people are staring at them in the big hall — so what? I find it hard to get too excited about the whole thing, and much like Nick I find it refreshing that someone is standing apart from the slack-jawed and drooling coverage that CES gets in other places.
Was it childish? Sure. Sophomoric even? Undoubtedly. But it was still pretty hilarious, and Nick makes a good point: it shows a lot more life than anything CNET has ever done/said/written. It’s not as though the Gizmodo team was smashing TVs with hammers, for pete’s sake. This response is completely over the top. And John Biggs’ long post on the topic is kind of sanctimonious but has a point in there somewhere — just for the record, I am not in favour of puking on sales people, although some of them probably deserve it.