Hype is Just Hype, and a Marketing Opportunity

So I have been feeling a bit burned out on the controversy angle and have tried doing a bit less of that on this site...I figure it is better to post that sort of stuff on Threadwatch.

Jakob Nielsen, who is always great at hyping his opinion and putting it out in an informative column, recently wrote an article stating that Hyped Web Stories Are Irrelevant.

He is partially correct. After the hype wears off the only things that are left are a bunch of links and maybe a few new readers, which lead to a few more links and a few more readers. Who knows, after a decade of debunking everything else as hype and painting an industry with your opinion maybe you could have one of the largest newsletters on the web. Like Jakob.

Incredible that he is able to come up with interesting columns every month after a decade of writing them. You need only look at some of those article titles to see how good he is as putting a different spin on many of the hype stories.

You only need to occassionally look in the search results to see how much the hyped stories and hype channels typically outperform the channels lacking hype. Why do they? Because it is easy to argue or agree with something that is full of hype. Stuff that is boring and down the middle typically just isn't all that remarkable.

I not only see lots of Digg pages in the search results, but if you ever try to search for something like "Google + some rare word or idea" you may never find the information you were looking for because Google is unable to get past the heavily linked hype.

The search results are nothing but a popularity content. More bloggers are realizing that. More are writing inaccurate / biased / hyped stories just for the attention it brings. But eventually it wears thin. I have been going a bit lean on my RSS recently because of this sort of stuff everywhere.

With so much bias and hype crowding up the search results eventually good functional ideas and products may need to pay just to get any attention.