Apple bombs blogosphere with an airstrike

For the next few days Apple will rule the blogosphere.

All of that had to do with the keynote presentation Steve Jobs gave at the MacWorld 2008 conference. It started yesterday, and what struck me is that from the beginning of the actual speech all major gadget and apple-fan sites started liveblogging.

Within seconds of the words leaving Jobs’ mouth, entire blogposts were being produced with added screenshots of the presentation. I know this isn’t particularly new, but I saw it on several sites and the thing I liked about it is the speed of which every blog tried to out-scoop the others.

I followed three sites quite closely, being Engadget, Gizmodo and Macrumors, and with every press of the F5 button new content appeared on my screen. But the same content threefold, now I know they don’t really have a choice to not blog about it, but there is no actual honour in blogging about this, because they are equally fast, the pictures are similar and the content is the same. The new content was gathered at a MacWorld feed-page and then quickly edited to regular blogposts, all withing seconds or minutes.

The biggest thing about the conference was the new MacBook Air, preceded by speculation long before the keynote fuelled by the mysterious catchphrase: ‘There is something in the air’. Wired Magazine quickly came forward with ‘inside information’ about what would be a new, thinner MacBook. Which was submitted to Digg shortly thereafter and labelled ‘inaccurate’. As it later turned out they were spot-on with the screenshots, but of course Apple could not confirm anything at that time.

Looking at Digg today shows the Apple dominance in the top stories, where 8 out of 10 stories were Apple related. In this post I wanted to point out the frenzy concerning new Apple gadgets (though it looks absolutely amazing and I definitely want to hold one and pet it, in my opinion the MacBook Air is nothing more than a very sleek gadget and slowly but surely the excitement is fading on other blogs as well) and the impact it’s creating on the blogosphere.

Dutchcowboys also wrote something (in dutch) about the massive impact the keynote had on the internet and Twitter in particular.