Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Motoring writers, travel writers, hospitality writers, and writers from
other trades are all beneficiaries of similar largesse from time to
time. Together with the journalist's lifestyle, it's one of the perks
of the job. Some are more precious about it than others, but most put
it into perspective and manage to maintain their independence. Quite
often reviewers and influential journalists receive "gifts" from
competing vendors.
I can remember a fellow IT journalist from a
publication I was working for attending the Atlanta Olympics as a guest
of IBM, the official information technology provider. When disaster
struck the computer systems, he reported the incident faithfully, made
front page news and embarrassed his host highly. He could hardly have
done otherwise. If he had failed to report the incident, his
credibility as an independent journalist would have been shot to pieces.
Putting all this into context of Microsoft and its 90 favourite
bloggers, there are some points worth remembering concerning the
bloggers.
Individual journalists, working for low to average pay at major
publications, are often not the ones refusing to accept free review
hardware from vendors. It is generally their well paid editors and
publishers taking the high moral ground.
In the case of bloggers, many have limited financial resources.
Receiving a free high performance laptop loaded with Microsoft's best
attempt to sway them toward Vista could make a great story, provided
they do the right thing and disclose. If any happen to be committed
Apple users, the chances are all Microsoft will receive for its trouble
is an unfavourable review comparing Vista to Mac OS X.
Those who are Vista Beta users or XP users, here is your chance to tell
the public whether Microsoft has finally got Windows right or it's just
more of the same.
Should bloggers keep their Ferrari Notebooks? That's up to them.
However, if they want to keep their credibility intact when they review
Vista (or an Acer notebook for that matter) they should disclose their
gift.
By the way, provided my visa arrives in time, I'm off to Macworld Expo
in San Francisco next week as a guest of Apple Computer - the first
overseas trip I've accepted this Century.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
