Month: June 2008

There’s a post by Stephen Baker on BusinessWeek.com that points to research saying that a product review by Walt Mossberg influences the value of a company’s stock.  Get a good review from Uncle Walt, and you could get a bump of about $500 million.  If Uncle Walt’s not feeling your product, it could have the opposite impact – to the tune of $200 million. 

I’m not going to argue with the numbers, mainly because my calculator only go to 9, and there’s no doubt that Mossberg is influential.  But, I think there’s another side to this story that shines the light on the new guards of media, like the gadget bloggers tirelessly viewing and reviewing the latest technology, keeping up with the latest developments in technology and always feeding the reader’s appetite for more and faster tech news.

I don’t doubt that Walt’s words impact those with fiscal leanings, specifically those who can impact a company’s stock price from Wall Street.  But, I suspect that the gadget bloggers impact those closer to main street who wait in line for the latest gaming console or cell phone to snatch them up as soon as they hit the shelves.

In that sense, blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget might be a better barometer for the success of a product than Uncle Walt.

I’m interested in what you think, so here’s another poll.

There’s always something to get in the way of doing the things we want to do. And, that’s my excuse for not updating my blog. Today, I found a reason to cut through the clutter and post again.

I’ve begun attaching the title of “beta junkie” to my online profiles. I love testing out new services, whether they are new to me, or new to the blogoshpere. It’s my experience with these new services that I’ll look to capture here.

Until I get my thoughts together about the current things I’m testing, what better way to kick this off than with a service that will give me content for future posts. The new service I’m trying out is PollDaddy.com. I just signed up for a free account, and I’m hoping that it will offer insight to the thoughts and experiences of those who follow me on Twitter, and eventually this blog.

I signed up for a free account, which you can do, too, to kick the tires a bit. It’s easy to sign up, quick to create a poll and easy to integrate into your site.

I’ll host the polls here and link to them from Twitter. Feel free to ping me with any interesting poll topics you come up with, too. I’ll give more details on this poll with the post I do with the results of the question below.

So, for now, here is the first poll. Let’s see how it goes.