Startup Blog

West Coast Bias in Top Blogs

Posted by Mike Volpe on 1/2/07 3:26 PM

It is surprising to me that in so many Web 2.0 blogs you see and feel a real bias toward the Bay Area in their coverage of new and interesting technologies and services. I mean isn't one of the whole points about "web 2.0" and the "social web" supposed to make your geographic location meaningless? Have we all forgotten that we read "The World is Flat" just a couple shourt years ago? I can hire programmers in Russia, have curtomer service reps in India, marketing people telecommuting in all 3 US time zones, and a headquarters in Bermuda or the Grand Caymans to save on taxes... but I can't get Blog coverage if I'm not in Silicon Valley? Come on guys... practice what you preach. Here are some examples of what I am talking about:
  1. http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/ilike-brings-free-indy-music-to-itunes-recommendations/ In Michael Arrington's coverage of tons of music reccommendation engines such as Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, MyStrands, and Qloud he never mentions in any of his articles a company called Goombah, which is based on the east coast. While it is not clear if what Goombah has is that much better or different than all the rest, at least mention them
  2. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_race_to_beat_google.php In this article Richard McManus neglects to mention ZoomInfo (Alexa ranking of ~1900, a pretty big company) in his article about potential Google competitiors. ZoomInfo has been around longer, developed cooler stuff and is much larger and more established than most of the other companies in the article.
Maybe this all just goes to show that the "social web" has not gone as far as we all might think, and that being geographically close to people does build better relationships, at least in 2007.
Mike Volpe

Written by Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe is a startup advisor and angel investor based in Boston.

Topics: blog, startup

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