[Pat Phelan & some Irish Wannabee. Photo by Shel]
Sometimes, I feel like I need more hats than a centipede wears shoes. At TC40 I realized that I was not alone. One of the companies I consult from time-to-time is Cubic Telecom. I helped them prepare to present at the conference, where I had credentials to attend as a blogger reviewing the conference.
As I turned out, they didn't extremely well with an announcement of a service that lets you send and receive local calls from 50 countries in one mobile phone, cutting about 90% off your current roaming costs--and you get to pick the countries. As it also turned out, I had all sorts of computer headaches and gave up on my plans to review the companies.
But writing about a client is always hairy. I try to get others to comment on whether they did well or not.
But at TC40 I realized how much I was not alone. In my previous post, I wrote about my apprehensions that i might have to give this conference a bad review. But the guy sitting behind me, Duncan Riley had the real headache. He was the TechCrunch reporter covering TechCrunch. If I thought panning this conference would demonstrate a death wish for me, just what would it mean for him?
But let's go further. What if I said the conference sucked and Riley had written that it was great? TechCrunch readership is about 60 times larger than mine. In fact, TechCrunch readership is probably equal to the combined circulation of all the bloggers who were writing, assuming that Om stayed out of the game.
Now I'm not saying that anything funny happened. In fact, Riley did a superb job of covering and it was my special interest that had me link to a post where Riley called my client "brilliant" and showed a picture of Cubic founder Pat Phelan.
My point is this: In simpler times, the journalists took a vow of poverty and didn't cover the people who could pay them. In simpler times the director of the show, would not have one of the show's most powerful reviewers sitting in the second row, wearing a media badge.
Times are stating to require we be more careful how we act than someone who wants to hum a porcupine.
