The other day I noticed this bit of fluff from everyone’s favorite ex-camera salesman, Bobby Scoble: Dying career: traffic helicopter pilot. On the surface, there isn’t rally much to say about the piece. It’s the usual tripe where Scooby takes “2” adds it to “B” and comes up with “yellow.” In this case he takes an Associated Press article about how advancing technologies are replacing the venerable traffic helicopter and lurches off into yet another manic rim-job for the next-big-thing.
Now, I could rant about how mind-fuckingly stupid you would have to be to rely solely on crowd-sourced traffic updates, but that isn’t really what I want to focus on here. What I want to do is use this as an example of how gob-smackingly stupid you have to be to pay the slightest attention to the New Media Douchebags, even more-so if you are a company taking business advice from these twats.
And why, you ask, is it so bad to heed the advice of the NMD’s. Here’s why my chum. These douchenozzles, who claim to understand “the end users,” have their heads rammed so far up their insular, Silicon Valley asses that you would have to be a retarded mollusk to think that they have anything worthwhile to say about the real world. Case in point, click on this link to Waze’s (the next-big-thing) real-time-traffic-map.
If it’s anything like when I viewed it, and I’m willing to bet that it is, then the vast majority of reports are coming from where? That’s right, the Los Angeles — San Francisco corridor. Or, possibly more accurately, straight out of Scooby’s ass. Now, it may well be that Waze is the next-big-thing. But I guaran-fucking-tee you this: If they are, by the time they have enough market penetration to decide that, Scoble’s ADD riddled ass will have forgotten them and moved on to something else.
That’s the danger of listening to the New Media Douchebags. They will absolutely not be able to tell you anything about your users. Because your users are in the real world, and they ain’t.