Micro Persuasion: Gmail Down, Bloggers Know Before Press

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Gmail Down, Bloggers Know Before Press

Gmail went down several hours ago. The bloggers are all over the story. The press isn't.

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Posted at 05:17 PM in Citizen Journalism, Journalism, Weblogs | Permalink

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Comments

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The real issue is -- why hasn't Google blogged about it yet? It's been down for at least an hour. More than 50 bloggers have already mentioned it.

Seems to me like exactly the time to use one or all of Google's myriad of blogs.

Posted by:William Morris | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 05:44 PM

The press don't know what's News....till it's Old News. I'M SHOCKED!

Posted by:NOBODY | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 05:49 PM

Bloggers also know you haven't been posting much lately. At least I haven't noticed you for a while. Welcome back!

Posted by:Justin Pfister | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 06:02 PM

With all due respect, but... it's been down for a few hours and you're wondering why the press has not written about it?

Even the best paid mail servers go down sometimes. *** just happens. Personally I'm glad the press doesn't waste time on things like this.

If you're point is "Blogs are faster than press" - well, uhm, yeah. We knew that 3 years ago. Are we faster than Steve Rubel now? ;-)

Posted by:Sjors | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 06:14 PM

Works fine for me. Maybe it's just a US thing.

Posted by:Pete Cashmore | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 06:43 PM

Just checked (4:42PM PST) and no Gmail issues from Palo Alto.

I agree that there's no reason for major media to have a story on this, at least not unless there's some very unusual cause. This is the Web, servers go down some time. Even Google has not yet crafted a bug-free complete software stack.

Posted by:BillSaysThis | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 07:44 PM

Works fine over here in CA.

Posted by:silas216 | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 09:04 PM

It's back up, but an hour of downtime? Not good. Especially for a company that wants to sell hosted mail.

Posted by:Steve Rubel | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 09:17 PM

Hi Steve,

just thought I'd respond to this as a member of the IT press. Call me a spokesperson for mainstream IT journos :)

As a previous commenter noticed, this is probably too small a story for many mainstream journos to pick up.

If Gmail was down for a few hours, globally, I'd consider covering it, but even so, I'd rather be focusing on getting scoops on material that nobody else is covering rather than simply covering something that everyone already knows about.

That, to me, is the essence of journalism.

Cheers,

Renai LeMay
News Journalist
ZDNet Australia

Posted by:Renai LeMay | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 10:53 PM

You guys are psycho. An hour without Gmail? That's called a reason to take an extended lunch or dinner.

Posted by:Randy Charles Morin | Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 11:54 PM

For what it's worth, I didn't notice any trouble connecting here in Argentina during the outage that others experienced.

Posted by:doug | Friday, May 05, 2006 at 12:10 AM

My Gmail acts up periodically and has for a few weeks now. It usually comes back up within 10 minutes after I try to connect the first time. I'm in NY. Some people need to calm the heck down... even the mighty Google can have a bad day or two.

Posted by:Rebecca P | Friday, May 05, 2006 at 09:52 AM

Even business-class services go down for an hour at a time, on occasion.

One of the reasons I'll never go to an Exchange server solution is I don't want to be without both my already received mail and incoming messages during the event of a problem.

As someone who covered tech news for the better part of a decade before becoming a flack, this really isn't news. This entry would have us believe Gmail being down for an hour is analogous to the AOL busy signal "debacle" of 97. Maybe, instead, it's Google's way of telling people to get out and enjoy some sunshine ;)

Posted by:Cyrus | Friday, May 05, 2006 at 11:00 AM

Not necessarily news. Blog posts were all the coverage this deserved. That's what we're here for... right?