Matthew Revell

The Guardian’s media section publishes its Buzz 30 list, today. I hate these things: a few bored hacks do their best to fill a couple of spare column inches with their prediction of what people will consider cool, or hot … erm.

Blinkx, predictably, makes it to the list. The Guardian describes it as:

Dubbed the internet’s “first intelligent search engine”, Blinkx not only searches the web but also news sites, emails, attachments, blogs and your own hard disk. Unlike Google, it also uses artificial intelligence to rate stories, not page rankings. Only three months old, Blinkx has made quite a splash.

This is a perfect example of the crap that makes up these filler “what’s cool” columns. It’s no wonder that one of Blinkx’s founders is a PR expert. Like just about every mainstream hack writing about Blinkx, The Guardian reproduces the Blinkx PR line almost verbatim. I love the reference to “articial intelligence”; ladies and gentleman, I present to you ye magikale arteefishal intelleegence! The only place Blinkx has made a splash is amongst ill-informed, mainstream journalists who are desperate to scoop the Next-Big-Thing.

Why do I dislike Blinkx? Well, here are the first three reasons that occur to me: it relies heavily on Google, throws up poor results and doesn’t fit in with the pro-active way in which people use the web. But if that was all, I’d just ignore it. What I dislike most is the hype surrounding it and the unthinking, lazy press coverage it’s received.

Well done to the Blinkx PR team. If only you’d put as much effort into your product.