Slashdot posted a story about a new web browser called Flock. The source was an article at BusinessWeek. Now here’s the interesting part:
It’s a fairly long article about a web browser, and it mentions a few other web browsers including Firefox, Opera and IE. It also mentions websites Amazon.com and del.icio.us. But the only links in the article are to stock quotes and an earlier article.
I understand that it’s Business Week, and I’m not saying they should have linked to every website that was even tangentially mentioned—but you’d think they could have at least linked to the browser company they just profiled! I had to get that link from Slashdot! (Unfortunately, so did everyone else, so I won’t be able to look at the page until tomorrow.)
Edit: Compare the BusinessWeek article to Wired’s take from last month. Even taking into account that they’re written for different audiences, BusinessWeek still looks like a print article that’s been thrown up on the web.
And both of them got it wrong. Both suggest that the Flock developers were Firefox developers which is completely false (though maybe the Flock developers are happy that the press is making that mistake.) Not one of the Flock developers had developed any of Firefox.
I think you’re splitting hairs when you try to restrict the Firefox/Flock connection to “developers.” If no one else, Bart Decrem used to be a marketing guy at Mozilla and Chris Messina was involved in setting up Spread Firefox.
Though if you think code is the only worthwhile contribution to a software product…