Going Gawker-less

Engadget and Gizmodo have been banished from my newsfeeds for a while now. ars technica and SlashGear replaced them a while ago. I'm even happier for it after the whole Gizmodo/Gawker/iPhone drama.

My own corporate-related biases aside (and as always, I only speak for myself here or on twitter), I find the whole thing to be morally reprehensible. If you don't know what I am talking about, then read Andy Ihnatko's article about what happened. If you're interested in the legality of the matter, then check out this article on DailyFincance.com. John Gruber sums it up well here as well. Especially that last part.

Anyway...

You know when you open the fridge and there's a gag-inducing odor emanating from inside? Like something died in there? Then, you locate the culprit and dispose of it with fire but can still smell the horrible funk? Like somehow that bad egg convinced the milk, vegetables and left-over pizza to all "go rogue" too?

Yeah, so...

The poor ethics of Jason Chen and Brian Lam at Gizmodo and Nick Denton at Gawker have tainted all of the Gawker blogs for me at this point. It may not be fair that their stink has infected Kotaku, io9, Jalopnik and Lifehacker... but it's there. I can smell it. My nose wrinkles when I visit those sites and see the Gawker logo. Even when I download the RSS feeds there's a still a whiff of Gawker's foul stank embedded in the xml.

It's a shame, since I was a regular reader of Kotaku and io9.

1UP and Joystiq are battling it out to be the main replacement for Kotaku. I'm in no rush to declare one of them my "go to" site yet. (I'm sure they are relieved.)

Losing io9 bums me out though. True, I get most of that news from iFanboy, /Film, TV Squad, etc. However, it was one of the few blogs I followed that was more about a genre than a specific medium. I liked that.

Oh well, maybe the funk will fade over time. For now, though, it's time to open a window.

Update on Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:46 by r3v

ToplessRobot has successfully filled the Sci Fi void that io9 left. SF Signal isn't too bad either, but the focus there is a lot more on books than the broader io9 or ToplessRobot.