Ok, who didn't get an Acer laptop?
I was just looking at the list of some of the people who got these things.
In no particular order: Robert Scoble, Craig Pringle, Mitch Denny, Brandon LeBlanc, Scott Beale, Joey deVilla, Mauricio Freitas, plus a heap of others I'm sure.
Naturally I went to Wally McClure's blog, expecting to see that he got one too, but no!
Jay Furr, a friend of mine who was very much an A-list tech-community person way back also missed out. Jay is famous for being the person who first called unsolicited email 'spam'.
Presumably anyone who's employed by Microsoft is ineligible, so maybe His First Scoble only got his because he has left?
I think people should obviously write to Aaron Coldiron to let him know that these guys missed out!
Ok, I don't think anyone should actually write to Aaron about it. But I do wonder what makes some people qualify and others miss out. Wally is certainly well known around the tech community, and many who were around in the early usenet days know Jay. I suppose a lot of it comes down to reputation too.
Reputation is an interesting thing. The MVPs are largely considered to have good reputations, and I'm sure that most of the people who got these laptops are MVPs. You can't build credibility overnight, but many of these people will soon enter their fifth calendar year of blogging (2003-2007) and have probably found their way into many people's reading lists. I only started blogging during 2005, and fully appreciate that I don't have the same kind of sway as many of the bloggers out there. And I'm still more accessible via Msgr than newsgroups.
In conversations about the Acer laptops thing, I've started to wonder about magazines compared to blogs (because I think no-one would've complained if Microsoft asked someone to review Vista on a particular piece of hardware for a magazine article). If someone in my generation wants an answer to something, they will search the web for it, rather than look through magazines. On the other hand, a magazine is more likely to be read in an evening or on a bus. I read a lot on my PDA / phone, and happily convert PDFs into Reflow mode for that. I think online magazines are good, and increasingly, magazine subscribers are being given logins to read the information online. But if only subscribers can read them, then search engines don't tend to find the data too well.
Blogs really are the new magazines, just like podcasting is the new radio, but it can be hard to find the good ones. I could add a new blog to my reader most days, but what I have trouble with is culling them. And even finding time to go through them! It's like I need to set aside time each day just to go through them, and more to work out what is worth spending more time on. Ah - the joys of balancing professional development and the rest of life.