Bloggasm

Joel Johnson: I’m a freelance writer living in New York. I’ve pretty much written about technology on the whole, but occasionally dabble into other areas. (But mostly technology and videogames.) I’m also given to somewhat opposed inclinations with my wallet, being both moderately generous with my spending when it comes to friends — or god knows, myself — but also extremely thrifty when it comes to the actual purchases. I won’t stop myself from buying something I don’t need, but I’ll at least temper that impulse purchase with the fun of comparison shopping.

The Consumerist was started as a sort of experiment. We knew we wanted a shopping blog, but haven’t found enough sites on the web telling us what *not* to buy. It’s the usually unspoken counterpart to the standard company > media > customer information flow. It’s not that we think companies are all evil. It’s that all companies are evil sometimes. It’s our job to amplify the voice of those customers who want to warn off their neighbors from making a bad purchase.

Simon Owens: If you’d have to pick an income bracket that your blog is geared toward, what would it likely be?

JJ: We don’t target any specific bracket, but I suppose that after a certain level of wealth one would lose interest in saving a few bucks on purchases. Or maybe not! Maybe that’s how people get rich.

I mean, even as I get older and learn to be better with my money (and have more income to blow), I still want to save. In fact, the bigger the purchases, the more percentage savings and the like can make a difference.

SO: Does your blog also focus on pointing out consumerist scams at all? If so, what are some of the biggest scams the blog has found?

JJ: We do try to point out scams, of course, but like most of our editorial we really have to rely on our readers to do the footwork by, you know, being scammed. Sometimes the scams are obvious and we’re just reminding people that their instincts are probably dead-on, but occasionally we’ll find something a little more subtle and insidious.

We haven’t found anything that I would consider uniquely critical yet, although I continue to be fascinated by the idea that large national chains like Urban Outfitters will just straight-up steal concepts from small designers with little to no recourse. I’m going to keep trying to follow that one (even though I am somewhat limited in my ability to know if a design is a rip-off or not), because I suspect there are a lot of independent boutique designers who may not even realize they’ve been had. It’s especially egregious since so often the people the big stores are ripping off are just kids or not-quite-starving-but-not-quite-eating-foie-gras-milkshakes artists who would have probably been happy to license the design for a small fee or a modest percentage of sales.

SO: As a blog that focuses on consumer products, do you ever find there to be a conflict of interest with your advertisers?

JJ: What advertisers? Right now all the ads on The Consumerist are network ads from Gawker Media. We have yet to have any company actually advertise on the site, which is probably partially due to the relatively small audience size (compared to other Gawker sites) and also from the fact that I have sworn to pay special attention to whatever company chooses to first advertise with us. It’s a unique opportunity for any company to get feedback who is really concerned with improving to get raw feedback from their customers, but as yet no one has taken up the gauntlet.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

JJ: Well, I read the majors just like everybody else, so when you say ‘should be reading’ it’s hard not to mention stalwarts like Boing Boing and Metafilter. But since you’re probably looking for something perhaps a bit more off the beaten path, I find myself always intrigued by what Thomas Mahon of EnglishCut.com has to say. (In the total antithesis of bargains, I aim to one day own a suit cut by Thomas.) I love Make’s blog by Phil Torrone, of course. I enjoy my own occasionally-updated blog about construction toys and Lego, nextbrick.net. My friend Noah Shactman’s DefenseTech.net is about as much politics as I can handle, made palatable by a healthy dose of mechanized killing machines. Clive Thompson’s Collision Detection is updated irregularly, but makes it possible to follow where Clive’s tangental interests are leading him any given day, like tracking a library by reading its droppings. TechDirt and GigaOm could very nearly give one all they need to understand the business side of technology, from the deals to the gear. And Mr. Holkins would never cop to it, I bet, but the thrice-weekly posts at Penny-Arcade.com make it one of my favorite blogs.

Anyway, I read a lot of blogs and could go on and on, but mostly I just marvel at the richness of media, written or otherwise, and wonder what it must have been like to live a few hundred years ago when the sum total of knowledge could have been soaked up in a lifetime. And I bet Da Vinci never got cilps of Colin Farrell boning some girl inserted next to a dissertation on the aftereffects of Ed Murrow’s editorializing on broadcast journalism. Truly, we are gods.