Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, we all know them, and they have their uses, but are they shooting themselves in the feet?

I bet I'm not the only one who can't be bothered to subscribe to their feeds any more, with say 50+ posts a day each, it's just too hard to keep up with torrent. Sure there's some nuggets in there, but picking them out amongst the swamp of Hello Kitty usb-powered electric toothbrush type gadgets is just too tedious.

Sure, I know why the endless churn of posts is necessary, they're reflex posting about pretty much every press release that passes in the breeze, for two reasons, ad-click hunting and the fact the publishers' pay scale encourages quantity over quality. The figures I've heard on the grapevine - which may well be a long way out - are that Weblogs Inc pay something like $500 per month for 125 posts, as Engadget's their flagship I guess it pays a bit better than $4 a post, and apparently Gizmodo pay about $11 a post. You won't get a living wage from that without spamming your audience into submission.

How about slowing it down a touch, hiding the crap items on a once a day round-up post, and paying the writers to write something coherant and intelligent?