Some much needed skeptical talk about the current state of Internet innovation. -RB

That’s the microversion of the state of affairs. Here’s the macro version. Thousands of startups are doing almost exactly the same thing, minor variations on a theme. Tech journalists report endlessly on the same handful of well-established companies. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft’s dominate pieces of the web, and they don’t appear to be in shaky positions. Good, long-time tech journalists like Om Malik are exhausted. He recently posted this to his blog after much ink was spilled over who Twitter hired as a public relations person:

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts [I] often wonder to myself, have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

via The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future.