Our website featured in the San Jose Mercury News

This happened… whew, two weeks ago already.

On March 11, I got an email from Mike Cassidy, columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. He said he wanted to speak with me about the website. We talked using Skype (on iPhone, on my part) a couple of days later. The conversation itself lasted for almost an hour. I was surprised by Mike’s interest, especially since I thought he wanted the story to feature in a larger piece about Apple or Steve Jobs in general.

The following week, the article was published on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the San Jose Mercury News. For those of you that don’t know, the Mercury News is the local newspaper of San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley. It’s basically Steve Jobs’ local newspaper! Gasp. Pictured right is a scanned version of that first page.

The online version of the article is here: Cassidy: Romain Moisescot makes Steve Jobs a full-time job

For those of you wondering — Mike was very polite and courteous during the interview. All that is mentioned in the article we talked about, including the sentence ‘Yes, the site can feel a little creepy’ which he mentioned as an echo of Fake Steve’s 2006 post (which I am very proud of). My stance on the ‘creepiness’ of all bout Steve Jobs.com is that I want to cover really *all* about Steve Jobs. However I have the greatest respect for Steve Jobs, so I never cross certain lines on the website or the blog (if you see what I mean — especially after the recent health episodes…). But for example since anyone can find Steve’s home address simply by typing it into Google Maps, why not have it properly and neatly presented on my website? That’s why I decided to cover more of Steve’s private life on the website for the past two years. But I don’t think that there’s anything borderline on the website.

Anyway, to come back to the article, my fear of course was what would come out of it. My conversation with Mike was pretty long and I knew he would have to select what he would write about. He did choose some aspects of our conversation that were anecdotal, and distorted them a bit; I’m referring to the anecdote with the “Contact” button, the truth being that I put it back because I am more often than not amused by the emails I get from people who think I am/know Steve Jobs. But overall the article is very close to the truth and I am very happy with its portrayal of the website.

Ha, and the picture — no, it wasn’t a professional photographer who flew from San Jose to my home in Paris to take a picture of me. It’s actually by one of my best friends who is also a pretty good amateur photographer at his lost hours.

Anyway, an interesting remark to close this narcissistic piece. Here are two screenshots of my Analytics stats:

This first one shows you the buzz effect after a number of tech blogs (including Cult of Mac, MacLife, LifeHacker/Gizmodo, and Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Fortune/CNN) discovered pictures of Steve Jobs sitting at his home office on all about Steve Jobs.com back in November 2010.

Now the second one:

That’s right, Mike’s article in the San Jose Mercury News, one of Silicon valley’s most prestigious publication, had practically zero effect on the traffic to my website. It certainly flattered my ego and helped my personal branding, but that’s about it.

I think those two screenshots speak louder than any essay or study on the future of print vs. online, at least as far as tech news are concerned.

 

 

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