If you are writing about technology for a living, do you actually know what you are talking about? Please honestly take my simple test. It should describe a bunch of reasonable expectations about technology. These expectations are really the minimal expectations that many of us have in our minds for reasonable competence in computing.
- Can you describe the broad low-level differences between a 32-bit and 64-bit processor and how these differences effect software development and software choice for the end user?
- Can you say what the underlying system architecture is for Mac OS X?
- If you wanted to talk to a database, what syntax would you usually write your query in?
- If you had a database table of all the users of a web app like Gmail or Basecamp, which field would most likely to have been stored as a salted hash? Can you describe what a salted hash is in broad laymans terms?
- Can you identify what programming languages are used by software developers writing for the iPhone, Android and Palm Pre platforms?
- What system technologies are CUDA and OpenCL attempting to make available for software developers?
- The programming languages Clojure, Groovy and Scala all run on which platform?
- True or false: programmers tend to use the same programming languages at home on their side-projects as they do at work on their day-job projects. Bonus points if you can explain your reasoning.
- What recent change in PC hardware design is prompting significant rethinking in how software is written?
- What does "CSS" stand for and what is it used for?
I'm not expecting technology journalists to be able to answer all of these. But I don't think it's justifiable to have a situation where people are pontificating professionally about technology in the news media if they cannot answer at least one or two of them.
My reasoning is very simple: if you are a journalist writing about technology and you have absolutely no experience of what software developers, designers, hardware engineers, testers and hackers do, you are at risk of being taken in by frauds, hucksters and publicists. I'll show you how with a few examples.
First, Google Wave. This has been talked about heavily by people in the technology press. One aspect that doesn't get covered much is how Wave as a distributed system and open source community works. For Google to achieve the lofty goal of producing a collaboration platform rich enough to supplant many common uses of e-mail, they've got to allow Wave to be open source, an open standard and to be programmable through an API. They are doing all these things. If you are weighing up the likelihood of Google's success at fostering an open source community of collaboration around Wave, actually looking at the technical details and the API and then comparing those to, say, Twitter or Flickr, the difference(tbc.)