Windows Phone Thoughts: The Power of Tech Enthusiast Sites

"Mr. Brome and cybersleuths like him are at the center of a teeming world of online cellphone gossip that is taking on an influential role in the $100 billion industry. The sites have emerged over the past couple of years, riding the global boom in the gadgets as their position in popular culture grows. With names like engadget.com and mobiletracker.net, the sites draw users capable of spending hours debating everything from a certain cellphone's battery life to the location of its volume button. The sites used to draw protests and legal threats from companies unhappy at seeing their secret product plans publicly aired. Now, cellphone makers are starting to court them, as their popularity surges to several hundred thousand users a month for some sites."

The article focuses mostly on the phone sites, but it does mention yours truly:

"Jason Dunn, who started a site devoted to palm-sized personal computers several years ago from his Calgary home, regularly gets invited to Microsoft Corp.'s campus in Redmond, Wash."

Damn, no link! ;-) At any rate, tech enthusiast sites are certainly a powerful force in the marketplace - I know that I look to my fellow enthusiast sites for reviews and opinions on things before I buy a product, and I don't have very much trust in PC World, C|NET, or any other mainstream tech news site. Where do you fall? Survey time!