Gadget wars - geek rivalry at its finest

There is an intense ongoing battle between Engadget and Gizmodo to be the first to deliver gadget news to the masses.

If you're a fan of gadget blogs Engadget.com or Gizmodo.com, you'll have to read the revealing and entertaining feature in this month's Wired magazine about the intense rivalry between the two.

This year's CES show in Las Vegas was used to illustrate the seriousness with which the editors or the two blogs take their goal of being the first to bring gadget news to the masses.

I've been in the CES press room in the past and seen these mainly US teams of tech bloggers racing around with video cameras , uploading photos, banging out breaking news stories on their laptops.

I'm still more of an Engadget devotee than a Gizmodo fan, but there's not much in it in terms of their global popularity Technorati ranks Engadget the third most popular blog in the world, Gizmodo comes in at 4th.

Gizmodo deserves credit for its more irreverent take, but for that type of tech coverage you can't beat The Register. Anyway, Gizmodo's Brian Lam has posted an analysis of the Wired piece and seems a bit miffed by the tone of the it which plays up the juvenile nature of some of Gizmodo's content and a particularly funny prank a Gizmodo staffer pulled at CES.

Said Lam in defence: "There are plenty of Giz readers that aren't hardcore geeks but love technology. I'm happy to dress up the tech in humour to get the point to more people, and the let the medicine go down smoother. Not everyone gets that."

While both sites are the most popular gadget blogs in the world, attracting millions of readers each month, they don't feature in the top 100 websites accessed by New Zealanders each month according to Alexa.com.

Gamespot.com, a game review community website and Digg.com, an aggregator for news stories, particularly those with a tech slant, come in at 53 and 67 respectively.

That Alexa list, incidentally, is worth checking out - the usual suspects are there: Google, Google NZ, Yahoo, Trade Me, YouTube and Wikipedia.

But other websites give an indication of what's floating the boat of Kiwi web users. It can pretty much be boiled down to this: search, social networking, banking, online video, online auctions, news, pornography, online dating, Chinese community sites, file sharing, airlines, ISPs, consumer tech companies and universities.

Trendpedia.com is a very good new website which tracks what is hot in the blogosphere and lets you punch in a key word to get a graphical representation of when the word has featured in a blog in the last month. You can then jump easily to the blog post.

What's your preference between Engadget and Gizmodo? Is Alexa a good representation of what we're interested in?