These past couple of weeks have been rich in events. CES in Las Vegas and now MacWorld.

But on the sidelines of these big mass gathering events there always something that goes horribly wrong. The major mishap at CES last week was when TV’s started to turn off magically. Some guy then proceeded to turn it back on, just to watch it go off again a couple of seconds later.

The prank by itself has no major consequences, except annoying those working at the booths. But when someone takes responsibility for such prank,publishes the incriminating evidence on video and confess to the whole thing on their website, things get out of control fast.

The culprits got banned from the event and even tried to explain themselves by referring to the whole incident as journalism.
Nobody cared. That’s what happened during the Gizmodo coverage of CES.

I’ve personally did similar stuff during computer expo’s that I’ve attended. To my defense I was young and was there as an anonymous guy.

The consequences were none and the thrill of misbehaving was huge. So I truly understand what motivated Gizmodo guys to do that kind of silly stuff.

The consequences for Gizmodo were on the contrary quite different. Not only were they banned from CES but they got virtually crucified by every blogger and news outlet across the globe.

Sometimes I like to use the old gray matter for a change, and I got thinking about this incident. Nobody talked about Endgadget coverage of CES, but everyone is talking about Gizmodo. Bad publicity is better than no publicity.

Do you agree with my theory that this was all a setup to enable Gizmodo to stand out from the crowd, or was just a prank?