Brian's Brain

If you haven't yet had a chance to do so, take a few minutes out of your busy Friday (as a means of easing yourself into the weekend, courtesy of humour) and check out the reader comments on my recently published Sony PlayStation 3 three-part review. After you finish (thanks, by the way, to the readers who rushed to my defense via their kind public feedback words), prepare to chuckle again as you read Wired's writeup "You, Too, Can Be A Fanboy", which ironically I read after I posted my writeup.

I'd like to publicly respond to the inquiries within some of those comments:

• My paycheck, my only paycheck, comes from Reed Business Information.
• One of the key reasons I decided to accept EDN's job offer a decade-plus ago was because of the tall, thick and inpenetrable brick wall between editorial and sales, a journalistic ethics-ensuring barrier that if anything has grown more solid in subsequent years.
• And anyway, I'm not aware that Microsoft (or Nintendo or Sony, for that matter) is an advertiser in EDN. I don't know for sure whether or not this is the case, because I make it a point not to read the print edition of the magazine; instead, I peruse the ad-less PDFs of writeups from the website. This is because I explicitly do not want to know who does and doesn't advertise in the magazine, so that my editorial output isn't even subconsciously influenced by this factor.

Oh, and 'Amplifier', who claimed that the 'PlayStation' brand was unstoppable because it was "about as powerful as "AOL" brand"? Great comparison, dude (or dudette)....yeah, that AOL brand is really rockin' right now....nothing like inadvertently making my point for me, huh? I enjoyed your comments most of all ;-)

Yes, I know the Xbox 360 and Live Marketplace initially exhibited similar attention exclusivity, but that got fixed nine months ago (or said another way, more than five months prior to the launch of the PS3) with the addition of background download support.