Blog Critic News - eBay's Whitman, Skype's Zennstrom and the new Zunes

At Vator.tv, we think the world is ready for a new approach to covering the technology industry in general and Silicon Valley in particular. In our view, tech coverage through the years has been, in a word, boring.

It's been boring because it's been largely lacking in the humor department. And it's been lacking humor because it's tended to view the executives, investors and bankers who ply the tech trade alternately as halo-adorned visionaries or as peddlers of kool-aid, rather than as real people. Visionaries and kool-aid peddlers can change the world, no doubt. But they're not funny. People are funny. 

To be sure, we know that the proliferation of blogs focused on the tech industry has moved the needle in the right direction. The best of them have pulled back the curtain and undressed many characters who had previously moved within bubbles of teflon. This has helped counter the resentful whispers that journalists at traditional media companies have uttered about the blogosphere -- namely, that their main editorial goal is simply to drive traffic to other blogs.

With all this in mind, we are launching a new weekly show called Blog Critic News. Each week, we'll call out the real people behind the biggest tech stories and highlight the blog postings that we feel have added the kind of insightful perspective that big media conglomerates simply can't provide without buying up their own startup news sites (anyone seen Newsvine?).

In this, our first episode, we look at why it took so long for eBay's Meg Whitman to realize how much she overpaid for Skype. We wonder if Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype (and Kazaa) founder Niklas Zennstrom has any sympathy for the plight of the Minnesota woman who lost a $220,000 file-sharing lawsuit to the recording industry; and check in on Microsoft's rollout of its latest Zune models. 

We hope you enjoy it and remind you that, since this is our pilot episode, it can only get funnier. 

(Warning to viewers: this is a work of satire, riddled with cheap character assassination, specious analysis and blatant errors regarding the management of eBay and Microsoft and the true worth of companies who give their product away for free.)