Paul Scrivens, who I recently met at the Blog Business Summit, has an interesting post on Being the Hype, making the case that hype can be overblown, like the boy who cried wolf, leading to negative effects: "If you continue to hype every product you release, hype will no longer be generated. This is what 37signals was doing wrong in my opinion. It's not that they are releasing a number of products or that many of them, some will argue, share the same qualities. It's that instead of just telling us that a new app will be launching next week or simply just launching it, we get a taste of our 4th product marketing speech which begins to wear on people. Apple gets hype because they don't bother hyping anything themselves. The rumor sites take care of that. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft hypes every new OS and has no chance of living up to their own hype." Amen. [tags: paul+scrivens]