Comments from Owen Thomas

Owen Thomas clipped Wikipedia board vote eliminates longtime foe of site's commercialization

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:07:07 PDT

The nonprofit parent of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, has dumped Florence Devouard as its chair and replaced her with board member Michael Snow, while also appointing Ting Chen, an editor of Wikipedia's German and Chinese editions. Venture capitalist Roger McNamee

Owen Thomas clipped Depraved pictures land Facebook user two-year jail sentence

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:18:58 PDT

If you can't do the time, don't post photos on Facebook celebrating the crime. That's the harsh lesson 20-year-old college student Joshua Lipton learned after a judge handed him a two-year sentence for severely injuring a woman while driving drunk.

Owen Thomas clipped Valleywag chooses advertisers as new object of love

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:19:14 PDT

Dearest advertisers: If we had a spraypaint can, we would graffiti our love — not hate — for you all over the sidewalks of the Mission. Sadly, we're all out. Thanks go to: Chevy Fuel Solutions, Eve Online, HP TouchSmart,

Owen Thomas clipped AMD CEO Hector Ruiz out

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:30:40 PDT

The CEO who, for a moment, turned the tide in AMD's long struggle with rival chipmaker Intel, is out, replaced by COO Dirk Meyer. The company recently posted a $1.2 billion loss. [San Jose Mercury News]

Owen Thomas clipped Silicon Alley Insider publisher raises money

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:56:17 PDT

Silicon Alley Media, disgraced tech-stocks analyst Henry Blodget's recently formed blog collective, has raised a modest $1 million from wealthy investors, Tech Confidential reports. The A round's A list included Tacoda cofounder Dave Morgan and former Wall Street Journal publisher

Owen Thomas clipped Slide shows off the wealth at third anniversary

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:25:48 PDT

Attention, rival Facebook-application developers: Slide has money in the bank, and your widget startup doesn't. Such was the unsubtle message of Slide's third anniversary, held last night at San Francisco's newly opened Contemporary Jewish Museum. It was the first tech-company

Owen Thomas clipped MySpace incubator succeeds at reeling in wayward employee

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:23:58 PDT

Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear

Owen Thomas clipped The sad thing is, we think Digg CEO Jay Adelson might actually think he's Tom Cruise

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:49:30 PDT

A recent photo of sunglass-sporting Digg CEO Jay Adelson with slightly more nerdy Google cofounder Larry Page sent reader theodp on an '80s nostalgia trip. (Photo by Reuters, photoillustration by theodp)

Owen Thomas commented on This Anheuser-InBev merger isn't for you, online publishers

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:44:02 PDT

@Lizstless: Money spent building's one own website certainly forms part of the larger marketing budget -- but it's not online advertising as such, so it wouldn't count in the figures discussed.

Owen Thomas clipped Bloomberg sale spells profitable future of journalism by numbers

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:00:18 PDT

Merrill Lynch, under financial pressure, is selling one of its more valuable assets, a 20 percent stake in Bloomberg, the financial-information business, for $4.5 billion to $5 billion. The sale marks the business's value at $22 billion to $25 billion

Owen Thomas clipped Yahoo hires controversial Twitter architect for troubled project

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:28:45 PDT

Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect

Owen Thomas clipped Google cofounder funnels money to wife's startup through Michael J. Fox charity

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:37:01 PDT

Google employees must avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, according to the company's code of conduct. But Sergey Brin is exempt from such bureaucratic trifles. The cofounder skirted ethical lines when he loaned money to 23andMe, a

Owen Thomas clipped How pissed off are Yahoos? Ask their janitors, who'd like them to stop peeing in the sink

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:13:55 PDT

"PLEASE STOP PEEING IN THE SINKTHANK YOU!FACILITIES" How low do things have to go before workers start treating their office like a public toilet? This low: A sign posted in a bathroom at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale accuses employees of urinating

Owen Thomas clipped Is Google's "work hard, play hard" recruiting code for age discrimination?

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:25:00 PDT

"We have a preference for those who like to work and play hard," the search giant candidly informs potential candidates for openings for a compliance manager, senior internal auditor, financial project analyst, senior internal controls auditor, management accountant, internal audit

Owen Thomas clipped Jerry Yang, Yahoo's indispensably dispensable man

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:43:44 PDT

Will either Jerry Yang or Steve Ballmer still be in their CEO chairs this time next year? Both have thoroughly embarrassed themselves in their handling of Microsoft's on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again acquisition talks with Yahoo. The tide of public opinion,

Owen Thomas clipped The bubble in personal-finance websites

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:21:12 PDT

AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes

Owen Thomas clipped Is AdBrite coming apart?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:30:39 PDT

A classic move by a startup hoping to recruit an executive is to offer him a board seat. So what to make of Zvents naming AdBrite executive Paul Levine to its board? Levine joined AdBrite, a San Francisco-based ad network,

Owen Thomas clipped How Google could humiliate Viacom in YouTube lawsuit

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:27:10 PDT

Worried that your obsessive kitten-video viewing records on YouTube would be exposed in Viacom's copyright lawsuit against YouTube? You can relax. Google and Viacom lawyers have reached an agreement to anonymize records of usernames and IP addresses in YouTube's video-viewing

Owen Thomas clipped Jimmy Wales, "punk capitalist"?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:46:43 PDT

In a new book, The Pirate's Dilemma, author Matt Mason holds up geek heroes like Linus Torvalds and Jimmy Wales as icons of "punk capitalism." Given Wales's abject failure to profit from Wikipedia or his follow-on venture, Wikia, I'd say

Owen Thomas clipped 5 questions Viacom doesn't want Valleywag to ask Philippe Dauman

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:26:19 PDT

Touchy Viacom flack Jeremy Zweig called Valleywag up to let us know personally that we'd been disinvited from next week's press-only screening of Tropic Thunder. Such a pity! Because we had a list of questions we were going to ask

Owen Thomas clipped Twitter-Summize a classic hire-acquire deal

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:20:24 PDT

Twitter has bought Summize, a search engine which indexes Twitter messages. It's hard to imagine Summize going anywhere else. But this deal is not about "strategic fit" or any such nonsense. No, it's about how the cleverly lazy founders of

Owen Thomas clipped Wall Street Journal cuts hit tech beat

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:06:41 PDT

Even as the New York Times staffs up its technology bureau, the Wall Street Journal is cutting back — at least on some of its higher-priced names. Among the names of layoff victims supplied by a tipster: Jason Fry, online

Owen Thomas clipped Happy Bastille Day, Jean-Louis Gassée

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:57:46 PDT

Some have suggested we observe Bastille Day by giving a shoutout to local Frenchepreneur Loic Le Meur. Sorry, Loic, but we still think you're a guy from Kentucky with a convincingly fake accent. Instead, we're saluting Jean-Louis Gassé. I know

Owen Thomas clipped Viacom unleashes PR thunder on San Francisco's press corps

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:35:22 PDT

Viacom's legal spat with Google has the media conglomerate cast in copyright-hating, freedom-to-upload-videos-loving Silicon Valley as a mustachio-twirling villain, out to expose YouTube viewers' usernames and IP addresses. Bwahahaha! Benighted flack Jeremy Zweig has been reduced to leaving comments on

Owen Thomas commented on Viacom says it never wanted to know all the videos you watched (but it did)

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:59:24 PDT

@G2GdoB2B: According to your commenter record [valleywag.com] most of your comments are pointers to internetevolution.com. You're banned, goodbye!

Owen Thomas clipped The best Google ad ever

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:09:03 PDT

Google has always been weak at marketing, hobbled by a cultishly engineering-centric culture that believes products should promote themselves. It worked for search, but little else. The official list of Google-branded Web services is dizzying in its me-too obscurity. Chipper

Owen Thomas clipped Jimmy Wales, cult leader

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:27:11 PDT

Later this week, Wikipedia is holding its annual, aptly named Wikimania conference in Alexandria, Egypt. Want a preview? Check out this video of Jimmy Wales, cofounder of the world's largest volunteer-run, sneeringly incompetent bureaucracy, playing games with attendees of Foo

Owen Thomas clipped Valley's 150 biggest companies all run by men

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:42:13 PDT

With Diane Greene ousted as the CEO of Silicon Valley software company VMware by a jealous man and replaced by testosterone-laden former Microsoftie Paul Maritz, there's not a single woman running any of the Bay Area's largest 150 companies by

Owen Thomas commented on How to piss off Jimmy Wales

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:36:56 PDT

@G2GdoB2B: That certainly explains his droit de seigneur on any woman mentioned on Wikipedia.

Owen Thomas clipped Barry Diller reveals he still likes them young in Sun Valley

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:46:40 PDT

At Allen & Co.'s annual schmoozefest in Sun Valley, Idaho, there were a lot of regulars, like IAC's Barry Diller — and a few new faces, like Slide CEO Max Levchin. Julia Boorstin of CNBC reports that the two were

Owen Thomas clipped Does Nick Denton wish he were Peter Thiel?

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:23:34 PDT

"Thiel makes me sick!" read the note from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. His oddly personal declaration was prompted by a brief in the New York Post about former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel's success as a hedge-fund manager. Thiel will

Owen Thomas clipped Nonprofit business gets into not-so-profitable one

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:31:19 PDT

Is blogging the future of the media business? If so, it's in a very small way. That's what I gather from the purchase by Guardian Media Group, a British ink-on-dead-trees concern, of PaidContent.org for $30 million or so. It's a

Owen Thomas clipped CNBC's Becky Quick joins long line of women emailing Jimmy Wales

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:09:52 PDT

newVideoPlayer("/jimmy_wales_inaccuracies.flv", 506, 423,"");Call it a strange attraction: Women whose Wikipedia entries aren't to their liking just can't seem to resist taking their case to the site's stubbly cofounder, Jimmy Wales. Even CNBC's Becky Quick struck up a correspondence, she admits

Owen Thomas clipped How to piss off Jimmy Wales

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:57:02 PDT

newVideoPlayer("/jimmy_wales_co_founder.flv", 506, 423,""); Watch Jimmy Wales's face as he's introduced in a segment for this morning's episode of Squawk Box on CNBC. Wales has long claimed to be Wikipedia's sole founder — a fact disputed by Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's cofounder. As

Owen Thomas clipped Jimmy Wales namedrops Richard Branson on CNBC

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:37:05 PDT

newVideoPlayer("/jimmy_wales_branson.flv", 506, 423,"");One of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's most charming personality traits is his relentless starfucking. It's a tendency that's exacerbated by his role as spiritual leader of the world's most comprehensive collection of inconsequentially inaccurate details about famous peoples'

Owen Thomas clipped Four moguls walk into a bar

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:28:37 PDT

Google cofounder Larry Page, Yahoo president Sue Decker, ex-Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, and Legg Mason fund manager Bill Miller, who owns large stakes in Google and Yahoo, sat and talked at a corner table at the Sun Valley Lodge, the

Owen Thomas clipped Dan Lyons quits Fake Steve Jobs before the real Steve Jobs drops dead on him

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:39:27 PDT

In humor, timing is everything. And death just ain't that funny. That's why Dan Lyons is quitting the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog. True, he's planning to turn his Fake Steve Jobs schtick into a second book. And his