Valleywag
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy Theories
Most Popular Stories
- Convicted murderer Hans Reiser fingers corpse in Oakland Hills (1,821 views, 8 comments)
- The return of Paul Maritz, the Microsoft menace (1,738 views, 3 comments)
- TechCrunch's secret Digg army (1,480 views, 6 comments)
- How to bitch about your big break in the New York Times (9 comments, 839 views)
great moments in journalism
Phonies line up for TV cameras outside Apple Stores
People used to wait in line at consumer electronics stores because they truly, deeply, fervently wanted to be first to score a hot new gadget. Now? The early birds in line several days early outside Apple Stores for the most part aren't Apple junkies. They're media-seekers who desperately want attention, not an iPhone. Would-be media disruptors are happy to provide. Check out this post from New Zealand: "Sorry for the video quality but I wanted to get this online before the mainstream media does." How very subversive of you. This is all great for Apple — you don't see any Greg Packer types pretending to be in line for an LG Dare. More »
Your Privacy Is An Illusion
What's obscene? If you ask Google, less and less every day
Do Floridians search more passionately for "bukkake" than "ethanol"?. Nobody thought to enter that data into the public record until Clinton McCowen, the proprietor of CumOnHerFace.com, was slapped with obscenity charges by the State of Florida, and his defense attorney turned to Google for aid. Last week, when the defendant settled out of court and accepted a three-to-five-year prison sentence, it seemed like the Google Trends defense was dead in the water. But McCowen's lawyer, Lawrence Walters, still believes Google's positive response to his subpoena — soliciting the frequency of sex-related search terms by community — bodes a shift in American morality. Simply put: Google has forced us all to confront just how kinky we are. More »
Caption Contest
Steve Jurvetson, rude boy
"Omar first introduced me to dub reggae many moons ago, and I still have his 'Omar’s Dub' tapes," writes Draper Fisher Jurvetson VC Steve Jurvetson about his friend pictured here. Have a better caption? The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "The first child Google engineered from a 23andMe 'sample kit' waits for its brethren to hatch" by The_Chris2.0.(Photo from Steve Jurvetson)
The 250
FriendFeed spawns yet another A-list no one reads
FriendFeed, a largely unused aggregation service for other Web 2.0 services most people don't use, has become the new hotspot for tech's roving band of self-styled A-listers. There's good reason: FriendFeed's user base is catching up fast on Twitter. But yesterday, blogger Yuval Atzmon posted an informal FriendFeed 250 that's already replaced the Twitter Top 100 as the place to be for self-promoters (and for people who like to argue methodologies.) The good news is there's still room for you. A mere 280 followers will put you on the list. But hurry. By August, FriendFeed will look exactly like every other Web 2.0 list ever made. One in three posts will be about a tech conference, and one in five will explain why because of FriendFeed, John Markoff at the New York Times is really scared for his job.
Google
New 3D virtual world Lively launches
Lively from Google is yet another 3D virtual world, kind of like Second Life but as yet unpopulated by furries or Goreans — completely virgin virtual land for griefers from like the clever goons at Something Awful to terrorize! But rather than an expansive, open-ended universe, Lively is a collection of individual "rooms" which you can then embed on third-party Web sites. Though it's not a browser-based application but a Windows-only download — so you'll have to wait just a bit before I can confirm whether or not you can "cyber," gamble or run ponzi schemes. You can, at least, feel up other users: More »
blogging for dollars
Sick of blogging? Data says you can quit now
Valley marketer Louis Gray and Outside the Beltway editor James Joyner agree: Blog links account for less and less of the traffic to their sites, falling an order of magnitude behind search engines. "Search engines, social media sites, and aggregators delivered much more traffic than links from very popular blogs such as Scobleizer, TechCrunch, and Micro Persuasion," Joyner summarizes from Gray's data. His theory? The geeks who read blogs all day in 2003 are now following Twitter and other speedier media.
rumormonger
Did Slide get rival RockYou's Facebook apps punished?
Traffic to RockYou's popular Facebook widget Super Wall declined from 2.1 million to 600,000 daily users over the last few days, as Facebook blocked the widget from sending users notifications and messages, claiming RockYou had violated Facebook's privacy policies. RockYou CTO Jia Shen told Inside Facebook the allegations and their punitive response are "slightly debatable": More »
silicon valley users guide
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman needs Ted Dziuba's guide to weight loss
In today's Los Angeles Times, reporter Jessica Guynn calls LinkedIn founder, Facebook investor and PayPal veteran Reid Hoffman "Silicon Valley's biggest social networker." Guynn means that just the way you'd think, reporting that Hoffman gains about 10 pounds per year, refuses to see a trainer and "doesn't step on scales." Some might deem Guynn's language rude, but since Hoffman's unhealthy-seeming weight is exactly the kind of thing everyone in the Valley won't admit they talk about, we're rather glad she called attention to it. Fortunately for Hoffman, Persai cofounder Ted Dziuba is ready with an intervention. Lately, Dziuba's been writing servicey items about coder life on TedDziuba.com instead of eviscerating TechCrunch-covered startups on Uncov. A recent post is perfect for the rotund Hoffman. But at 725 words, "An engineer's guide to weight loss," the busy Hoffman will never take the time to read it. Below, a slimmer, 100-word version Hoffman can squeeze into his schedule. More »
Movies
Fake technology company most believable part of "Kabluey" premise
Kabluey, one of those twee Indiewood flicks that will make you laugh while tugging at your heartstrings (and give former Friends star Lisa Kudrow a chance to show her serious actress chops) is based on the real-life complications of taking care of a family while the father is fighting a war on the other side of the planet. Those details come from filmmaker Scott Prendergast's experience watching his sister-in-law cope with the fallout of her husband and his brother being deployed to Iraq. Which is believable, but not something I'd milk for laughs. More »
Startups
Pets.com CEO Julie Wainwright's new business plan: embracing failure
Julie Wainwright is back. The marketing brain behind the Pets.com sock puppet, Wainwright is now touting a me-too Web 2.0 site called SmartNow, which features user-submitted videos and articles from experts, targeted at women like Wainwright. But how many women are there like Wainwright, really? More »
Discrimination
Venture capital remains dominated by white men
Shall we all pretend to be shocked by a new study that shows that the venture-capital industry is overwhelmingly — no, disgustingly white and male? A National Venture Capital Association survey found that 88 percent of general partners — the people who can actually greenlight an investment at a firm — are white, and 86 percent are male. On the VC blog Private Equity Hub, Alex Haislip takes hope, noting that the junior ranks of VC firms are more diverse — and that some less lily-white firms have delivered good returns lately. Greed and the relentless herd-following instinct should take care of the industry's inequities, he seems to argue. Good luck with that! More »
the chart
Vimeo without founder Jakob Lodwick: quite successful
Is IAC's Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by bizarrely charismatic (and just plain bizarre) New York entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, missing its founder? In a word, no. Lodwick lost his job due to insubordination last November; his dare-you-to-sue-me funding of an IAC employee's music startup, in an apparent violation of his noncompete agreement, is right in line with the nose-thumbing he did while on the job. We heard IAC finally fired Lodwick because he would blow off meetings with upper management when it wanted to talk to him about things like marketing and growth. So who got it right — IAC chairman Barry Diller's suits, or the wannabe iconoclast? More »
Valleyspeak
Merriam-Webster's new dictionary words for 2008
Last year, the lexicographers at dictionary maker Merriam-Webster proclaimed w00t its Word of the Year. For 2008, they've added fanboy, webinar, netroots, and pretexting to the lexicon. Who cares? I do, because I find Merriam's online dictionary, more consistent, more focused, and better written than its wikified open dictionary or the Google results for define:pretexting. There'll be 100 or so new words in the Merriam-Webster's 2008 edition, due September 1. Meanwhile, I called the company and got the 25 most populist of the new entries as a teaser: More »
loren feldman
"TechNigga" comic's made-for-Valleywag video
Disgraced video comic Loren Feldman has been removed from Verizon's phone and broadband video-on-demand library. I wouldn't compare the guy to Lenny Bruce, but this much is true: Feldman, a member of both the Screen Actors Guild and the risqué Friars Club in New York, goes out of his way to be offensive and sometimes it works. OK, so sometimes it doesn't. His year-old "TechNigga" clip, which Verizon didn't even carry, got Feldman axed from the lineup. "TechNigga" consisted of a Jew portraying a stereotypical black thug — booze, dope, hookers, etc. What could go wrong? Far funnier and less awwwwwwkward is Feldman's puppet interview with Jason Calacanis's bulldogs from April. The puppet host is a spoof of marketing consultant Shel Israel. At this point, you either know all about Shel and his contempt for Feldman, or you don't care. Just watch the video. More »
social news
TechCrunch's secret Digg army
How do TechCrunch stories make it to Digg's front page so often? With a little help from its friends, of course. Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley, now a foe of editor Michael Arrington, posted a screenshot from his inbox revealing what Riley calls "The TechCrunch Digg Club." It includes four writers from TechCrunch proper; seven from gadgets blog CrunchGear; two from TechCrunchIT, Arrington's incomprehensible enterprise-tech spinoff; plus two or three interns. More »
Stocks
Wall Street analyst slashes Hollywood, making room for equally obnoxious new content gatekeepers
The six big TV-and-movie conglomerates — CBS, Viacom, Disney, NBC Universal, News Corp. and Time Warner — suffered in a handicap yesterday by Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente, who downgraded the companies' ratings and stock-price targets. CBS fared worst, but even News Corp. didn't come out unscathed, and all six saw their respective share prices drop on the news. DiClemente's "color" had a familiar refrain — while DVD sales are only down 5 percent over 2007, the analyst doesn't expect digital downloads and other new media distribution revenues to keep pace with the decline in lucrative sales of packaged plastic. In other words, movies and television will take the same hit that music labels and newspaper publishers have. But what does this mean to your average plebe blogger with a script treatment busy shooting sketches on digital cameras and looking for a break? More »
11:40 AM on Tue Jul 8 2008
By Jackson West
267 views,
7 comments
Latest by jackparsons: @Spy from the Land of Rainpeople: Add "clickhonkeys" or whatever it's called to the list. more »
Justin
Music-startup founder leaked damning deal memo by confusing email with Tumblr
Yesterday, we asked why Justin Ouellette, the founder of Brooklyn's favorite music-sharing site, Muxtape, would post the terms of Jakob Lodwick's investment in Muxtape to his personal blog — especially when those terms might prove dangerous for Ouelette's friend Lodwick, an oddly charismatic tech entrepreneur who had a frosty falling out with IAC chief Barry Diller? The answer: Because even for the founder of a Web service that's grown to 140,000 users in just 5 months, sometimes email is hard. Writes Ouellette in a post replacing the now removed image: More »
valleywag calendar
Anti-social equals anti-progress
Crowd surfing is not just for rock stars. Tonight discuss how to harness group wisdom with the darlings of Web 2.0 at Search SIG’s panel on Social Search, Discovery, and Community Wisdom at the Cubberly Community Center in Palo Alto. If you are finding yourself caught outside of the in crowd, join TechSoup’s posse of social innovators at Net Tuesday. Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter and Deb Levine of I.S.I.S. are taking on the millennial malaise in Mobilizing Generation 2.0: How Nonprofits Can Use Technology to Engage Youth. Still not sure you can tap into the group mentality? Maybe you just aren’t communicating. To get a sneak peak at the next big buzz word, head over to Books Inc. in the Marina where the editor of Daily Candy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should will be filling in for dictionary.com with a little wordplay and champagne. More »
In Brief
Terry Semel Woos Dubai's Billions in Planned Return to Moguldom
FROM DEFAMER.COM: While DreamWorks, Lionsgate and even Cash-Machine Manoj all have Indian capital to thank for their varying degrees of independence, Terry Semel is apparently courting a few billion dollars from Dubai as he nears a deal to acquire the management giant (and burgeoning media player) IMG. More »
breakdowns
Google Docs goes down just in time for morning meetings
Google Docs, one of the permanent-beta applications that Google offers as a free, lightweight alternative to Microsoft Office, went down for a brief spell just before 9 a.m. While it's back up now, as a reader pointed out, it's "Not very convenient when you have important files you need for a meeting." Welcome to the future of cloud computing, where instead of a blue screen of death, you get a server error message.
Design
Redesigned Facebook launches next week, really this time
Facebook users will be able to "start exploring" the site's controversial new redesign on July 14, founder Mark Zuckerberg's flacks announced yesterday, through one of their typically annoying Facebook updates. (Have they never heard of email in Palo Alto?) A full, official launch will come a week later, in time for Zuckerberg's keynote address at the company's F8 event, a gathering for developers. Facebook had originally announced it would launch its redesign in early April, but that was before independent Facebook-application makers got a look at the changes and completely freaked out. More »
hires
The return of Paul Maritz, the Microsoft menace
Why so gloomy, VMware investors? The company's stock drop, while likely driven more by the virtualization software maker's newly slenderized forecasts and the resignation of its founder, seems like a slap in the face to incoming CEO Paul Maritz. And that would be a shame, since VMware is now getting one of the princes of the software world as its boss — and just in time, as it's facing tough competition from Microsoft, where Maritz used to work. More »
Porn
Ashley Alexandre Dupré drops suit, Joe Francis to take his cut
Well after the Eliot Spitzer scandal has subsided and bronzed call girl Ashley Dupré no longer makes headlines, she's dropped her case against Girls Gone Wild's entrepreneurial ex-con Joe Francis over the online release of a video characteristic of Francis's oeuvre. We can only hope the young Dupré, pictured here in her high school yearbook, walked away with not just a settlement up front but points on the back end. Sadly, the market cap on her performance can have only been diminished by the wait — I can imagine a band manager-type, buoyed by well-bankrolled rap videos, holding out for mainstream money. More »
exits
VMware CEO and founder resigns, shares drop 30 percent
Palo Alto server virtualization software maker VMware'scofounder Diane Greene resigned today, effective immediately. Virtualization is technology that allows one server to operate like its two or more, and it was thought to be a hot growth sector. Key word being "was." The company, which EMC spun off in an IPO only last August, also lowered its revenue growth expectations for the quarter below 50 percent. More »
loren feldman
