Valleywag
blogging for dollars
blogging for dollars
sex trade
How a Stanford grad flunked the escort test
Geeks always think they will trick the system by being smart. They fail. It's no different when intensely brainy women take up escorting over the Internet, like Stanford Law graduate Cristina Warthen, in court this month facing federal tax evasion charges. As sophisticated as the sex trade is, there's still no magic solution for how to hide the money. The Feds claim Warthen hid cash in a safe-deposit box, her apartment, a storage locker, and even law-school textbooks they found in the trash. I've watched clients nerd out over this on message boards for years, trying to come up with the foolproof plan. There isn't one. More »
Details, Details
Correct out-of-touch New York style rag's Internet gossip!
It's complicated. God, is it ever. The same October Details story that follows around New York's "Internet playboys" and their bicoastal hangers-on runs with this chart of who dated, funded, or hated in this overdocumented side of the Web scene. So sweet to know we're not the only ones keeping a scorecard, but one of its subjects, Caroline McCarthy, claims there's inaccuracies! Let's do Details and the kids recently fanning their fameballs from the coverage a favor and fix it up then. Ready? Let loose in the comments with your errata.
Social Networks
John McCain, defender of Internet children everywhere
Congress has passed a bill compelling registered sex offenders to submit "email addresses, instant message addresses and other identifying Internet information" to law enforcement. The legislation is sponsored by John McCain, who is not uncoincidentally running for president. The bill, which has passed both houses of Congress and is expected to be signed into law by Bush, aims to protect children from sexual advances on social network sites. Facebook, MySpace, and others are meant to cross-check their user databases with the federal list, and, in the parlance of these types of laws, "delete online predators." But these bills are so broken from the start: what's to keep a past sex offender from just using multiple online identities? Oh, and then there's that whole sticky issue of protecting freedom of speech for those who've served their criminal sentences. Courts in Utah — yes, that Utah — have just ruled on that, providing bad news for those who supported the McCain bill. More »
TMI Weekly
NextNewNetworks now supplying Julia Allison with better lighting
OMG you guys gadgets and girls and hey it's the rich girl from Los Gatos and her iPhone and her friends and one is Julia Allison! Julia Allison you guys! Who is totally not the point of this story, because wow NextNewNetworks is really producing this? More »
All The Sad Young Startup Men
Introducing New York's own Web 2.0 "playboys"
The golden boys of New York's start-up scene are just as flashbulb-driven as the women who dote on them, a new Details mag feature reveals. Mostly they followed Tumblr's enfant terrible, David Karp, and his heterosexual beard Charles Forman, who pimps "social gaming" at iminlikewithyou but is still better known as last season's Mr. Julia Allison. There's a guest appearance by Kevin Rose, which you can just tell is going to get messy. He's inserted towards the end as the wise old sage, warning these new guys away from male Internet fameballing: More »
great moments in journalism
Current TV's Twitter-enhanced live feed of the Obama/McCain debate on Friday "broke new ground," according to Wired blogger Sarah Lai Stirland. But it's been nearly a month since the September 8 premiere of CNN's Rick Sanchez Direct, in which Sanchez turns the camera on Twitter for the modern version of man-on-the-street quotes. How it works: You add Rick. He adds you back. You then tweet live during his show. He may pullquote you, or run the live stream onscreen. Sanchez, currently following nearly 18,000 people, already drew attention for his live tweet-reading during Hurricane Gustav, when Twitterers filed reported facts to millions of viewers. More »
Wired lauds Current TV for copying CNN
Current TV's Twitter-enhanced live feed of the Obama/McCain debate on Friday "broke new ground," according to Wired blogger Sarah Lai Stirland. But it's been nearly a month since the September 8 premiere of CNN's Rick Sanchez Direct, in which Sanchez turns the camera on Twitter for the modern version of man-on-the-street quotes. How it works: You add Rick. He adds you back. You then tweet live during his show. He may pullquote you, or run the live stream onscreen. Sanchez, currently following nearly 18,000 people, already drew attention for his live tweet-reading during Hurricane Gustav, when Twitterers filed reported facts to millions of viewers. More »
le web
Feel the love, even if it's kind of uncomfortable, at Le Web 2008
Dashingly awkward entrepreneur Loic Le Meur was last seen making conferencegoers squish up in their seats with his "How to find the G spot" presentation earlier this year at Supernova. This December, Le Meur may bring yet more sensual discomfort to the attendees of his Le Web conference, organized by his wife Geraldine. The couple promise sessions on "Platform Love" and "Big Love" and "Love Entrepreneurship." Put on some Al Green before diving into the full invitation below: More »
Cute Startup Alert
Get Satisfaction all about customers pleasing themselves
Cra-zazy customers hardly need to be told where they can take their complaints: They just need an outlet. Get Satisfaction aims to automate the bitchfest. Bonus: Its president is Lane Becker, one of Valleywag's most lovably lubricated crush objects — clothed, bespectacled and interviewed in this clip from Web 2.0 in New York. Becker's founding cohotties are Thor Muller and Amy Muller. The "frictionless" solution to demanding customers, who will blog about your inadequate service as soon as look at you, was hatched out of the mayhem caused by their mail-order grab bag business for previously free conference tchotchkes, Valleyschwag.
sex trade
What this week's news means for high-end escorts, take 8
The impending Depression Lite will be a boon to high-end sex workers, researcher Sudhir Venkatesh assures Slate readers. Venkatesh has made a name for himself in the post-Freakonomics, après-Spitzer era of hooker metrics, and the high end of the industry is his niche. Venkatesh actually does get that the sex trade is way more about moneyed escapism than anything else. But when he spins off onto the subject of "high-tech" hookers, he loses his credibility. More »
i hate it here
Timeline of a Twitter outage
TWITTER IS DOWN NOW IT'S NOT OH MY GOD. A nightmare in screenshots! More »
sex trade
Porn palace in San Francisco houses just another startup
San Francisco's Kink.com operates just like any other startup — young folks everywhere, DJ booth in the break room, plucky office vibe — except there's way more ass-fucking. That's the story from inside The Armory, the imposing 200,000-sq. ft. "castle" at Mission and 14th Streets. The Armory's dungeonlike interior is the base of operations for CEO Peter Acworth's fetish-porn production company. What began as a shy British boy's experiments — building "fucking machines" and getting girls from Craigslist to ride them — has bloomed into a business that allowed him to buy his own playland for $14.5 million. Kink.com is the cover story for this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian. If you're not up to speed on the whole fucking-machine scene, here's a one-minute SFW text primer: More »
Yahoo
Mad Men's Don Draper lends dated persuasion to Yahoo's ad platform pitch
Adding some actual potency to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and president Sue Decker's pitch to Madison Avenue this morning: Jon Hamm, star of AMC's weekly ode to the world of 1960's ad guys, Mad Men. Yang and Decker were likely hoping Hamm's shine would rub off on them, just by having him in the room this morning to deliver lines like "what my friend Jerry Yang is about to share with you will rock the advertising world in the same way that radio and television did way back when." More »
sex trade
Highly available ladies, for a fee, at Oracle conference
Larry Ellison didn't provide escorts for attendees at this week's Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Well, certainly not for all of them. But with 45,000 geeks — the kind of geeks who can afford Oracle's software — in town, it's bonus week for local working girls. "Jet-setting adventuress" Kimberlee Cline eyed a few obviously scalable women gliding in and out of the W Hotel, a short stiletto strut from the show. Thanks, Kimberlee — and whatever you do, don't say "exponentially" to a DBA unless you're sure it's not more of a step function.
Danah Boyd
Microsoft hires social network wonk, lets her keep her Mac
The 2.0 crowd's favorite social media academic, Danah Boyd — she types it as "danah boyd" because it looks prettier — is going over to Microsoft's newest research team in Boston (read: Harvard and MIT.) She's already done research at both Yahoo and Google, so the move makes sense. Even though Boyd once likened Microsoft to Germany: More »
i hate it here
When you're too good to just work at home
This is just so busted, where do I begin? I needed somewhere to duck into downtown to work for an hour before going to Marissa Mayer's favorite hair salon. There's Wi-Fi there, but that's a bonus: not a reason to camp out. Even bloggers have boundaries. But not this guy, who actually worked from the cafe I ended up in on what looks like a laptop with a broken screen. Instead of replacing the laptop — these are lean times after all — he just brought his own external monitor. More »
We Read the New York Times So You Don't Have To
Worried about Twitter? So was Socrates
Today in Twitter Journalism, it's our man at the Times, Damon Darlin. You've probably heard about, but haven't read, lovable IT crank Nick Carr's anti-Internet essay, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" Darlin helpfully pares Carr's 4,175-word article down to a single tweet. Then, contrary to what you'd expect from the Gray Lady's newsroom, he says there's a basic human fear over new communications technologies that goes all the way back to the original master of irony. We fed Darlin's essay into our shiny new 100-word-version machine: More »
Politics
