Feature

Should Facebook and MySpace can their salesmen? Only if they're not into this thing called "revenue"

Everyone wants to sell ads like Amazon.com sells books — one click and it's done. Social networks Facebook and MySpace as well as ad networks AdBrite, AdReady and AdItAll have all followed Google to offer advertisers do-it-yourself buying options. The trend has led both the Wall Street Journal and PaidContent to wonder if online ad sales teams will go the way of the dodo, or at least the travel agent. The answer — especially for social networks MySpace and Facebook — is no. More »

9:00 AM on Fri May 9 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
661 views, 2 comments

Latest by Nicholas Carlson: @TechMerkin: Who says it's for ad sales people only? Promise me enough good gossip and maybe Denton will pay for us to eat one of these gorgeous slabs. (Right, Kidder?) more »

toogle many googlers

Why Google's drowning in talent

Looking at the departure of top Google flack Elliot Schrage for Facebook and concluding that the search engine is suffering a "brain drain" is the laziest journalism on the subject I could imagine. The BBC's take on the subject is predictable, citing the same names — Ben Ling, Ethan Beard, even chef Josef Desimone — everyone else does. The most telling thing is actually a Google spokesbot's programmed response: "We have a deep management pool at Google." The problem at Google is not that its brains are going out the drain. It's that the drain is plugged up, and not nearly enough are leaving. More »

5:00 PM on Thu May 8 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,724 views, 1 comment

Latest by ThatKid: All that water imagery has me feeling seasick. more »

erik moeller

Wikipedia's porn-loving No. 2 and his abiding concern for the children

A firestorm is now brewing over pornography on Wikipedia and its accessibility to children. The FBI is investigating the matter, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily reports. Jay Walsh, the spokesman for Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has disclaimed all official responsibility for the contents of the world's greatest compendium of fictional balls. But who oversees the contents of Wikipedia for the foundation? Why, Erik Möller, its deputy director. And Möller is deeply, deeply concerned about the children. More »

9:20 AM on Thu May 8 2008
By Owen Thomas
5,624 views, 20 comments

Latest by XedMac: I have repeatedly told Wales (since july 2006) and others (like Wikipedia's Fred Bauder) about the (self-identified and active) pedophiles on Wikipedia. Jimbo and co really don't give a shit. Here's a few emails: ----------------------- (July 2006, from Xed to Wales) Wales [...] I notice [..] more »

breakdowns

Yahoo's real leadership problem: David Filo

Everyone's piling on Jerry Yang, saying Yahoo's founder-CEO needs to go. Why? The weak stock that provoked Microsoft's unsolicited bid may have been the result of his absentee ownership over the years. But Yahoo's deeper problem is the rot in its technical prowess. And that has everything to do with the quieter cofounder, David Filo. Filo has stayed behind the scenes, but wields considerable power over Yahoo's infrastructure. Requests for more hardware go through him, for example. When Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner joked in an internal all-hands movie about not going through IT because it was "too much paperwork," the audience surely laughed because they knew exactly what he meant. More »

5:00 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Owen Thomas
5,592 views, 31 comments

Latest by BaldDog: @princesscrap: Laurie Mann, is that you? No one else I know could be so clueless about what makes people tick. Didn't you learn anything in those classes that HR made you go to? more »

cubicle culture

Tech's top 10 workspaces

What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities. Also, we like windows and brick. Lots and lots of brick. After spending some time on Office Snapshots, we present the ten best-looking offices in tech, below.
More »

6:00 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
146,436 views, 18 comments

Latest by lwaldal: brick is so unappealing in san francisco. anyone who watched bricks pop out of buildings in san francisco in the 1989 earthquake (ouch!) wouldn't want to be sitting near a brick wall. more »

jerry yang

Yahoo can find its way, but only if it stops searching

Jerry Yang's spin campaign about why the Microsoft bid fell through is transparent. He's not trying to cajole Steve Ballmer back to the negotiating table; he's trying to cover his rear and appease indignant shareholders. The only reason he's so open about accepting a new bid from Microsoft, I think, is that he's not expecting another one to come. Ballmer has more or less said he thinks that Yahoo is worth less and less every day; last Saturday, when Yang flew up with cofounder David Filo to meet with Ballmer one last time, was as close as the two will ever get to agreeing on Yahoo's worth. The thing is, unless Yang makes some dramatic shifts, Ballmer may well be right. More »

1:40 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,023 views, 7 comments

Latest by FungibleMind: @feeldumb "Google would have much more well targeted information from their search data than Yahoo! will ever have." Wrong. Yahoo! has as good or better data than Google in both depth (length of time) and breadth (services, media, platforms), more »

friendfeed

Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed

"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea. More »

9:20 AM on Mon May 5 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,427 views, 11 comments

Latest by Figaro: Friendfeed is for people on ADD/ADHD. Even if you have few friends, the amount of useless data that it gives you is enormous! Stay clear of that tool! It's just an RSS reader with a "social" feel to it. more »

youtube

Google needs to stop being nice and start charging advertisers for distribution

In comments to CNBC's Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared that "advertising itself has value" in YouTube's efforts to achieve profitability. By which he likely means that a well-placed ad can, on occasion, actually help a potential customer find what they're looking for. But you know what else has value? Distribution. Never mind sophisticated ad-targeting technology — YouTube is subsidizing distribution of commercials, and if the company wants to profit, Schmidt might want to think about charging for it instead. More »

12:00 PM on Thu May 1 2008
By Jackson West
370 views, 1 comment

Latest by Magister: Ah... Come on, Jackson... You know that whenever we're watching an episode of Monk or Grey's Anatomy, whenever that commercial for the cruise line plays, we all "look over there", even though there's no "over there" on a full screen. more »

developers

How widgetmakers hijacked Zuckerberg's Facebook redesign

Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the original design, reflecting developer concerns." Below, screenshots of Zuckerberg's original plans for the redesign, annotated with the objections Facebook-application startups raised.
More »

1:20 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,634 views, 7 comments

jackpot

John Battelle takes $22 million in fuck-you money

Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million. More »

1:00 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,937 views, 4 comments

Latest by moore850: Word on the street is, he'll lose most of that in one incredibly bad hand of poker at a suitcase gambling stand by Capitola beach. more »

nerdspotting

Jimmy Wales takes his Wikipedia magic show to New York City

For a province of California, Silicon Valley can be strangely puritan at times. That made it an uncomfortable locale for libertine Libertarian Jimmy Wales, the less-than-saintly founder of Wikipedia. Wales told ex-lover Rachel Marsden, the Canadian controversialist, that he wanted to move to New York to be closer to her. Their affair is over — ended, fittingly, via a posting on Wikipedia — but Wales has relocated to New York all the same. The likely reason has to do with work, or the appearance of work. Although Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, is located in San Francisco, and his ostensible employer, for-profit wiki venture Wikia, has itsheadquarters in a suburb to the south of the city, Wales is charged with running a search-engine project for Wikia which is based in New York. More »

11:40 AM on Tue Apr 29 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,125 views, 42 comments

Latest by Rachel Marsden: @gitahne-o: Damn straight. more »

social networks

Labor complaint against Uloop could set new precedent for Web unionization drives

Are employees who even mention the word "union" on employer-organized internal message boards protected under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935? "This is kind of a new frontier, a gray area," Austin Garrido told me in a conference call with fellow former Uloop employee Sarah Doolittle last week. He and Doolittle claim they were fired after discussing unionization efforts at the college-focused social network. As their complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board continues to be investigated, one thing it could hinge on is if discussion about forming unions online is protected in the same way that posting a flyer in the company break room or chit-chat amongst coworkers on a shop floor. "It's something that really hasn't been considered in the past," Doolittle added. And what about third-party employee networks on sites like Facebook? More »

6:00 PM on Mon Apr 28 2008
By Jackson West
970 views, 7 comments

Latest by It'stheRooo: @giddieup: In your plans for world domination, I do hope you've included your status as sole employee in your sole proprietorship in your -- also sole, I'm sure -- acquisition exit strategy. more »

media

"Google Me" documentary an irony-free, feel-good flick with literal cult appeal

Jim Killeen, former bit-actor and current small businessman, decided to turn the typical act of searching for other people with his same name on Google into the premise for a documentary — Google Me. He tracked down a number of other Jim Killeens around the world, from Australia to Ireland, and spent some time to get to know them and ask them a few questions. The result is an hour and a half of "gee whiz" encounters and white male bonding. See Jim meet Jim! And Jim! And Jim! See Jim get grossed out by vegemite and haggis! See Jim uncomfortable as the particulars of a swingers party are explained! You can watch it all for free on YouTube. But what was the most interesting thing about the film? More »

10:00 AM on Sun Apr 27 2008
By Jackson West
1,739 views, 10 comments

Latest by wryter: About 15 years ago, filmmaker David Berliner's "The Sweetest Sound" had a similar conceit. He tracked down anyone he could find with his name via phonebook, newspaper ads and however else people used to search for each other during those more »

the sum of all human knowledge

Jimmy Wales fails to usher in "new era of politics"

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, occasionally says something clever. Why doesn't his magazine cover politics? "We're not working on an election story," he told MarketWatch. "This comes from my own sense that politics today is being driven by the institutional structure of the past 20 years." Too bad Jimmy Wales hasn't figured this out. Proclaimed the founder of Wikipedia on July 4, 2006:

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Wales's commandments to his followers: Join a mailing list and start editing his advertising-supported Campaigns Wikia site. The wiki has seen all of 14 changes in the last month. Wales himself stopped editing the wiki in September 2006. More »

2:20 PM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By Owen Thomas
705 views, 26 comments

Latest by Troll_2.0: Why didn't Jimmy just stick with his money making porn search, Bomis? Instead he comes up with a "Book of Common Wisdom" for an encyclopedia and has to steal lunch money from kids and defraud investors and the IRS to more »

marc andreessen

Why Marc Andreessen should stick to his keyboard

Every time Marc Andreessen steps away from his desk, disaster abounds. For the father of the Netscape browser, the creator of the Web as we know it, the legendary barefoot geek from the magazine covers, expectations are way too high. And so the disappointments pile up. The Andreessen of today is not the Marc we remember. His pate has gone from mophead to Klingon; his wardrobe, inevitably a tracksuit with leather shoes, is an utter disaster. And when he speaks, he says absolutely nothing. John Battelle, the slickster salesman-interviewer of bubbles past and present, tried to get some fighting words out of Andreessen on stage at Web 2.0 Expo. He failed, utterly, epicly. Andreessen praised Bill Gates, said competing with Microsoft was interesting, described Microsoft-Yahoo as "a good deal." More »

9:40 AM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,762 views, 12 comments

Latest by flyover: @broozier: Males shouldn't be jealous that's a female trait Watch you mad 'cause you push dimes and he sell weight? more »

online advertising

The trouble with CNET

Myopic Wall Street often uses a microscope when it should use a telescope. The rot at Web publisher CNET goes far beyond the particulars of one quarter. Forget the question of by how many cents per share it missed earnings expectations, and ask yourself this: Why isn't CNET gushing cash? Its established brands in tech news and reviews should be printing money. No wonder hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to unseat its board. I'm not sure Jana has any plan, other than throwing the boardroom rascals out. So what's the problem, and what to do? More »

5:00 PM on Thu Apr 24 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,699 views, 14 comments

Latest by masterofmonkeys: Before the bust, Cnet threw some great parties for employees. The place never regained its balance, though, despite the rebound, either morale wise, or business wise. more »

Valleywag

Facebook making sure there's nowhere on the Web to hide

Valleywag team

Gawker Media Network