• Some guy named Denton can't figure out how to sell ads on Valleywag.
• So he's going to sneak Valleywag posts onto Gawker.com, where Ketel One is happy to buy banners.
• Valleywag.com the URL will still work. Valleywag's RSS feed will still work. You will not have to go to Gawker.com to read Valleywag stories.
• In 2009, Owen will be posting full-time, maybe 6-12 posts per day. Everyone else is fired.
• Denton's trying to follow Wired's footsteps: Take an insidery, localized publication and make it a national daily read. Will it work? Maybe. Will Chris Tolles still reload obsessively? That's the challenge.
• Valleywag's traffic isn't enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page. Denton's keeping Owen instead of me, because Owen likes to write about boring money issues that, in theory, Chris Tolles thinks are way more important than photos of Steve Jobs parked in a handicapped space.
• I'm here until December 1. Owen gets his Thanksgiving vacation. I get an extra month's rent.
• TechCrunch gets to pretend we don't exist, which makes them look like a bunch of five-year-olds. Everybody wins!
• You're worried about me? I owe the New York Times one short freelance article, that's all I feel comfortable saying. I'll be fine, because I'm nuts. Nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Rooskies!

• Nicholas was the first to get a look at Yahoo's Buzz:
  Screenshots of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg competitor
• His historical analysis of why newspapers keep failing to grasp the online opportunity was widely read in the industry:
  5 ways the newspapers botched the Web
• He covered the craze for Facebook applications on its way up — and down:
  The Valley's Facebook frenzy fades
• Google's Chrome browser provided endless comedy:
  Uh oh, the b-tards got their hands on Google's Chrome comic
• He dug into what really made some tech gigs suck:
  Tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs
• The fiery implosion of Pay By Touch, a biometrics company, provided Carlson with one of his best ongoing stories. A former Pay By Touch employee recently complimented him for his work, telling me that his stories on Valleywag were the best source of information on what was happening to the company:
  Pay By Touch story archive
• And most recently, Nicholas uncovered the love connection behind Michael Arrington's MySpace scoops:
  Michael Arrington pounding his MySpace source

• Melissa's debut column was not afraid to be servicey — and also telling about the Valley's peculiar sex culture:
  How do I get a Stanford girl to blow me?
• The first question Melissa got asked: "No one actually goes to sex parties in the Valley, do they?" The second: "Can you get me in one?" That prompted a column:
  Sex parties in the Valley — how do I get invited?
• The sexographics of the Web's top companies:
  Googlers getting laid way more than Microsoft, Yahoo
• We called the SXSW conference in Austin "spring break for geeks." Melissa lived it:
  The art of the SXSW orgy
• Melissa tackled the Web's relentless misogyny with wit:
  Five reasons why women really do need to get off the Internet
• And she also critiqued the media's writing about the business of sex with an insider's eye:
  How the New York Times missed the latest escort scandal
• My all-time favorite?
  
  How to lie to your friends with Web 2.0

• An expert in online video from his film-school days and his stint at NewTeeVee, Jackson was not afraid to be servicey when the Olympics rolled around:
  The definitive guide to watching the Olympics online
• Jackson was one of the first to publish the news that sex blogger Violet Blue had been unpublished:
  Blogger completely deleted from Boing Boing archives
• Apple cofounder, cable-TV star? Jackson knew pageview gold when he saw it:
  Steve Wozniak and Kathy Griffin all broken up
• The surreal estate of the Valley's rich and famous was a constant obsession:
  Larry Page's $7 million manse
• Who needs venture capital when you've got a trust fund?
  How daddy's money paid for Andrew Baron's Rocketboom
• Jackson and I loved to disagree about San Francisco's gay-marriage- and hair-gel-loving mayor:
  The east coast's love affair with Gavin Newsom
• Google executive Marissa Mayer was this site's first obession, but Jackson's fashion sense took his critiques to a new level:
  Marissa Mayer and friends on display at department store
• Who can forget the time Jackson got TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington a milkshake? Readers drank it up:
  Michael Arrington drinks Valleywag's milkshake

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Oh, and ads? Yes, of course. Valleywag is unabashedly capitalist. There will be ads in the emails; we may, eventually, if enough of you subscribe, send you separate emails with specific, thoughtfully targeted offers from advertisers. (A theoretical example: an invitation to a sponsored party.) What we won't do is sell your email address to an advertiser.

The big tech pubs have been shuffling their A-team players lately. Steven Levy jumped from Newsweek to Wired. Dan Lyons left Forbes to replace Levy at Newsweek. Forbes is now doing some high-end poaching of its own. (Can we vote for Brendan Koerner?) And the New York Times is staffing up for battle with the Wall Street Journal. Here at Valleywag, we heard that perpetual hanger-on, WSJ book reviewer, Wired kibbitzer and Bono impersonator Paul Boutin was being pulled into interviews for some of these big gigs. Paul, we told him, why bother? No matter where you end up, every single article you write will be 100-worded and openly mocked on Valleywag. Why don't you just finally join the team and post the stuff yourself here? Cracked Boutin, "That seems easier." He starts July 1.

The back story: Boutin and I met 11 years ago when we were both working at a dotcom called HotWired, a long-forgotten online offshoot of Wired. He emailed me asking for schwag from Suck.com, the site on which I worked; I left stickers and postcards and every other sort of branded giveaway on his chair, from which he was invariably absent. We eventually managed to meet — our door-desks were only 30 yards apart, after all. From those virtual beginnings came a fine bromance, and any number of coconspiratorial collaborations. Over the years, though, we never managed to draw a paycheck from the same place at the same time.

Until now. While he's contributed to Valleywag in countless ways since its inception, his work has always been tempered by employment obligations elsewhere. No more! At last, Paul's all ours — which means, gentle readers, he's all yours.

Boutin's not the only one signing on for more. Alaska Miller, one of our more vociferous commenters, is joining us as a summer intern. And while we're sad to lose calendarist Dianne de Guzman, who's starting a master's program in journalism at the University of Southern California in August, we're happy to have found a replacement, Adriana Nunez, who will pick up her duties starting in July.

• Our Sitemeter link hides in plain sight at the very lower left corner of the front door.
• Our internal stats counters report daily and monthly pageviews by author. There are three Paul Boutins listed. This explains my schedule.
• We also run Google Analytics, but I'm too chicken to publish our password. There's always That One Guy Who Ruins Everything. If you know a way to autopublish a read-only GA chart, please fill me in.

Ever since my parents bought a Sanyo MBC-550, technology has been the family business. Since then, I've drawn paychecks from both Microsoft and Yahoo, was an early adopter of the email breakup letter, and have had my own domain name for nearly as long as Kottke.

Oh, but I'm not just a dot-communist. Before my parents worked in high tech, they were truck-driving activists, and I was born a red-diaper baby. So while I appreciate that Wozniak and Jobs found better uses for integrated circuits than guided missile systems, I also find it pretty ironic that an industry suckling on DARPA's taxpayer-funded teat is full of free-market fundamentalists.

In a community where transhumanist teleology is taken semiseriously, Jean Baudrillard's maxim "the real no longer exists" seems to sum up the postmodern, postindustrial culture and economy within our little bubble. Which means that the drama tends toward a theater of the absurd. You can bet I'm looking forward to heckling from the cheap seats.

(LOLshevik by Erik Dunham)

• Senior editor: A second-in-command to take turns running the site with the managing editor (yours truly). Broad industry knowledge, editing experience, and wicked sense of humor required.
• Nights and weekends editor: A workaholic night owl whose twitchy news sense will keep the site running 24/7, or a semblance thereof.
• Reporter: Ideally, a ubiquitous party attendee who also enjoys rummaging through court filings and reading IPO prospectuses. Vicious streak preferred.
• Intern: Speedreading feedreaders encouraged to apply. Bonus points if you spot things that end up on Digg before they end up on Digg.

That's a business concern, of course. Aesthetically, I'm quite fond of this new design. You'll notice first a change up top: Valleywag's logo has been given more room to breathe, and our RSS feed has been made considerably easier to find. As well, you'll see some of the key tags we use. A word on those:

• Top Our biggest stories, featuring essential reading, important news, and original reporting and scoops.
• Feature Longer stories, including humor from special correspondent Nick Douglas and helpful Silicon Valley Users Guides by very special correspondent Paul Boutin.
• Clips The best video we can find on the beats we cover, from TV and the Web.

In addition, we'll have a rotating list of tags, based on the stories we cover most frequently. You can subscribe to any of those tags individually as an RSS feed. Just follow the link to the tag page, and copy and paste the URL into your feed reader.

On top of that, we've made our story-sharing features a bit easier to use with icons. The "heart" icon is perhaps the most perplexing. If you've signed up as a commenter on the site, you can use the "heart" icon to mark a story as a favorite, what we used to call "clipping." Stories you mark are then displayed on the friends page of everyone who's signed up to follow your comments. In other words, you don't have to comment to tell your Valleywag followers you like a story. All you have to do now is "heart" it.

To share a story with friends not on Valleywag, you have the predictable choices: Digg, Facebook, and email. Those are the means by which we typically find ourselves, against our better judgment, engaging in acts of shameless self-promotion. It only makes sense to offer you the same tools to do our work for us without the burden of any shame whatsoever.

I can't say that I welcome your feedback while keeping a straight face. To tell you the truth, I may laugh a little, especially if your complaints are self-righteous, strident, or pushing an agenda. But go ahead and leave a comment. You may at least provide some other readers with entertainment. Saves me the trouble.

But if you take this for what it is — a useful improvement to the site, not a once-every-hundred-years transformation of media — the new feature will likely grow on you. Once you've registered with Valleywag, you'll see more icons next to users' comments. In addition to the familiar "reply" and "report" buttons, you'll see a "plus" icon that lets you follow a fellow reader. You can see the people I follow here. On your commenter profile page, you can also see the people who follow you. After you've added some people to your followed list, you'll get notified about the comments they leave, and also the readers they've started following. And, oh yes — everyone else will know who fascinates you. Privacy? Surely you expect too much.

Because they're proper nouns. An "internet" is any interconnected network of networks; a "web," lowercased, is any connection of hyperlinked pages. The Internet, and the World Wide Web — the ones we all connect to — are the only ones we actually care about. If you insist on writing about "the internet," I'll insist on asking, "Which one?"

Three words: geeks gone wild. The bacchanalia alone makes it worthwhile to dispatch a correspondent to Black Rock City. When we pitched our reporter, Simone Davalos, on the project, she wrote back worrying that her posts wouldn't fit on Valleywag:

I am just worried they will not be as tech-centered as the usual Valleywag entries, since it's probably difficult to discuss mergers and acquisitions when you're on mushrooms and there's a brace of naked blue-painted chicks riding a pink fluffy bicycle sliding past as some stranger bewilderedly staggers up to you and offers you the last piece of pizza, then runs away giggling when you take it.

I'm just saying.

As I write this, Simone has arrived at Black Rock City and just checked in with me "from the middle of the FUCKING DESERT," as she says in her latest email. Sounds like she's developing the requisite Valleywag bad attitude. I can't wait to read the first of her many missives.

And so it came to pass.

The place, of course, had a few underlings already, and I haven't had the heart to issue any of them pink slips yet. There's Nick Douglas, the site's redheaded stepchild and my predecessor as editor; Megan McCarthy, our reportedly leggy party correspondent; and Tim Faulkner, our salty New England contributor. Today, though, I'm adding Mary Jane Irwin to their ranks.

Irwin, who goes by "MJ," was a former intern of mine at Business 2.0, more recently an intern at Wired, and, like disgraced "Dateline" producer Michelle Madigan, a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism. Not that I hold that against her. The first day she reported to me, she welcomed me with a gratuitous insult. And when she wasn't working her butt off, she precipitated an acid rain of commentary on the less-than-stellar startups which made their way into Business 2.0's pages. I loved it, of course. And when I started at Valleywag, I knew it wouldn't be long before she did, too. Please welcome MJ in true Valleywag style.

So, Owen, you mean to tell me that you've just been playing hard to get for two years?

1. Venture capitalists wouldn't know an original idea if it hit them in the bank account. A wise source advised me to go easier on entrepreneurs and harder on the Sand Hill Road crowd. Fair enough: They're slavish imitators with little to contribute besides money.
2. Entrepreneurs are absolutely in it for the money. I said "easier," not "easy." Sure, they want to change the world: They want to change it from a world in which they are poor to a world in which they are millions of dollars richer.
3. Bloggers are actually rather dull. People with something to say are interesting. But actual ideas, knowledge, and journalistic ethics, alas, don't come as part of the standard WordPress install. No wonder people are getting bored.
4. Google is increasingly evil. Insiders like to talk about how Google, now that it's a big company, is getting "complicated." I don't think it's that complicated: If Larry Page and Sergey Brin ever really solved the search problem, as they've been promising to do for a decade, they wouldn't have a multibillion-dollar advertising business.
5. I'm actually a complete bastard. I'm keeping Nick Douglas and Megan McCarthy around, but mostly because they amuse me. From hanging out with me at parties, they somehow concluded I was a "nice guy" and hence would be a total softy as a boss. Hah! At this very moment, I have Douglas out fetching me a quad frap and McCarthy holed away in a cubicle cross-indexing S-1 filings. I'm also hiring a set of newbies to abuse. With that warning, still care to apply? No resumes, please; just send me the URL for your blog.

All I can promise you is that I won't post any photos of semen on the front page (no promises about after jumps!). But if there's something you think should be talked about, send it to along to tips@valleywag.com. Or, if you're into the whole instant communication thing, you can find me on AIM as Scott Kidder.

Onward!

1) I'm the managing editor at Gawker Media, where I oversee the bloggers across the network of sites, but seldom get my hands dirty with actual blogging. Today should be interesting.

2) I'm better versed about what's going on in New York City internet circles than the Valley, so it's going to be kind of a NYC-centric day around Valleywag today. If that's not your thing, check back tomorrow. Or stick around anyway and watch me make a fool of myself. Who knows, might be funny. (And there's always Boutin's and Douglas's posts to look forward to.)

3) I was in San Francisco the fateful weekend over a year ago when we recruited Nick Douglas to write Valleywag. The recruiting trip included a late-night visit to a stripclub in a limo that Chris Batty, Gawker's advertising director, somehow procured on the street. This actually happened.

4) In summer 1994, I lived in Berkeley and interned at Mondo 2000. Obligatory geek cred, etc.

5) Yes, that's the name on my birth certificate. Thanks for asking.

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