The answer is pure self-interest. $4 million is nothing to a 97-year-old venture capital firm like Bessemer. It could easily write off its investment in Wikia, an attempt to capitalize on the anyone-can-edit wiki concept popularized by Wikipedia.

But Levine has invested his reputational capital in Wikia. Admitting he made a mistake in backing Wales means Levine would lose face with Bessemer's partners, who will be more likely to question his subsequent investments. (That he has also invested in Yelp and Diapers.com surely does not burnish his record.)

Levine would have us be impressed by the fact that Wales "volunteered to forgo his Wikia salary." This would be more impressive if Wales had not long ago forgone any pretense of doing any work to earn that salary. When Levine first invested in Wikia, Wales promised to spend 90 percent of his time on Wikia and 10 percent on Wikipedia. In fact, he spent nowhere near that proportion of time on either, focusing instead on an increasingly lucrative speaking career.

I'm inclined to feel sorry for Levine, who was clearly deceived by Wales, but is stuck defending him, lest he admit to the con. We will give Levine this much. In a recent blog post, he wrote, "Valleywag reported some nonsense about Jimmy getting fired because of a bogus expense report. Nothing could be farther from the truth."

What is uncontestably true: Levine was enraged when he learned that Wales tried to get Wikia to reimburse him for a $1,300 dinner with a private-equity investor, at which he primarily discuss ways to profit off of Wikipedia, not Wikia. But it is quite possible that Wales's attempted expense-account flim-flam was the least of his sins as CEO of Wikia, and that Levine actually fired him over more serious matters. If so, why doesn't Levine wash his hands of Wales, write off the investment, and tells us what Wales did? Otherwise, he'll find that he's only just begun his career of lying on Wales's behalf.

Developers/Senior Developers (Santa Monica)

Reply to: job-894125901@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-10-26, 10:07AM PDT

Do you know that you're amongst the very best, but can't find a company that appreciates you or gives you the opportunity you deserve?

Mahalo.com is a human-powered search engine. It is one of the hottest startups on the planet right now. We're well-funded by the same people that backed Google, Yahoo and YouTube (Sequoia), a well as Newscorp, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk (Paypal) and CBS. Our human-curated results are the very best starting page for any topic you can think of, blowing away machine-only search engines. And our growth curve has been phenomenal: this coming year ought to be downright amazing.

We're looking for top-notch Developers and Senior Developers to get us to the next level.

Skills we're looking for include the following (you should have a subset of these, all are not required):
* Python, PHP
* C/C++, Java
* MySQL
* Familiarity with MediaWiki
* memcache, squid
* Strong command of PHP5
* Familiar with general Internet technologies including HTML, XML, Javascript, HTTP, CSS, cookies, etc.
* Knowledge and experience in Apache, MySQL, Linux

Bonus:
* Hadoop / Hbase
* Lucene
* Nutch
* Spread

You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter with the "general get it factor". You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.

We work with cutting-edge technologies. You will learn more here in a month than most companies will teach in a year.

Although we work hard, we offer a laid-back environment, competitive salary, benefits and stock options. This is a potentially life-changing opportunity — the kind that is usually only available in Silicon Valley, and is extremely rare in Southern California. If you're excellent, we invite you to come join us.

Please send a RESUME.

Location: Santa Monica
Compensation: Commensurate with experience + Options
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
PostingID: 894125901

Brian Ussery, who noted the change on his blog, is a professional search-engine optimization (SEO) consultant — he helps website owners raise their Google rank. Ussery thinks Google has "a renewed emphasis on rooting out paid links passing PageRank and/or low quality links." Years ago, site marketers realized that they could simply pay "relevant" sites — say, the site that comes up first for "Pacific Heights real estate" — to link to their own sites, boosting their own rank in Google results.

When Google employees said, "Have other relevant sites link to yours," they meant "build a site that people who run other relevant sites will consider worth linking to." What they didn't mean was "pay them to link to your crummy site." As Ussery implies, that's pretty much how everyone does business on the Internet now. Google's graph of all the Web's links, once an elegant directory of reputation, has been corrupted by payola.

What does Google want? Their guidelines should spell it out: Dear Webmasters, please stop spending your budget buying links. Instead, buy our ads.

After giving a short speech to attendees, in which he praised their efforts to break the "feudal" system of network television, Gore promised "By tomorrow, I'll be on Twitter." Then he left. Come on, Al. How hard would it have been to sign up for Twitter on the spot, then stick around for a few minutes to lob an inconvenient truth or two across John McCain's puss during the opening leg of the debate? Instead, here's the message Gore sent: Twitter is for kids. (Video by Laughing Squid/Scott Beale)

Now hardly seems like the time. The pension funds and college endowments which invest in VC funds have been pulling back, as of late. And investments in consumer Web startups — Miller and Levinsohn's specialty — are not looking as wise as they were a year ago. If the duo do raise money in this climate, it will be an impressive feat. If they don't? Then their second careers as venture capitalists may come to an abrupt end.

In a word, no. Despite improved targeting, click-through on Facebook ads remains abysmally low, at about 0.045 percent, CPM Advisors reports. The rates on those ads is similarly rock-bottom; Facebook's automated ad-selling systems suggest advertisers bid a CPM, or cost per thousand pageviews, between $0.21 and $0.27.

Most of Facebook's inventory is junk. And Facebook's new design may help take out the trash. It's no surprise users don't click on ads on profile pages; there's too much else to do. The new profile centers on users' news feeds, a constant report of their activity on Facebook — and, increasingly, on other sites across the Web, like Digg and Flickr. (This latter bit, called Facebook Connect, is a reinvention of the troubled Beacon feature, which met a frosty reception last year for being overly invasive of Facebook users' privacy.)

To the extent Facebook users see ads on the new profile pages, it seems likely they'll be disguised as reports about your friends in your news feed. (Did you know your friend went to see that new movie? Maybe you'd like to buy a ticket, too.) Or not: We hear Zuckerberg, who once championed these ads as a once-every-100-years change in media, has now soured on them.

One has to think conventional ads won't disappear entirely from Facebook. The social network has a multiyear agreeement to let Microsoft sell ads on the site, for one; having already renegotiated that deal in the course of getting a $240 million investment, Facebook would be hard-pressed to change it on Microsoft once again.

But make no mistake: Taking banners off users' profiles is a bold bet. The new profile design emphasizes the news feed — and, presumably, the friend-centered ads that appear within it. Those ads are difficult to sell, and difficult to place; they require vastly more computing power than the keyword matching Google has used to make billions of dollars. If Facebook can master this, it might actually be worth $15 billion, or more. If it can't, its value will be much closer to zero. Good luck, Zuck.

Update: The ads are back — but the mystery over their disappearance remains.

Bewkes has been trying, on and off, to swap AOL and a fistful of cash for a 20 percent stake in Yahoo, which would help CEO Jerry Yang fend off both Microsoft and Carl Icahn. Yahoo executives aren't particularly interested in having AOL's aging Internet assets dumped on them to manage — but they were eager to buy Bebo, particularly Yahoo Europe head Toby Coppel. Yahoo has a deal to sell ads on Bebo in Europe, a deal that most expect AOL to do away with after it expires. Buying Bebo serves to makes AOL more attractive to Yahoo — and if that gets AOL off Time Warner's back, then it may be $850 million well spent.

Because he has an exceedingly tolerant employer. Wikia, the for-profit startup he created after realizing he'd never make a fortune from Wikipedia, is betting on Wikia Search, a "Google-killing search engine" Wales bragged about in sex chats with ex-lover Rachel Marsden. Wales has talked about moving from San Francisco to New York to be closer to the search project's team. The notion of Wikia Search is that, as with Wikipedia, volunteers can build a better search engine than Google's experts. The reality? According to a user who's been working on the project since 2006, nothing is getting done. His screed, sent to an internal Wikia mailing list:

Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:13:24
To:"Mailing list for Search Wikia" ,"Search Wiki" ,"Jimmy Wales" , jer ,dennis@igfoo.com
Subject: [Search-l] Sorry to do this but its coming, yes a rant :-(

Right, im afraid the time has come once again where i have been wondering to my self again, and i feel that things need to be said, so here they are.

*Whats happening with the project. AFAIK overall (and i know somethings have happened) but *very* little seems to have happened since the launch. Now i know that things are probably happening with the team, but any chance of actually telling the users about this, cos its not looking good from here atm.

Ive copied in the so called pillars of search

* Transparency - riiiiiiight :-(
* Community - hmmm contribute to stale projects?

* Quality - well....

* Privacy - hmm yes that seems to have been done to an extent ( by the community mind)

Ive been on the project since dec 2006, and so have been waiting along time for this to happen, so its not purely a case of i want everything to happen NOW, i just want it to look like SOMETHING will happen SOON.

*This brings me onto the next topic of where is the project going??? There has been practically no progress, and frankly i cant see much being done from my point. The launch has happened, many people were interested, contributed but have now left, because NOTHING has happened. so overall the net gain of launching the project?? bad press and a few (relative to the web) minis.

*Many things have been promised by various people, which havent happened. Most specifically this has come from a certain member of staff, one specifically, that has said that they will do many things, but even the most basic of tasks seem to have not happened. so Broken/missed promises. Well iirc (name here) said he would make sure that the about pages etc were created, hmm... (http://alpha.search.wikia.com/about.html in case you forgot where those were). This is a wikia project, any chance of getting ANY involvement/input/co-ordination from the team who, ultimately, want us to make them more successfull and a profit (if were being frank).

Now i know i havent been that active recently on the wiki, but i have been reading the mailing lists and talking in irc, but the main reason for me not being active on the wiki, is mainly the fact that i just dont have the motivation to do anything because of the above. Frankly atm its a stale project, but hopefully this rant (which i hate doing) will mean that the project will hopefully become better.

If i have offended anyone above then i am sorry, but i feel that certain things need to be said right now, in order to make the project better, which is my aim.

Many thanks and look forward to the responses to this, especially from wikia staff

Regards

mark

(user:Markie)
_______________________________________________
Wikia Search mailing list
http://alpha.search.wikia.com/
Change options or unsubscribe: http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l

In this picture of Parikh with YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley in Davos, look closely at "Asha"'s name tag:

First, that the Times is having trouble recruiting a short-timer replacement to run the site until a sale. Second, that buyers for the site are scarce, and the Times realizes it. Nisenholtz's job responsibilities were greatly reduced when the Times merged its print and online newsrooms three years ago. Running About.com, especially if the company plans to keep it, would give him something to do besides speak at conferences.

Amazon.com sent Valentine an employment agreement, dated and apparently signed by Valentine on June 23, 2006. The deal called for him to get a $1.7 million signing bonus, a $150,000 salary, another $500,000 bonus, and 400,000 shares of Amazon.com (now worth almost $30 million). The contract called for him to start on September 11. Valentine surely told his bosses of this fact. And yet Microsoft did not announce his departure until September 5, less than a week before he started.

So why would Microsoft lie about Valentine's employment status? In July and August, Microsoft's programmers were on a death march to complete Windows Vista. Had they known that their leader, Valentine, had one foot out the door already, would they have worked so willingly on the project?

Lying to employees is one thing. It's routine and expected. But lying to shareholders is another. Given the importance of Vista to Microsoft's finances, shouldn't Microsoft have disclosed Valentine's plans to leave as soon as they knew about them? And assuming Valentine was complicit in the ruse, should Amazon.com's owners be similarly concerned?

Rubinstein left Apple in the spring of 2006, before the Air began serious development. But he'd presumably have sufficient contacts within Apple to get such a warning. It would explain a long-standing mystery: Why Palm killed the Foleo later, rather than sooner. Better to take the financial hit in September — Palm wrote off $10 million in Foleo R&D — than to face the inevitable comparisons to a far superior machine in January.

Le Meur has already snagged $6 million in venture capital for Seesmic, a site which is a bit like YouTube, a bit like Twitter, and a bit like Justin.tv. His new investors include Reid Hoffman, the hyperconnected chairman of LinkedIn; Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, and angel investor Ron Conway, the startup ATM of Silicon Valley.

So why is Wilson in town? Here's where it gets interesting. Brad Feld of Foundry Group, a frequent coinvestor with Wilson's Union Square Ventures, announced on Twitter yesterday that he was in San Francisco to meet with the New York-based Wilson, who had just flown in on a delayed flight. Shortly after he landed, Wilson posted a video to Seesmic. Feld then posted that he had just attended an unnamed startup's board meeting, which planned to announce his investment on Monday.

Not Seesmic, though — that company plans to launch, officially, at Demo at the end of this month. Announcing the company on Monday would be a breach of etiquette, at the very least, for a participant in the prestigious startup conference. And Le Meur is too French to be so blatantly impolite.

So what are Wilson and Feld up to? Given Feld's and Wilson's Twitters, it doesn't seem like there would have been time for them to meet yesterday, except at the unnamed startup's board meeting. It makes sense that they'd be in cahoots on another deal. The other clues in Feld's blog post: The company is headed by a "star" with previous startup successes, has about 20 employees, and is hiring another 20, including two software product managers. Any ideas? Leave them in the comments, or drop us a line.

One theory: Avaricious day traders, hoping that the stock might drop from its IPO price, may have sold it short. As the price slowly rose, they would have found themselves losing money, a position known as a "short squeeze." To get out, they'd have to buy shares of a thinly traded stock, in a rising market — a formula guaranteed to push shares sky-high. Note that NetSuite only sold 6.2 million shared on the market, but 15.9 million shares changed hands today. That's a lot of buying and selling. Any other theories? Let me know.

Creative Commons is supposed to be easy. As commenter cowsandmilk put it, "You learn 4 words and you're set." But watch where I run into trouble with these four mouthful-of-letters words:

Noncommercial: This one's easy. No making money off the work. Don't even try.

No Derivatives: Use the work as is only. No remixes, mashups, or 100-word-versions.

Sharealike: Um, I smell GPL here. This means if I use the work in another work, I have to license my work the exact same way. Which probably means forget it, but understood.

Attribution: The problem word. penguin07 summarized the confusing wording in the license for the above comic:

The comic itself is on a website that says, 'Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License."
What's that? You click the words and it goes to a page on another site that says,
—-
You are free:
to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix - to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
—-
[But] nowhere does it say what "the manner specified by the author" to "attribute the work" is.

I went to the Creative Commons website and found this description:

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

At some point in 2009, the Creative Commons people are going to reveal that every single one of their licenses actually forbids any use at all, even LOOKING at a CC web page, and does so in such a way that it indemnifies Disney, Microsoft and Google for every page on the Internet. The resulting $463 billion settlement will make Boing Boing's editors the wealthiest 4.5 people in the galaxy.

Once you know where to look, it's so obvious you'll have to pretend you knew it all along. www.intelligence.gov is the homepage for the United States Intelligence Community, or IC in spookspeak. The 16 spy agencies are listed in a sidebar on the "Members of the IC" page:

• Air Force Intelligence
  
• Army Intelligence
  
• Central Intelligence Agency
  
• Coast Guard Intelligence
  
• Defense Intelligence Agency
  
• Department of Energy
  
• Department of Homeland Security
  
• Department of State
  
• Department of the Treasury
  
• Drug Enforcement Administration
  
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
  
• Marine Corps Intelligence
  
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
  
• National Reconnaissance Office
  
• National Security Agency
  
• Navy Intelligence

• 1. Gotta keep 'em separated. Yes, GameSpot makes its money by selling ads about the very same games the publication writes about. That's exactly what makes it a bad precedent to let advertisers call the shots. Exhibit A: PC World, which kept integrity-laced editor Harry McCracken and sacked the suit who tried to make McCracken pander to Apple.
• 2. Follow the money. Firing a senior employee is expensive. It would've been far more cost-effective to simply change the review's score, or to rewrite or reassign it to get a more positive take (that's a "pos-men" to 30 Rock fans.)
• 3. This is how it starts. Shooting a reviewer to appease an advertiser would be a terrible precedent to set. CNET has a solid reputation for telling powerful tech companies to go fish. CNET reporters refuse to honor tech vendors' imaginary embargoes on stories, and they've always been blunt with criticism of products. That's why CNET is successful and credible, even though I make fun of their writing skills.

I think Gerstmann was let go for entirely other reasons that had nothing to do with his low review score for a mediocre game. This anonymous post — whoops, it's been removed — by an alleged ad sales worker at CNET claims a flap over Gerstmann's review had already come and gone prior to this week.

I haven't been able to catch Gerstmann at his home phone in Petaluma or via his Facebook page. Jeff, what really happened? Drop me a line.

And there's also WhatsOpen, the secretive startup that's a favorite of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. A source close to the company confirms the screenshots Valleywag ran show an Android app.

Look no further than the iPhone for an explanation why. Though Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors and Google pays Apple for the traffic its Safari Web browser generates, Jobs tapped Yahoo to provide email for the iPhone. I think Jobs's appearance at the Yahoo event served as a reminder to Schmidt that Apple's not a wholly owned subsidiary of Google.

And there's also the personal connection. Decker used to serve on the board of Pixar, where Jobs was also CEO, before Disney bought the animated-film studio. It can't hurt to keep that relationship warm — especially when Jobs can use it to squeeze better terms out of Google.