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clay felker
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clay felker
Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure they've been lovingly crafting it for years — is that rare article worth reading beyond the first 100 words. You think Perez Hilton's nuts? Read up on Felker's career. More »
obituary
Best Buy's Geek Squad celebrates death of noted pedophile Arthur C. Clarke tonight
Best Buy's Geek Squad is holding a memorial tonight to honor Arthur C. Clarke. Alas. Everyone was far too polite to say this about the recently deceased sci-fi writer: Had he lived in the U.S. rather than Sri Lanka, he'd be a prime membership candidate for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. "Once they have reached the age of puberty, it is OK... It doesn't do any harm," Clarke told the U.K.'s Sunday Mirror in 1998. More or less exiled from Britain over his underage affairs, he continued to pursue them in the South Asian island nation. Authorities there turned a blind eye. This is all well known among the more sophisticated realms of fandom — but not, apparently, Best Buy headquarters in South Richfield, Minn. At 8:01 p.m., every Geek Squad repairman will pause to think reverently of a champion of child abuse. The press release: More »
obituary
Lovably dorky blogger Russell Shaw dead
Russell Shaw, the HuffPo contributor and former ZDNet and Weblogs, Inc blogger who good-naturedly took guff from us Engadget brats when I last saw him at CES 2006, "passed away while on a reporting trip in San Jose, traveling from his home base of Portland, Oregon" according to CNET editor in chief Dan Farber. A bit more detail from Andy Abramson.
obituary
Eliza creator dead at 85
Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor whose work, the Wall Street Journal eulogizes, "led him to preach the evils of computers," passed away March 5 in his native Germany. Word just hit the news wires last night. The Journal's bio includes this quote: "The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay. There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they call sell. But mainly it's garbage." A more fitting tribute to Weizenbaum is this Web-based Eliza. Spend twenty minutes with it and I'll bet that to the annoyance of Weizenbaum's ghost, you'll come to learn something about yourself.
gary gygax
Universe turns out to be modeled on Dungeons & Dragons
Attached to the hilarious — if technically inaccurate — chart I blogged yesterday is an appreciation for D&D creator Gary Gygax, who died last week, penned by Wired editor Adam Rogers. "Gygax's genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk." The unintended result: "Every time I make a tactical move, I'm counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice."
ric weiland
Early Microsoft employee, a suicide, leaves $65 million to gay causes
The late Ric Weiland, employee no. 5 at Microsoft, left a $65 million fortune to the Pride Foundation of Seattle, a gay and lesbian nonprofit. Weiland committed suicide in 2006 at the age of 53. He's said to have struggled with depression. But depression is a medical diagnosis, not the explanation for a life. One wonders what he struggled with: Not likely loneliness, since his partner, Mike Schaefer, survived him. And not likely overt prejudice, since Seattle is among the most painfully politically correct of cities. His legacy, and this mystery, are all we have left of Weiland.
Tom Lantos, a longtime Congressman for the Valley, has died. He had suffered from esophageal cancer. Unlikely to shed a tear: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who was called a "moral pygmy" by Lantos after Yahoo outed a Chinese dissident to the authorities. [Huffington Post]
obituary
The writers' strike, 2007-2008
What is online video worth in the age of YouTube? $1,200, according to the Writers' Guild of America. That's the amount the group of television and movie writers agreed to accept for work streamed over the Internet. An odd amount, and like all fixed pay for the hit-and-miss, easily measured world of the Web, almost always the wrong one. Also easily measured: The relentless slide of television audiences. Here are the key dozen words from the Guild's 643-word letter to members: More »
Jeanette Symons, a cofounder of several telecommunications startups and hero to girl geeks, is believed dead in a plane crash in Maine. Symons was flying her own Cessna Citation. Her most recent venture, Industrious Kid, runs Imbee.com, a social network for children. Her death proves a sad truth: Women aviators are as good as men at getting themselves killed. In death, we are all equal. [Boston Globe]
Michael Klein, the former CEO of eGroups, died in a plane crash in Panama on Christmas Eve, along with his daughter, Talia, 13. Klein had sold eGroups to Yahoo for $450 million in 2000; before that, he'd sold another company, Transoft Networks, to Hewlett-Packard. [San Jose Mercury News]
obituary
The decline and fall of Business 2.0
Did Business 2.0 die a natural death? Or was it murdered? The story told so far about the tech-focused, San Francisco-based magazine's demise was an abrupt drop in advertising. But in his MediaShift column, Mark Glaser suggests that a poorly planned business-side reorganization by its parent company, Time Inc., is more to blame. Combining Business 2.0's salesforce with that of Fortune and Money led not to the expected boost in ads, but a drop that hit all the magazines, with Business 2.0 — where, I should disclose, I worked before joining Valleywag — the most vulnerable. The most intriguing tidbit: Glaser reports that TechCrunch, run by Michael Arrington, explored a merger with Business 2.0. Arrington, in a blog post, confirms the rumor, and, intriguingly, suggests that Time Inc. was "proactive in destroying" the magazine to favor Fortune. More »
obituary
Netscape's name lives on -- but death would be better
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily. But a society of denial-ridden necrophiliacs hardly makes for a compelling audience. When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, it did everything imaginable to keep the brand alive — and everything imaginable to kill it. It forced the worst features of AOL onto Netscape and migrated the best features of Netscape to AOL — not that it helped either. And Jason Calacanis's brief tenure at AOL? That dirt-grubbing graverobber just made things worse, and then left for greener pastures. More »
Oakland Post editor and longtime Bay Area journalist Chauncey Bailey killed by masked gunman. [NBC 11]
Blogger, filmmaker, and creator of girl-centric video games Theresa Duncan reported dead. [LA Observed via Mediabistro]
Teenage entrepreneur Ben Casnocha experiences the death of a former classmate. Not someone he really knew, mind you, but close enough to provide conveniently timed talking points for his upcoming "intellectual salon" on death. [ben.casnocha.com]
