The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are locked in an obsessive death match. Only one newspaper can survive! But until one slays the other, they're mimicking each other's every move.
More bloggers getting paycuts! Today, the slasher is BlogHer, a network of ladyblogs which grew out of a conference for ladybloggers. We feel more sorry for the women behind BlogHer than the ladies they're shortchanging.
Click to viewThis is why people love Apple executive turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, whether or not he knows what he's talking about. At a Commonwealth Club event, Kawasaki was asked about his insanely popular "Ten Ways to use LinkedIn." Watch him squirm for a minute before 'fessing up: LinkedIn flack Kay Luo provided Guy with his talking points for the post. "I really needed a post — it was four days!" Guy, next time feel free to raid our inbox. We get more helpfully-already-written posts than we'd ever imagined possible.
Pictures from Life's centuries-old archives will now be available as part of Google Image Search. The images will be hosted on Google servers, however they carry no clear usage instructions. At least it's now easier for bloggers to spice up their posts with something that has a bit more gravitas than 4chan images. (Image via Time Inc.)
My worst fears for a favorite writer have been confirmed: Dan Lyons told Valleywag alumnus Jordan Golson via phone that (A) Newsweek, his new employer, ordered Lyons to remove a blog post calling Yahoo publicists "lying sacks of shit," and (B) rather than continue to blog under the boss's watchful eye, Lyons — once Internet-famous as the Fake Steve Jobs — has stopped blogging altogether. The man has two kids and Newsweek pays real money, so I'm not going to toss rocks. Except at Newsweek, which hired Lyons because of Fake Steve Jobs, his hilarious fake-Apple-CEO persona; urged him to blog outside the magazine; then freaked out when Lyons continued to write honestly in his spare time. You maniacs! You blew it up!
Om Malik has some brash advice for Yahoo. Too bad no one will find it: Three different publications' logos clog the top of his article's page. The lead paragraph is disrupted with another promo link, a broken stock ticker link, and a blogroll for Kara Swisher, whose name really ought to link to Google Finance to disclose her wife's current worth in GOOG shares. Second paragraph: "Yang's decision isn't a surprise ... In June 2008, I wrote about ..." Om, I know you love it when we pick on each other, so here you go: Start your friggin' article already. I went deep-sea diving in Om's prose to fish out his admirably brazen suggestions to fix Yahoo without Yang:
Chris Alden, CEO of blog-software maker Six Apart, understands his business so well that he posted his own internal memo before any pesky gossip bloggers could extract it from his loquacious employees. He's also sensible enough to admit that there's more to blame for the layoffs than the economy — like the integration of recent acquisitions. He also snuck in a well-disguised hint that the company is cash-flow positive. Well played, Chris! The company is laying off 8 percent of its 200-plus workforce, and shifting more resources into its services business. Cofounder Ben Trott is taking a bigger role running Six Apart's blog-hosting business. Alden and other top managers are taking a 15 percent paycut. The only disappointment: That the company didn't kill off Vox, its interminably boring free personal blogging service.
My Wired essay "Kill Your Blog" has spawned a charmingly identical piece in The Economist's print edition this week. Same theme, same Jason Calacanis quote from July. But read this part out loud: "A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone." I'd love to meet The Economist's anonymous author, if only to confirm that anyone on Earth actually talks that way.
I love Dave Winer's blog. He's even crazier than me, but he's pathologically unable to lie. Winer's latest post admits something most Californians would deny: The first time he learned a friend was married to another guy instead of a gal, he blurted out, "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable." He got over it, but he remembers that feeling. Dave, don't ever change. Remember when you found out I was working for Denton? That was hilarious. (Photo by tobiashm)
I won't give up until I land automoronic rumor site LayoffGossip a hit in a major American newspaper. It's a perfect story for a lazy reporter: Web 2.0 uses Web 2.0 to document failure of Web 2.0. Three's a trend! Right now, the site's Valleywag entry says, quote, "General feeling is fearful. to be careful. Average salaries will be available next week." LayoffGossip has forced me to confess an ugly truth: TechCrunch is actually pretty good.
Valleywag is name-checked in the New York Times today. (Page B1 if you're holding the dead-tree version.) The article talks about how companies must now pre-blog their own layoffs to beat the rumor mill. What it doesn't talk about is the problem of false positives: On the Internet, you can find layoff rumors about any company on Earth. For example, look at LayoffGossip.com this morning. Valleywag layoffs! They're coming! I can confirm that layoffs are scheduled for October 3, 2008. Credit the losers behind LayoffGossip for building every Clay Shirky talking point into their site. You can vote for the truth/lie factor of a rumor. Awesome. I clicked True on this one 76 times.
"If you care about the Internet, Obama should have your vote." Just kill me, that seems easier than suffering through another 763-word endorsement for Barack Obama by a former TechCrunch writer who doesn't even live in America. Riley's no idiot. He's just a capitalist. Every four years, tech bloggers realize that political chatter draws far, far more traffic than tech ever will. So they decide to write about politics.Look, Duncan. I read Boing Boing. I'm fully aware that net neutrality is the defining issue of our time, except for copyright law which is also the defining issue of our time. What I don't need is another overlong blog post endorsing a candidate who locked up the San Francisco/Brooklyn Web 2.0 voting demographic last year. At this point, the only good gossip is if there's a Mission hipster tweeting for John McCain from a table at Ritual Roasters — and I mean doing it 100 percent unironically.
Brian Sugar, cofounder of San Francisco-based blog network Sugar Inc., sent two ominous Twitters this afternoon: "Sad day." "First rain, will last for 5 months." Was he just talking about the weather? Less than an hour later, he'd gathered his staff into a conference room and told them he was laying off nine employees, mostly in editorial — 11 percent of the company's 80-person staff. What's worse: More layoffs could come over the next two quarters, if ad sales don't improve.Sugar's CEO may have aimed to put employees on notice, in hopes of motivating them to perform. But leaving a shoe to drop is the worst mistake one can make in cutting employees, the meltdown's self-appointed layoff pundits agree. Sugar Inc.'s real problem may be self-inflicted: It took ad sales in-house from partner and investor NBC this summer, leaving it with a sales force still in development, right as the online-advertising market got a lot tougher.
Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette blogger, left our cozy Gawker family two years ago for a big gig with Time. A regular on TV and in wonky political magazines I don't read, Cox has been blogging for Time from John McCain's plane. But now Ana Marie is in trouble: Turns out her $1,000-a-day expenses on McCain's plane weren't fully covered by Time. Cox was making ends meet with paychecks from Radar, a pseudoinfluential New York magazine. Radar goes out of business every couple of years to stay trendy. Last week, the mag dutifully shut down for a third time. Cox, despite a "mid-six-figures" book deal in the works, was reduced to pleading for donations on her personal blog. There's a big lesson here, and I think it's: Owen, I want my travel paid in advance.
Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board? Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.) Eldon rapidly took the story down, but not before it was syndicated to The Industry Standard, where it caught the eye of Nicholas Carlson, my former charge at Valleywag who has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives. Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones. Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry. This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.) There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.
Eyebrows cocked? Smirk at the ready? Then you, sir, are qualified to tack on wry analysis to the day's news at AllThingsD.com. Good thing Peter Kafka, Kara Swisher's latest hire at the Dow Jones-backed tech blog, is a continent away from John Paczkowski, Swisher's incumbent snark machine. Put the two in the same office, and they might just spend all day raising their eyebrows at each other.
Michael Arrington is a has-been, and he knows it. When the smoke clears after the crash and burn of the money machine behind today's tech startups, there's one word no one will ever write into a business plan again: Web 2.0. For Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog was born with the mission of tracking what he called "Web 2.0" startups, that's a problem.He's made Web 2.0 as much as Web 2.0 made him. Now, Arrington needs to cut his name loose before he becomes just another has-been journalist with a trade magazine. There's only one way to do that: Quit TechCrunch. Back away slowly. Keep coming into work now and then — preferably to a real office, rather than commuting from his bedroom to his living room, as he still does today. Post some of the biggest scoops. Talk up the next conference, party, or other cobranded event with Calacanis and Om. I don't do predictions. I'm always wrong. But Mike, this is true: I used to get tips all the time that "Michael Arrington is doing some vaguely dishonest thing. I know, because I know someone. Run with it, Valleywag! Keep digging! Follow the money!" Today, Friday October 24, 2008, with everyone freaking out over money, with tech employees looking for the truth behind the phony all-Is-well messages coming from their leaders, Valleywag gets more tips than ever. I've noticed one undeniable trend: The number of rumors about TechCrunch I get has peaked. It's over. Michael Arrington may end up on Charlie Rose again. Michael Arrington may get called "kingmaker" again. Michael Arrington, kingmaker! But TechCrunch? Mike, that's so Web 2.0. (Photo by Joi Ito)
AOL has released numbers detailing the success of Weblogs Inc., its blog network for a reported $25 million. Since taking the company off of Jason Calacanis's and Brian Alvey's hands in 2005, AOL has seen visitor traffic climb 122 percent a year on average, from 1.4 million visitors to 13 million. Revenue went from $6 million to $30 million off of 13 million visitors. You'd think AOL could afford to pay their bloggers to blog.
