Tim White, the operator of Craigslistblog.org, an unofficial blog about the free classifieds site, is throwing in the slightly soiled towel. Craigslist, which launched its official blog well after White launched his in March, threatened him with legal action over its name in April. Craigslist's lawyers and White have been going back and forth since then. White tells Valleywag Craigslist has now offered him a settlement: If he agreed not to sell the domain name or run advertising, they'd let him keep the site. Instead of agreeing to it, he's shutting down the site."That particular blog was never about the money, but it definitely makes things more difficult if I have no chance of paying the writers," says White. "I’m torn because there’s so much news every day about them and I’d like to see someone cover it closely." We'll do what we can, Tim. The site's disappearance is disappointing. But the whole episode served to reveal Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster as a control-freaky jerk who's sensitive to criticism, and not averse to litigation when he doesn't get his way. That's good information for people to have — and we wouldn't have learned it without White.

In Dan Lyons's Fake Steve Jobs blog, he played the Apple CEO as a cynic who borrowed the cult-creation techniques of old-world and new-age mystics in order to more efficiently exploit a workforce and market products. But the actual Dan Lyons, now a bloggin' Newsweek reporter, has a heart. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Lyons apologized for not being as funny as his avatar Fake Steve Jobs since leaving Forbes and starting his new blog, Real Dan Lyons. So why did Lyons give up the ghost of Fake Steve? He confirmed for the crowd what Valleywag had reported:Lyons couldn't bring himself to mock a cancer sufferer who's wasting away.

The latest hire in online tech outlets smacks of cannibalism. Silicon Alley Insider, the vanity blog vehicle of former Wall Street stock analyst Henry Blodget, has lost managing editor Peter Kafka to AllThingsD, the vanity blog vehicle of Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Dow Jones makes for a steadier parent than AlleyCorp, the tech-startup holding company of DoubleClick cofounder Kevin Ryan. But one would think Swisher, who confirms the hire and says Kafka will start at the end of October, might have first raided the vast hordes of reporters working in the faltering medium of print before feeding on her own kind. Let's just hope she lets Kafka get out more.

Interesting things end up in our inbox, but none as cavalier as the nonapology that Andy Wibbels, a Six Apart product manager, sent us. He acknowledges that he unintentionally spammed a number of blogs with a mass email promoting the company's new blog directory, but flips off criticism of the mail's impersonal tone on "one of our interns [who] was obviously mismedicated." I must be doing this intern thing wrong, because my boss has yet to offer me any drugs, let alone accuse me of being on them. Andy, here's a Management 101 tip: Be a mensch and own up to your mistakes. A good leader doesn't let shit roll downhill. Full email:

Wall Street is melting down. But from sampling the thoughts of tech bloggers on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator, you'd think that the biggest story today was a redesign of WSJ.com. One couldn't ask for a clearer sign of the Valley's superficial obsession with user interfaces and online advertising. With Lehman Brothers going bankrupt, Bank of America negotiating to buy Merrill, and AIG desperately selling off assets, who, exactly, will be having their employer pay so they can read the headlines on WSJ.com, let alone advertising there? Yet the problem goes far deeper than one website's newly glossy surface.The disconnect has been long in the making. The economy is a constant topic of discussion in the Valley — but the question is always, "Why aren't we feeling it yet?" That's because the bicoastal economy has split apart. After the '90s bubble burst, investment banks slashed their presence here, and have not returned in force. With no IPOs and few large acquisitions, Wall Street's investment banks have realized that the geeks are not going to make them rich. And the geeks have realized Wall Street will not make them rich, either. Small boutiques like GCA Savvian and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst are taking whatever midmarket M&A action there is; Wall Street's local bankers have been reduced to shopping around private investment rounds in companies like AdBrite and Glam Media. There's even talk of creating new markets for tech-startup securities which bypass the public ones. Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have made going public an even more tiresomely bureaucratic affair; meanwhile, employees at fast-growing companies like LinkedIn and Facebook are itching to realize some of their paper wealth. The only potential buyers of those shares are "accredited investors," which the SEC defines as individuals with net worth of more than $1 million or steady income of more than $200,000. Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen recently spoke of the unintended consequences of post-Enron regulations; instead of protecting the public investor, they have resulted in cutting him off from opportunity. The rich will get richer, while the average Joe will never get a chance to invest in the next Google. (Or, one should note, the next Pets.com.) The Valley's entrepreneurs love to disparage Wall Street. Google's cofounders famously tweaked the bankers' noses by insisting on an egalitarian auction format for the company's IPO. Yet no one has invented a perfect algorithm for distributing the fruits of the Valley's innovation to the investing public. Wall Street's thundering herds of braying brokers, for all their flaws, managed to spread the wealth. The notion of the insular Valley doling out its profits to a crowd of privileged insiders surely appeals to those already inside the circle. But it should alarm everyone else.

Click to viewKnow that old saying "keep your friends close and your enemies closer"? Former Engadget editor Ryan Block has put it into practice by tapping former Gizmodo editor Brian Lam — now the site's editorial director — to help advise them on their new gadget startup gdgt. In doing so, Block has ended — or at least set aside — a long-term gadget-blog rivalry which frothed with animosity. (Gizmodo, like Valleywag, is published by Gawker Media.) At times, the competition got dirty — like the time Block created an anonymous blog slamming Lam for a post about the iPhone.Block has since confessed to the stunt. In a post on Lam's hire, Block says "Brian Lam and I are actually pals outside of work — have been for years." But back in 2006, a tipster told Valleywag, Block created a blog called Boycott Gizmodo! and a Digg account with the same name that he used to promote blog's one and only post to Digg's front page. "The time has come to Boycott Gizmodo," reads the post. "Not only did Brian Lam and Gizmodo purposefully deceive long standing readers such as myself about the iPhone, they did a terrible job of covering their tracks." (Lam's post promised readers news about an "iPhone" device on a Friday, before the launch of the actual device — and then, on a Monday, revealed that Cisco owned a trademark on the term, long attached to speculation about an Apple cell phone, and had released an iPhone-branded product. The companies long since settled the matter, giving Apple rights to the iPhone name) We asked Block if he was the author of the blog. In response, Block told us, "Brian and I have always been friends who knew where to draw the line." Block also just published a confessional blog post titled "Bygones and rivalries," in which he confessed to authoring the "Boycott Gizmodo!" blog. He also offered another anecdote from a rivalry we're all going to miss.

A photo that may or may not depict a young, nude and brunette Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee, has made the tabloid rounds after being featured on blog Hollywood Newsroom. It was sent in as part of a Photoshopping contest, but looks legitimate enough as a photograph (though not necessarily of Palin). Either way, it's too racy for Google — which strictly forbids placing its automated advertising next to "adult or mature" content.Naturally companies like Wu Yi Source, which had an placed by AdSense when I dropped by, would certainly be offended that their ancient Chinese weight loss secret might be associated with a display of svelte bodies. The blog is now looking for another advertiser, and have promised that their next photo compositing contest will feature Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in compromising — and AdSense-unfriendly — positions.

"I’m starting at Newsweek tomorrow and Fake Steve was supposed to be part of my job. So we’re going to discuss whether to revive the blog." — Excerpt from an email message from semi-retired Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons to Mac Soda blogger mykbibby. Contrary to speculation by certain people we could name but won't, Lyons didn't kill the blog to curry favor with Apple for Newsweek. It was more personal.Dan saw His Steveness in person at Apple's developer conference in June and had a sincere personal crisis over Jobs's obvious illness. He felt wrong mocking a guy who might not be alive the next morning. Because in case you can't tell, Dan Lyons is one of Jobs's biggest fanboys. Huge. (In photo: Dan getting his own fanboy love at Macworld Expo 2008 from stock analyst Charlie Wolf.)

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has said that he wants to displace CNET as the tech industry's top news site. His redesigned home page suggests that TechCrunch won't so much defeat CNET as become CNET. Arrington has replaced the Boing Boingy full-posts-in-reverse-order blog format on TC's home page with much more of a news-site layout. There's a top story with a custom-written "deck," to use newsroom jargon, meant to get you to click through to the whole article. It's similar to the format used by most newspaper sites. Here's a demo of the click-through trick:For contrast, Web editors at Wired.com abandoned decks a year ago, replacing them with a mix of standalone headlines and excerpted blog posts. An explanation at TechCrunch says a main goal was to "reduce load times" for the home page. More effective than reducing the amount of story text, TechCrunch's home page clutter of ads and widgets has been trimmed by about 20 percent, compared to old screenshots. I'm sure clever commenters are already concocting their Valleywag-are-hypocrites posts, but here's what you don't know: We fight over stuff like this all the time. I'm a fan of the all-on-one-page format, for easy sneak-reading at work. Certain sweater-clad people here beg to differ.

Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work.The theory it's based on is nonsense. It is true that ideas spread virally through the population. But it turns out that there's not a single set of influencers who are reliable Typhoid Marys. Duncan Watts, a former Columbia University researcher who now works for Yahoo, found in a study that the emergence of contagious ideas is random. Repeated experiments found that anyone can start a trend, and it's impossible to predict who those people will be. Watts's research is not 100 percent conclusive; his models might not translate perfectly to the real world. So let's go there! In April, a study by Canadian research firm Pollara found that word of mouth works — nearly 80 percent said they'd buy products recommended by a friend or family member. But word of mouse? Only 23 percent said they'd buy something touted by a blogger. "This shows that popularity doesn't always equate to credibility," Pollara executive Robert Hutton told MediaPost. "Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there." In backing Scoble, Seagate hoped to buy cheap buzz. It's a convenient fantasy for marketers: Find the one magic guy to woo, then watch him chat up your company to Wall Street traders! Seagate would have been better off sending big hard drives to a dozen bloggers. Or a hundred. Or, for that matter, a random assortment of people, whether or not they have a habit of typing out the contents of their brain every 3 seconds. Anyone — literally — would have been a better choice than Scoble.

Heart-warmingly vulgar comedienne Roseanne Barr is making headlines again, and it's with a blog. The LA Times wonders if Barr is drunk when she posts items online after a series of screeds about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. She is, then she obviously understands blogging for what it is: Part self-promotion, part maniacal delusion, and all about making a scene as publicly as possible. The Huffington Post has proven profitable with its own stable of celebrity bloggers and an anti-Republican slant similar to, but far less entertaining than, Barr's — but then, the Huffington post also gets free labor from hundreds of other, less famous bloggers. So why are celebrities in the blogodrome so easy to resent?Because celebrities have every other possible medium in which to broadcast their feelings and opinions, from movies to television, newspapers to magazines. Why would I want to read John Cusack's opinions about why the war in Iraq is bad, when I can go see his terrible movie about it? Either way, I'm almost guaranteed not to laugh. Responding to the brouhaha over her blog, Barr at least makes me chuckle:

Last month, Alan Citron silently disappeared from TMZ.com, the gossip megasite he helped launch. He has suddenly reappeared at Buzznet, a music-blog startup that's dabbling in celebrity news. "It goes to my reputation of being quiet," he told me. I felt bad for Citron when, as the general manager of TMZ.com, he sat next to me on a panel on gossip at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this spring. Julia Allison, the notorious nobody with a nonstartup, stole the show, literally leaping from the audience onto the moderator's lap.It was utterly unfair: Citron had built TMZ.com, out of nowhere, into the Web's undisputed champ of 24/7 celebrity chatter, with some 10 million visitors a month. Allison had done exactly nothing, except for, unbelievably, further trivializing the very notion of fame. And yet Allison dominated the conversation. How was it that, in a newsroom full of gossips, no one thought to mention the departure of a top executive? Did he not make enough of an impression around the office? Citron's discretion is to his credit. But it's possible there's such a thing as being too quiet.

Add mommyblogging to the long list of maternal entitlements. It's the old story of exploiting your childbearing for commercial gain, this time online! Ah, but even ladybloggers without kids can get a piece of the mommyblogger ad budget. According to the Washington Post, Melanie Notkin's SavvyAuntie.com had advertisers and "a well-known venture capitalist" after her from day one, interested in cashing in with her on on the "parenting site for nonparents." We're reminded of PlanetOut's fundraising days, when venture capitalists told the gay and lesbian site's founders that they should refocus the site to appeal to gays and their hip straight friends. Notkin has a point, though: If you're going to buy your best girlfriend's brood a Barack Obama onesie, shouldn't you be allowed to blog about it, add affiliate e-commerce links, and run ads on the page, too?"This was not going to be your mommy's website ... I wanted it to feel like a fashion and beauty magazine but with tremendous depth," Notkin told the Post blog. For "depth," read "Twitter," which Notkin credits with leveraging her brand or whatever nonsense phrase we're using today to excuse egolinking. SavvyAuntie was among the most oft-Twittered words on its launch day — "her marketing is genius," said TechCrunch's snackiest flack, Calley Nye, before her own post got pulled, for, we guessed, overdoing the PR-speak. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's unpublishing of Nye's post, not the brilliance of SavvyAuntie's business plan, was likely what launched it into Twitter microfame. But Notkin is a genius for spinning the snafu as an event that promoted her "visibility." Someone else's baby, someone else's blunder — it's all fodder for Notkin's marketing event. That's really savvy. (Photo by Kelly Sue)

[Editor's note: You probably didn't read Sassy magazine's Cute Band Alert back in the '90s. But that girl in your campus lab, the one who made her own zines and wore slips as outerwear? She did. In homage, we give you Cute Startup Alert!] Tumblr is at the apex of blog cute right now. We blame founder David Karp and his short pants. There's something indierock about the way Karp avoided Silicon Valley to found his company in Manhattan and stock it with Williamsburg residents.You won't find Tumblr in your sysadmin's RSS feeds. Tumblr bloggers follow one another on the site's internal Dashboard system. By design, the site limits bloggers to a few formats, gracefully styling their most self-aggrandizing prose into tasty niblets. It's like the beauty of a three-chord postpunk love song packaged as a middle-school love note: "Do you want to / Follow me? / Yes/No" New York's chattering classes — the new old media kids, the new new media kids, and the even newer kids who want to be the new new kids — have gleefully hopped aboard Tumblr. Karp's ladylove, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, is there. So are a raft of current and former Gawker editors and their hangers-on, drunklinking one another late into the night, thanks to Tumblr's one-click reblogging tool. "In one particular social circle," Karp explained recently, "we've collected a lot of New York users. It's a clique like any other where you'll see a lot of negativity." True, and what cuddly, darling negativity it is. (Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

These days, even birth announcements go out via Twitter. That's how blogger Jill Fehrenbacher, wife of Engadget founder Peter Rojas, belatedly acknowledged the birth of their son, also named Peter. Can't blame her for being busy: She'd launched a commercially minded babyblog, Inhabitots, two days prior. Congratulations are due. But Rojas seems a bit frazzled by fatherhood. The couple also recently bought a new $1.6 million home on Essex Street in New York's Lower East Side. In an email exchange with Cityfile, a database of Manhattan's microcelebrities, he asked the site's editor to remove his condo's street address, citing "harassing materials" sent by mail to his previous residence. Cityfile has declined to redact the address — a matter of public record, in any case. The emails, reprinted below:

Mommyblog superstar Heather "Dooce" Armstrong can use "a lewd word" on her masthead and hold onto her J.C. Penney sponsorship. Why can't the rest of the ladybloggers cash in while cussing? Venture capitalist Tim Draper puts it best: “I love women. Women are more than half the population, and they do most of the shopping." Your womanblog is only worth something if you type one-handed, a shopping bag clutched in the other.Armstrong makes for a nice story, but she's far from exemplary. The Times gets this much right: So long as women bloggers stick to topics that publishers know they can sell ads against, they're in business:

According to the latest round of echo-chamber essays, PR people are now irrelevant to the tech industry unless they completely reinvent themselves. But how? Robert Scoble's Illiad-length roundup post links to everyone and rehashes everything, yet arrives at nothing. Scoble and his blog buddies want PR people to enter into vaguely defined high-maintenance relationships with them. What they're afraid to come out and say: Buy us lunch. Really, it sucks reading press releases on an empty stomach. (Photo by AP/Larry Crowe)

Click to viewA year after Google bought RSS-feed ad network FeedBurner for a rumored $100 million, FeedBurner's death was announced informally in a Google Groups thread. Publishers are expected to use Google's own AdSense instead. CenterNetworks publisher Allen Stern explains his frustration in the above video: FeedBurner had built a business that could deliver high ad rates in large volume. With Google failing to meet the same metrics, the only winners are the FeedBurner execs who flipped their company.

It's all too easy to suggest that Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent.org, is a nostalgia freak, as Silicon Alley Insider does. True, Ali worked at the long-forgotten inside-the-media publication, which aimed to write about the media industry with the savvy of mainstream business publications. But Ali, who testily refuses to describe the new Inside.com as a "relaunch" of the original site, is merely admitting the obvious: PaidContent.org is quite possibly the worst name for a blog ever. The nostalgia value? Priceless for Ali, meaningless for anyone else. Inside.com is simply a better name. Why not say that?

Robert Scoble did in fact capture some footage of John Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, back in 2006 when flying with the campaign's blogger party plane. The problem: All of the tapes are property of PodTech, the videoblogger's former employer, so all he can release are the still images, like this one of Hunter seated with Edwards.The accidentally historical shot is among those circulating on the AP wire, he told Valleywag this morning: "I never in a thousand years thought I'd be witnessing a scandal. But I don't really care about the sex part of it." Except he does. Scoble says he and others on the blogger plane, like Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, are glad the affair is out in the open now — and not just so they can flog their photos: "We're all disappointed that he took such a risk with the presidency in the balance." Despite his past support of Edwards, said Scoble, "I'm really happy he wasn't nominated. If he was the nominee right now, it'd have handed the election to McCain." We're not normally fans of tech bloggers turning into political pundits, but Scoble's analysis is spot-on. (Photo by Robert Scoble)