SF Weekly writer Mary Spicuzza attempted to track down Griot, a Wikipedia editor with a record of baiting other users into getting banned. She chronicled her meandering, unsuccessful saga in 4,275 paralyzing words. Snipping out a lot of needless narrative and ruminations about anonymity and accountability online, we arrive at an elegant 100-word account of the hunt for a Wikipedia user.
Bebo had found potential buyers in Microsoft and Yahoo, sources told BoomTown's Kara Swisher, not Google or News Corp. as TechCrunch reported. These facts were "easy to find out about by anyone who can pick up a phone and ask around like a reporter is supposed to," WSJ vet Swisher writes on her blog. Then she goes on to slam Michael Arrington's TechCrunch some more.
That just about sums up Microsoft's response after Google's top lawyer laid the smack down on the Microsofties. In a short missive, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith says roughly " You're kicking our ass in search and advertising, so who are you to talk about monopolies on the Internet?" Read the full release after the jump.
Ousted Vimeo founder/CEO Jakob Lodwick has fallen into Tumblr-blogged obscurity. Without a scantily clad photo of Jakob and Julia every morning, why should we continue to care about his budding musical exploits? Lodwick must have gotten the memo, for he's taken on fellow nerd-hottie hipster entrepreneur Peter Rojas in an attempt to stay relevant. Lodwick (and everyone else) can't figure out what's so great about Rojas's Web-music thing, RCRD LBL. "They combined the worst way to discover music (genres) with the worst way to organize Web content (tag clouds)." Them's fighting words! At least he has one good point: the only people who think any of this crazy music 2.0 nonsense is a good idea are founders of music websites and their friends. (Photo of Jakob Lodwick by Jesse Winter) Update: Lodwick deleted the post. Luckily, we have a copy.
Enterprise IT is boring ... except when it gets lowdown and dirty. LIke it's starting to between Microsoft and VMware. Last week, Microsoft announced a "vision and strategy to accelerate virtualization adoption." We could relay the details, but they're full of jargon like "System Center Virtual Machines Manager (SCVMM)" and "RPD protocol for VDI environments." So go here for that. The best way to understand tech jargon like this is to see how companies pump up their sales guys for battle, since everyone knows sales guys are thick as rocks and must be told things in small, English-language words. Here are excerpts from a leaked VMware memo:
Mark Cuban was happy to sit with Deadspin blogger Will Leitch for an interview to go into GQ. (Deadspin, a sports blog, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher.) But then Cuban saw Leitch's subsequent post on Valleywag. "While I respect the magazine," Cuban writes on his blog, "I am not a fan of the site [Leitch] works for, or of its affiliated site that the blog ran on. I would not have done the interview had I known he would blog about it for this site." Which is too bad, really. We're normally fans of the outspoken, outrageous entrepreneur-blogger. Except when he engages in phony self-righteousness. "Is this ethical?" he asks.
Scoops are important to journalists. But do readers care? Some writers persist in thinking so. I can't remember ever seeing such backbiting over a humdrum funding announcement: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD scooped everyone last Friday with a rumor that Slide, Max Levchin's Web widget maker, was raising a big funding round. Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek had more details of the $50 million round in an already-written column published to the Web after Swisher's post. Brad Stone of the New York Times weighed in that afternoon. And that's when the knives came out.
I'm sitting in the CES press lounge when my editor, Owen Thomas, sends me an email:
Having plenty of time on my hands while my compatriots at Gizmodo blog blog blog it all at CES 2008, I took a walk around the press lounge to check the ratio of Macs to PCs. The latest numbers peg Apple with a 7.3 percent market share in the world at large. Will the the press lounge be full of fanboys or stodgy old corporate types?
What does Michael Arrington have against women? A lot, apparently. His latest target: A blog commenter named "Shelley," who spoke up on behalf of a photographer, Lane Hartwell. Hartwell, as we'd guessed, was the copyright complainant who knocked the popular "Here Comes Another Bubble" video off YouTube. Canadian blogger Mathew Ingram said Hartwell was wrong. Shelley responded in Hartwell's defense. And that's when Michael Arrington joined in and turned the conversation awkward.
European TechCrunch competitor BlogNation imploded two weeks ago. Yesterday, its founder Sam Sethi wrote a long post to explain how it was all Michael Arrington's fault. Today, Arrington responded. Both are blowhards who love nothing more than to spew verbiage at each other. Logorrhea as a lethal weapon. How to get your dose of schadenfreude without getting bored to death? By reading these 100-word versions of each missive.
Kara Swisher, the mean lesbian who blogs for Rupert Murdoch at AllThingsD, just called me "the town work whore" in an email. What does that even mean? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Sorry people, show's over. Connected Ventures cofounder Jakob Lodwick has pulled the plug on JakobandJulia.com, his joint venture with his girlfriend, Star editor-at-large, and geekboy aficionado Julia Allison. "My interest in creating fuel for the gossip sites has dried up," Lodwick writes on the blog. "I don't enjoy the attention anymore." We'll hold you to that, Mr. Lodwick. Allison, however, doesn't seem like she's going to hold you much at all anymore, judging by the following response.
An extraordinary public slap, rarely seen in the genteel world of magazine publisher Time Inc.: Fortune appears to have momentarily taken executive editor Josh Quittner's Techland blog away from him and handed it to rival tech writer David Kirkpatrick. Quittner's recent blog rant about Facebook's Beacon was wrongheaded enough, but entirely undeserving of this humiliation — republishing, duplicatively, a Fortune.com column by Kirkpatrick in Quittner's blog. Kirkpatrick, left, declared that Quittner, right, had been "silenced" on the Facebook issue. He went on to tear apart, at length, Quittner's argument. All the more shaming, because Kirkpatrick is — how to put this gently? — a laughingstock among his colleagues.
Blognation, the mostly Euro-focused competitor to TechCrunch, founded by former TechCrunch blogger Sam Sethi, is imploding — according to TechCrunch. Michael Arrington must find this all delicious: Oliver Starr, a blogger who left Arrington's MobileCrunch site and later landed at BlogNation, is now writing about Sethi's troubles.
The New York Times gave futurist and avant-garde pianist Jaron Lanier space to complain that he wants you to pay up for Internet content. You probably don't know who he is unless you watched PBS science programs in the '90s. He allegedly coined the phrase "virtual reality" back when it meant bulky goggles and the Nintendo Power Glove, not cruising for a mistress in Second Life. We agree with this much: Everyone has the right to try to make a buck. Some Internet content has value. But definitely don't buy Lanier's CDs. Instead, we'd pay for a high-def webcast cagematch between Lanier and his unnamed nemesis. Can you guess who?
God bless Allen Stern of CenterNetworks. The blogger has given us a gift: something to call Jason Calacanis other than "egomaniac." Now, Stern thinks that being a "community CEO" is a bad idea. Publicly relying on readers of your blog and Facebook "friends" for business decisions, Stern argues, causes customers and employees to lose faith in you as a leader. Calacanis, of course, disagrees, and has embraced the label in a long post defending his newly christened role. Bring out the bulldogs, already.
