Valleywag
100-word version
Posts Tagged “
Bloggers
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100-word version
feuds
Blogfights: A 100-word history
Nearly ten years before Violet Blue vs. Boing Boing, the Internet's early bloggers discovered their new medium's killer application: Personal spats. Radar Online blogger Choire Sicha, angling for his 14th return to us here at Gawker Media, recounts blogfeuding's past. Choire: tl; dr. Only one era bears recounting: the months after 9/11. More »
health
Blogging mentor Doc Searls in a world of hurt
Sixty-year-old David "Doc" Searls, a ramblingly lucid blogger who has mentored many a protégé, is recovering very slowly in a hospital near Harvard University. Doc has spent the week suffering a series of increasingly outlandish medical malfunctions that would make for a classic Doc Searls blog post if they weren't so lethal. Searls, a Santa Barbara resident who currently holds a Harvard fellowship, scared the bejeezus out of friends and followers this week by detailing his increasingly preposterous illnesses on his blog and on Twitter. As conferencegoers frantically tried to figure it all out by reading his posts in reverse, Valleywag phoned Doc in his hospital room to get the 100-word version. More »
bloggers
Tumblr: the documentary
Who uses David Karp's microblogging site Tumblr? To us, they are trustafarians and their hangers-on — men with beards and thick glasses, girls with rainbow leggings and bangs. They are Sanfrooklyn's creative types and those who dress like them. Or — according to David Seger's Tumblr: the documentary, embedded below — they are "the dumbest babies of them all." We take exception to this as a Tumblista ourself, though we can't deny a sad correlation between our self-worth and the number of those who follow us. More »
bloggers
Vanity Fair displays new media acumen with "Blogopticon"
In a wonderful piece of linkbait, Vanity Fair produced an illustration featuring a number of popular "blogs" arranged in a cartesian graph from "Scurrolous" to "Earnest" on one axis and "Opinion" to "News" on another. While we're trying to grasp how the 'Wag ended up on the earnest side of the scale, more confusing is the inclusion of Salon and Slate. Apparently, if you're not printed on paper, you're a "blog" — even though both publications predate the term. But where the chart really gets things wrong is in using the disembodied head of Amanda Congdon to illustrate online video program Rocketboom. If the authors or illustrator actually watched the show or read many of the listed blogs, they'd know that Joanne Colan took over as host after a very nasty and public departure from the show by Congdon. Keep trying, guys, you're bound to figure out this Internet thing eventually!
Blogging for Pink Collars
Caterina Fake crashes ladyblogs' "digital slumber party"
Women do rule the web, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake told the New York Times, but with a "crushing sameness." Loads of blogs aimed at the moneyed portion of the lady demographic are launching, including Jezebel (published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media) — ostensibly part of the "sameness" Fake alludes to. A BlogHer study even deems blogging now mainstream among women. Fake is not swayed: More »
blogging for dollars
Bombay Sapphire discovers spirit of exploitation
In their endless quest for authenticity, marketers have latched onto bloggers as their new spokespeople. They're less demanding than celebrities, and far cheaper than copywriters. In this spirit, Bombay Sapphire, a brand of Bacardi Limited, which sold $5 billion worth of booze last year, has recruited bloggers for its Spirit of Exploration website. In exchange for writing paeans about exploration, Bacardi is allowing them to enter a contest, and linking to their blogs. At least Federated Media, the ad network, sold out its bloggers' credibility in exchange for a large Microsoft advertising buy; Bombay Sapphire's ad agency has cut out the middleman and persuaded bloggers to whore themselves out for free. Impressive!
great moments in pr
Renee Blodgett brings oversharing to the world of tech PR
We live in an overfamiliar age. Why should our flacks be any different? Even so, Startup-PR consultant Renee Blodgett has raised the bar for the rest of her industry. Blodgett, PBS informs us, "is one of the PR folks who understands how to communicate with bloggers." A blogger who forwarded me an email from Blodgett begs to differ. Blodgett and said Web scribe have never met, and yet Blodgett feels perfectly comfortable proposing "social" time, planning a "small group dinner," and asking for hotel recommendations. All this with four smileys thrown in for good measure. The email: More »
tumblr
Would you pay $999 for a customized Tumblr? Trustafarian bloggers will!
A couple weeks ago, when we showed you how to redesign your Tumblr for free, we mentioned that a company called Tumblize plan to charge $499 for the very same service. We were wrong. Andrew Wilkinson's Tumblize, launched today, will design you a customized Tumblr for "just $999." Startled by that kind of nonironic usage of the word just? Don't be. If Tumblr's blogging hordes have taught us anything, it's that earnest is the new ironic. Besides, Tumblize already has customers offering testimonials. Simon Frankson extols:Tumblize actualized my crazy vision in ways I didn't think the internet even allowed for. They're poet/designers making haiku websites out of dreams.Below, view a screenshot of Frankson's Tumblr and $3,996 more worth of goods. More »
jackpot
John Battelle takes $22 million in fuck-you money
Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million. More »
1:00 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Owen Thomas
3,750 views,
4 comments
Latest by n/a: Word on the street is, he'll lose most of that in one incredibly bad hand of poker at a suitcase gambling stand by Capitola beach. more »
automattic
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher admits her bias in interviewing Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg: Not only does her site use his blogging software, but she admits to having a "personal mancrush" on the programmer. He is perhaps the first straight guy to receive such treatment from Swisher, who is, provably, a mean lesbian. I think it's the hair: Mullenweg stole the retro-fauxhawk look from yours truly, I believe. Swisher does ask Mullenweg, "How do you make money at this?" But she's too crushed out to point out that Mullenweg already has made money, at least for himself, by selling a chunk of his company to investors. A digest of the interview: More »
Matt Mullenweg charms pants off Kara Swisher, copies my hairdo
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher admits her bias in interviewing Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg: Not only does her site use his blogging software, but she admits to having a "personal mancrush" on the programmer. He is perhaps the first straight guy to receive such treatment from Swisher, who is, provably, a mean lesbian. I think it's the hair: Mullenweg stole the retro-fauxhawk look from yours truly, I believe. Swisher does ask Mullenweg, "How do you make money at this?" But she's too crushed out to point out that Mullenweg already has made money, at least for himself, by selling a chunk of his company to investors. A digest of the interview: More »
security
Google's Blogger flooded by spammers
Over the last few months, wily spammers may have figured out how to crack the security feature known as "captchas." With an army of compromised Windows PCs known as botnets, they've been using their new power to flood Google's Blogger with spam. Why Blogger? More »
blogging kills
MessageDance trying to cash in on "blogging kills" scare
While exploiting tragic deaths and blogger heatlh problems for a trend piece in the New York Times is bad, trying to gin up new customers by jumping on the bandwagon is yet worse, but that's just what MessageDance is doing with their latest email direct marketing campaign: "Power blogging minus the heart attack!" Especially since it seems to imply that making it easier to post updates anywhere and anytime will somehow relieve the pressure to constantly stay on top of the news.
bloggers
Local woman dumps newfangled RSS feeds to type in website addresses the old-fashioned way
An online publishing veteran who goes by the name of Halsted has stopped drinking from the RSS firehose. She says she's not missing her feed reader's unread items folder:Nothing has changed. I spend my time writing, reading, and puzzle-solving instead, and my stress levels are markedly down. Now I am absolutely convinced that I need to ditch my RSS reader permanently, and only read a handful of feeds on a start page like iGoogle or Netvibes.As a journalist, it's my duty to call three friends for quotes to support my article about the "Slow Web" movement now. I expect some blogger will get a book deal for the inevitable manifesto. (Photo by Jef Poskanzer)
great moments in pr
Microsoft pretends Vista sales video is a gag, and CNET editor buys it
With the leak of an internal sales video, Microsoft is having its ironic cake and pretending not to eat it too. Its marketing team produced an awful spoof of Bruce Springsteen singing about Vista. One should note: Companies do this routinely to motivate their salespeople, but the innocents in engineering normally aren't exposed to the cheerleading routines. Microsoft's spin on the video: It's a gag! We're being sly! And incredibly, CNET editor Charles Cooper bought their line, quoting an anonymous flack: "They thought folks internally would get a kick out of not taking themselves so seriously all the time." More »
"Blog Till They Drop" author no stranger to technophobia
"Nat Idle, a medical student turned journalist, sits in a San Francisco cafe when a woman puts a folded note on his table. Nat picks up the note, walks to the door to follow her, opens the note and reads: Get out of the Cafe, NOW! The cafe explodes." So begins Hooked by the Timesman who warns blogging can kill. [Matt Richtel]
nerdfight
Rafat Ali's blogging hopes and dreams: to be as boring and profitable as Reed Elsevier
It takes a brave man to get in the middle of TechCrunch's bloggin' VC Michael Arrington and PaidContent founding editor Rafat Ali as they duke it out over the future of their micromedia empires. Timesman Saul Hansell is nothing but brave. In a Bits blog post, he quotes Rafat Ali's new hired hand Nathan Richardson saying that PaidContent differentiates itself from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and our own Valleywag because it "has not gone down the road of following personal foibles." Then, towards the end of the piece, Ali himself suggeests that Arrington is thinking too small by gunning for CNET:The big market for us is the trade media. Companies like Reed Elsevier, Nielsen, Incisive and Informa play in this market, not these blogs.But are these publishers so evenhanded? Trade publications have a history of being self-interested boosters for the markets they cover. More »
fresh start
Sony loses $50 per laptop thanks to those meddling bloggers
Tech bloggers are all worked up again. They're pissed that favorite whipping-boy Sony is charging $50 to not include "bundles" of trial software with new PC's. Engadget's Paul Miller writes:Or here's an idea, Sony: stop trying to milk profits and start giving consumers laptops that actually work out of the box.Sony is just trying to take care of their shareholders by keeping margins up — just like any other manufacturer. The company thought it could get away with charging $50 to replace lost revenue from paid placement of trial software without anyone noticing the absurdity of the situation. After the uproar, Sony changed its tune and will now offer its "Fresh Start" option for free. We suspect the other computer makers will follow suit shortly. Sony, next time just keep your mouth shut and we'll all get rich, ok?
