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Recap
Recap
Social Networks
What does online gossip profit us?
In an upcoming New York Times magazine, already teased online, Wired contributor Clive Thompson argues that Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr are not alienating us from one another as human beings, as social-network fearmongers claim. We're just becoming more digitally intimate, present in the lives of our 500 "friends," one update at a time. “Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone’s trivia and gossiping,” a 20something Facebook user Thompson interviewed said. We know how well that goes. More »
Commenter Of The Day
WilliamMarkFelt
Marc Andreessen invented the friggin' Netscape browser. Have you heard of it? He also wants you to know that he's the idea guy who shifted your computing paradigm by getting Netscape to develop webtop software. So while gabbing at the Churchill Club, Andreessen slyly noted the realization of his ideas. By Google. Today's featured commenter, WilliamMarkFelt, explains the thing about ideas: More »
Berserkeley
The Atheon, a "Temple of Science," coming to Berkeley
The Judah L. Magnes Museum, which exhibits "art and history focused on the Jewish experience," seems to be taking a cue from Neal Stephenson's latest novel. The Atheon: A Temple to Science, Memory Lab, Projections, and Meta/Data will open on September 27. The long, long press release below promises "religion has finally been rendered wholly compatible with science ... In the case of the Atheon, the stained glass is patterned to show the cosmic microwave background radiation — capturing the universe in the first several hundred thousand years of creation — using NASA's new WMAP satellite data." If that don't knock you to your knees, nothing will. More »
Caption Contest
YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley chats up Henry Kissinger
YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley imposes on former secretary of state and world famous skirt-chaser Henry Kissinger at the party thrown by Google and Vanity Fair on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. You know how this works — best caption suggested in the comments becomes the new headline. Yesterday's winner was WagCurious for "Apparently everything gets past security these days." (Photo by Rex Sorgatz)
Sponsors
Got money to spend? Valleywag's ad inventory is for you
The Wall Street Journal's new magazine will tell you how to fritter away your cash on luxury baubles. Some choose instead to make wise investments, like our advertisers. This week:
Chevy Fuel Solutions, IE8, Mike's Election Guide, Register.com, Sharp Aquos, Sprint, T-Mobile, Unscrew America
Looking to put your cash to work? Advertise on Valleywag.
Uncov blogger wins America's CTO contest
Narrowingly beating out Hans Reiser in a tight reader vote, The Register's newest columnist, Ted Dziuba, has won the IT snark site's poll for CTO of America. Yeah, it's stupid. But after reading all those bloggers who seriously expect Barack Obama to come to them for sage counsel, I needed a break.
Domain Names
35 percent of biggest companies own ____sucks.com
A study of Fortune 500 and other companies found that one in three have bought the name, say, walmartsucks.com. But corporate attitudes toward hate sites vary widely between, say, Dell and Xerox: More »
Online Video
Joost finally abandons desktop app
Online-video startup Joost — whose name we think is Estonian for "trouble" — will cease development of its little-used desktop application and focus exclusively on a long-expected Web-browser plugin. None of which solves Joost's biggest problem: a lack of compelling content. Considering how difficult it was for NBC to convince many to download Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin for online coverage of the Olympics, it's unlikely that users will flock to download something from an even more obscure company, especially when Adobe is building features similar to Joost's into Flash. More »
Clips
Sony to make movie from "Christian the Lion" YouTube weeper
It was sweet when Bree and Dan posted corresponding "Boy Problems" and "Girl Problems" videos during the first LonelyGirl15 run. Yeah, it's heart-rending when crows mother kittens. But YouTube's biggest tearjerker has to be the story of Christian the Lion — coming to a theater near you, courtesy of Sony. More »5 rules for making a company video worth watching
Austin-based interactive ad agency Tocquigny embarrassed itself with a video meant to show prospective interns how fun it is to work at the company over the summer. Instead of showing how quirky and Internet-savvy Tocquigny was, it proved to be a turnoff — and a ripoff. Besides not copying someone else's work, what could Tocquigny have done differently? Using five examples the agency should have followed, we'll explain how to do a self-promotional corporate video right:
More »
2:00 PM on Fri Sep 5 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,046 views,
2 comments
Latest by Shadowlayer: Whats your company Advertising Guru? Anyway, the digg video is just asking for the question: why there's so many people working more »
Great Moments In Pr
Electronic Arts publicity stunt seizes up London traffic
As part of Electronic Arts's efforts to promote Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, the video game publisher gave away $35,340 in free gas at a station in a north London neighborhood. The game, set in Venezuela, uses gasoline as a form of currency. However, the scene that developed looked more like Baghdad shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with a line forty cars long and actors in camouflage fatigues trying to placate angry commuters trying to get out of their driveways. In the end, the company ended the giveaway with a little over half the free fuel doled out.
Microsoft
Facebook's search engine second fastest-growing on the Web
What did Microsoft get when it signed a deal in August to serve ads against search results on Facebook? The right to make money off the second-fastest growing search engine on the Internet, according to a ComScore study. Facebook served 173 million search queries in July 2008, up 10 percent from 157 million in July 2007. Facebook doesn't allow its users to search the rest of Web from its site. Even then, its search engine reached a sixth the size of Microsoft's own. More »
halsey minor
Fibbing CNET founder in $16.8 million art lawsuit
Sotheby's, the auction house, is suing CNET founder Halsey Minor for $16.8 million it claims he owes for artwork he bought in a May auction. Minor says Sotheby's misled him. Sotheby's says Minor told it he couldn't come up with the cash because he was owed money by others. Oh, and CBS bought CNET for $1.8 billion earlier this year. So CNET founder Halsey Minor ought to be rolling in the dough, right? No. And therein lies a twisted tale that ties up a heralded artwork, Edward Hicks's "Peaceable Kingdom," with Minor's dotcom-era fibs. More »
Polls
Where did Google rip off its Chrome icon?
On Blogoscoped, obsessive Google watcher Philipp Lenssen has posted an exhaustive list of "Google Chrome Tips and Pointers." Go there if you are, for example, a freeloading jerk who wants to learn how to install ad blockers in Chrome. But I think the best part of the FAQ is the question Lenssen raises about where the logo came from. Voice your preferred theory in our poll: More »
meghan asha
Julia Allison pal's Cisco ad fails Wi-Fi test
Bay Area-raised biotech heiress Meghan Asha, who now lives in New York and egoblogs for fired Star editor-at-large Julia Allison's NonSociety, appears in an endorsement video for Cisco. The "Digital Cribs" lifestyle shoot has a brief product placement of a Cisco Linksys wireless router. Asha claims that she uses the Linksys for her home Wi-Fi network, which she calls "Geeking Out." Wait for the blooper which shows the whole setup's a fake, 23 seconds in: More »
Clips
The 5 goofiest computer ads
Microsoft's new Seinfeld ad campaign proves you can't predict success. Here are five goofy ads that worked — plus the clip that probably sold Microsoft on Seinfeld. Above: A parody of Jacques Cousteau's undersea documentaries for Sun Microsystems. More »
Conspicuous Consumption
Got money to burn? New Wall Street Journal mag is for you
Everyone who reads blogs all day knows that newspapers and magazines are doomed, sinking ships, right? Not if you've got money to spend. Saturday's Wall Street Journal will include a new quarterly lifestyle magazine called WSJ. — yes, with a period, just to annoy Owen. What's in it? More »
Vibrant Media
World's most annoying online-ads startup loses executive
Ah, schadenfreude: Vibrant Media, the company responsible for those "IntelliTXT" ads that appear disguised as hyperlinks in the middle of articles and pop up if you accidentally mouse over them, is enduring executive turmoil. Sean Finnegan, an advertising executive who joined the company as "chief media officer" in January, is leaving the startup for Publicis. Such a big title, such a short stint! But Vibrant's executive ranks are stuffed with ridiculously puffy titles. A suggestion for Vibrant: Try making your ads, and your business cards, less obnoxious.
valleywag calendar
Geeks for change
Hate your job, your friends, yourself? Ditch the existential crisis and use your tech prowess for a good cause. The Change Jam with Dreamfish is rallying doers and thinkers for a meetup at its San Francisco office today from 2 to 6 p.m. On Saturday, take your pick of work or play. The Ladies Who Launch are holding a BYOB (Be Your Own Boss) event. Speakers include heavy-hitting women like Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook, Valleywag's favorite online-video personality; Heather Stephenson of Idealbite.com; and Gina Bianchini of Ning. The event's at the Galleria at the San Francisco Design Center. If you're more interested in meeting your match in gaming, sign up for the Halo 3 International Tournament local qualifying round at PlayNTrade in San Mateo. Check-in starts at 11 a.m. For those of you who couldn't get into DjangoCon at the Googleplex this weekend, trade your tears for beers. Everyone is invited to the Django 1.0 release party Saturday night at the Tied House in Mountain View from 7 to 10:30 p.m. (Photo by donnaphoto) More »
rumormonger
SanDisk for sale to Samsung?
Milpitas-based flash-memory maker SanDisk may sell out to Korean megavendor Samsung, the world's biggest maker of memory chips. As prices for flash memory drop, SanDisk sale rumors have floated for weeks, including word of a possible acquisition by hard-drive maker Seagate. But Samsung could use SanDisk's portfolio of patents to beat back its rival Toshiba, which currently has a manufacturing partnership with SanDisk. Not to mention save some money: The Wall Street Journal reports Samsung pays SanDisk $400 million to $500 million a year in flash-memory royalties.
online advertising
A billion-dollar advertiser backs Yahoo's Google deal
Why did Yahoo choose Google over Microsoft for a search deal? The chief reason Yahoo executives cited was that the Google partnership let Yahoo continue to sell both search and display ads in package deals. Kellogg, a breakfast-cereal maker with a $1 billion marketing budget, just gave Yahoo's strategy a big vote of confidence. More »
In Brief
Honda Insight Vs. Toyota Prius: Separated At Birth?
FROM JALOPNIK.COM: It's hard not to think the new Honda Insight hybrid and the Toyota Prius look like kissing cousins. But, while both are five-door hatches sharing similar profiles, cut lines and green-tinged halos... they've got vastly different designs. More »
Jackpot
Management fees keep VCs rolling in it -- for now
Total compensation for venture capitalists and other private-equity managers was up 32.3 percent in 2007 over 2006, a new study reports. How can this be? Private equity is just as bogged down as the public markets by the credit crunch. For the Sand Hill Road contingent, there wasn't a single tech IPO in the second quarter. Acquisitions were down too. If VCs don't unload their companies on someone — public investors, or larger companies — their limited-partner investors don't see returns. So why the raises? More »
radical transparency
Wired nears Schwarzschild radius of self-referential blogging
"What if we showed how we produced this story?" iconoclastic Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked the team producing an article about self-referential screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (in photo) and his new self-referential film about a self-referential Broadway play, Synecdoche, New York. "What would happen if we broke the rules, we put the whole thing online as we produced it?" "What if we posted the edit — hell, the rough draft." "What if we posted the pitch letter?" "What if we posted the emails about the pitch letter?" Keep going guys .... What if we posted the email you sent Valleywag? Transparency just keeps getting easier. More »
browser wars
Marc Andreessen blesses Google's browser
Google Chrome has the potential to replace the Windows desktop — and kill Adobe's Flash for extra points. So said Marc Andreessen, one of the programmers behind the world-changing Mosaic browser. He'd long ago envisioned a future where instead of running applications from a desktop operating system, computer users would get everything from servers on a network. It wasn't his original idea, but Andreessen pushed Netscape developers to replace the desktop with a "webtop." The result, Constellation, was bloated and slow. Ten years later, Andreessen told a small crowd at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto that Google is finishing his work: More »
Politics
