Today's Most popular News

Source:Valleywag

Arguing with a child will just leave everyone frustrated, but some people never learn. If you thought blogfather Dave Winer’s recent spat with blowhard Jason Calacanis was childish, you don’t know the depths of the man’s juvenility. In January, he argued with commenter Nick Irelan on his blog, Scripting News, about the origins of RSS, blogging, and podcasts. But unlike most Winer spats, the Internet manchild’s typically disproportionate response could actually land him in legal trouble.

When Irelan persisted — acting like a child himself by trying, unsuccessfully, to delete and edit Winer’s Wikipedia entry — Winer retaliated by cybersquatting on the domain name NickIrelan.com. This could be a real problem for the inventor of RSS — it’s not only childish, it’s potentially illegal. If Dave were a mensch, he’d apologize and let go of the domain name.

Source:Valleywag

We’ve pointed out the perils of working at perpetual second-placer Yahoo before, but employee Rich Yueh wants to convince us we’re wrong with his mad rap skillz.

To the beat of the played-out Mims single “This is Why I’m Hot,” the happy worker attempt to flow:

This is where I work, this is where I work, this is where I work. I work at Yahoo, and you should too.

Aside from listing free amenities (the cafe, a gym Yueh doesn’t use enough, iced mochas, a backpack, and business cards he’ll never hand out), the zealous Yahoo does anything but persuade prospective hires. I don’t want to work with bland drones with bad dance moves and lame taste in music who are satiated by free coffee and large monitors, whose sense of rebellion is pretending to use a carpool parking space and to ghost a car. I’d be embarrassed if my coworkers were impressed by these supposedly “wicked” rhymes:

I work ’til six, sometimes nine to five. My boss likes the way I’m always on time, making sure my stuff goes live.

Word, Rich, word.

Source:Valleywag

Revenge is always sweet — and no one dishes it out more cuttingly than the gays. Mark Elderkin, the founder of Gay.com — the queer portal that merged with PlanetOut — was, by all appearances, abruptly pushed out of his company last year in a so-called reorganization orchestrated by new CEO Karen Magee. Since then, PlanetOut has suffered a financial torture by a thousand cuts, as a host of new gay blogs and dating sites steal its traffic. Last month, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gave the company a helping hand with fresh financing. But now, Elderkin has designed a scheme to sharpen the assaults of PlanetOut’s rivals — and increase his former company’s pain.

How? Elderkin has launched a new online-advertising network which pulls most of the online gay competition together into a single advertising buy — a knife, in other words, pointed at PlanetOut’s heart. The pitch for the network includes all of PlanetOut’s standard marketing tricks, including citing the earning power and other attractive features of the gay demographic.

Elderkin’s Gay Ad Network is, in itself, a smart move, playing on marketers’ interest in targeted networks that allow them to place advertisements more thoughtfully. But that doesn’t mean that his new venture is not, at the same time, a supremely pointed slash by the ad world’s gay blade at Magee and his old company.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 3:44 pm and is filed under online advertising, Top, gay ad network, Karen Magee, Mark Elderkin, PlanetOut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.