I’ll admit it, I’m jealous: While Valleywag remains stuck with a logo that looks like an IBM monitor from 1982, io9, Gawker Media’s newly launched sci-fi site, has gotten a wickedly cool illustration. The future is coming, and it is diabetically adorable. I quizzed site editor Annalee Newitz on the origins of the logo.

Valleyfag: Let me guess at your instructions to the designer for the io9 illustration: “Think Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen.”
t3chn0ptimist69: hahaha we just said, “give us a cute gender-neutral thing with a brain implant” Eliza Gauger, the illustrator, is a genius

Like I said: Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen. A supremely effective exploitation of the visual resonances of two pop-culture memes. I can only applaud. And, in a nod to my futurist colleagues, coin a new word: “cynesthetic.”

Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with Scott Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller’s backing or Allison’s cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he’s grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org.

Lodwick’s fashion sense has its own affinity with the homeless. But Norbum is clearly an attempt at attention-grabbing humor. I’ll concede the attention-grabbing part — I’m writing about it, aren’t I? — but the humor, after one weak chuckle, escaped me. Without Allison, without his partners at Connected Ventures, Lodwick’s limits are becoming more easily glimpsed. And less watchable every day.

Source:Valleywag

The herd of day traders is debating whether to buy Apple before Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo. But following the herd is a strategy that generally leads to getting trampled. Eric Savitz of Barron’s spots a smarter strategy: Buy Amazon.com, and sell — or at least avoid — Barry Diller’s IAC. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says IAC has “few countercyclical hedges to protect against a potentially material economic slowdown in the U.S.” What does that mean?

It means that Diller, who prides himself on spreading his bets, has done a bad job. The company’s diversification into all fields of Internet business has proven a weakness rather than a strength — a fact even Diller now recognizes. That’s why he’s breaking the company up into bits, leaving an IAC that’s focused on online content and advertising. The remainder, however, will still be too vulnerable to the U.S. economy.

Bezos, meanwhile, has proved the opposite of Diller. He’s made one bet and stuck to it. And while e-commerce is no longer sexy on Sand Hill Road or on Wall Street, it continues to be a growth industry. The longer users have been on the Web, the more they tend to shop online.

His lone divagation from e-commerce — Amazon’s panoply of Web services, popular with gullible startups — is an exercise in renting out a computing infrastructure he’s built at great expense. It’s unlikely to be a better business than e-commerce, but it scores Bezos valuable press at little cost.

Mahaney’s stock analysis is not a shocker: The stock market undervalues persistence and overvalues change for change’s sake. What’s surprising is that so few people have taken this insight to the bank.

Source:Valleywag

Valleywag dwells on sex, greed, and hypocrisy. That leaves little room for the merely quirky, edgy, and unprofitable. For that, we present to you io9, a new sci-fi blog published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media. All of our colleagues are dutifully saying nice things. There will be none of that from Valleywag, thank you very much. Don’t get us wrong: We are grateful for the existence of io9, run by surly media Nerd Annalee Newitz (”sparkly-crap mobile circuit-board garbage gizmo mass-produced by machines“).

Where else can we pawn off geek-culture stories about space porn and Star Trek that have nothing to do with making you smarter and richer? Take a break and check out these randy, sex-crazed fruitopians, with their rose-colored technoptimism and their shiny silver jumpsuits. If you don’t roll back to Valleywag bent over with laughter, perhaps you never belonged here in the first place. (Photo by M. Weiss/NASA/CXC via Getty Images)