First, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel banned Rachel Glaser from the corporate jet. Now the annoyingly loud talker is out of the corporation. The senior vice president will leave the company in 2008, reports Kara Swisher, who’s an expert on loudness. On her way out the door, Glaser could hold it open for VP of media engineering Bharath Kadaba, also soon to depart. A source told Swisher that Yahoo is just trying to cull its executive herd. Not a bad idea, considering that as recently as September, that pack included 300 vice presidents and several dozen senior VPs. But there’s likely more to Glaser’s departure, at least, than simple economics.

Last we heard of Glaser, departing Yahoo finance exec Mark Rubash told us it would “more enjoyable and rewarding elsewhere” than to take a job which would place Glaser as one of his reports. Rubash was hardly alone, according to one commenter who wrote, “To say Ms Glaser is ‘widely disliked on the Sunnyvale campus’ is being kind.”

Source:Valleywag

Herb Caen’s typewriter is gone from Moose’s, but the recently remodeled North Beach hangout still hosts the beloved columnist’s spirit, I’m convinced. So I picked the spot for drinks in honor of Megan “Leggy McCarthy, our party correspondent who’s headed to some print rag in SoMa. (In Soviet Russia, Wired gets you!) Drinking starts at 4 p.m. Drunk blogging starts at 4:15 p.m. RSVP on Facebook, or just show up with a juicy piece of gossip dripping from your lips.

I just published my first in what will be a whole lot of New York Times personal technology articles for non-nerds. “A Universe of Gadget Advice” leads those of us (read: me) who can’t follow the gadgetspeak on Gizmodo through the hell — well, the heck of online last-minute gadget gift shopping. NYT techniology [sic] editor Damon Darlin turns out to be a perfectly nice guy who gets my jokes. And then edits them into English. I’ll be writing about cellphones, cameras, TVs, and any Web 2.0 stuff that survives Ted at Uncov. I’m pretty sure I’m now the first writer to simultaneously contribute to the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and Gawker Media. Look, you’ve got your creepy life goals, and I’ve got mine.

Some Silicon Valley CEOs rally the troops by hosting ski trips or offering free iPhones. And then there’s Cisco CEO John Chambers. He uplifts his workers through internal corporate communications — a webcam set up in his office which allows him to record video missives on his latest travels and to pooh-pooh the last quarter’s earnings report. Comments on the videos are enabled, and, some may say, enabling. Unlike the snarky criticisms you see on YouTube or other video sites, all the comments after Chambers’s clips are a hallelujah chorus. Cisco’s amen corner, after the jump.

Source:Valleywag

newVideoPlayer(”Jay_Leno_Writers_Strike.flv”, 475, 376);
David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien could be back on TV before Hollywood writers end their strike, Variety reports. Writers are striking over how much they should be compensated for content distributed over the Internet and on DVDs, but producers for the three late night shows are in secret talks to bring back their own scribes before the strike ends. That could be a serious blow to the writers’ cause. So far, late-night reruns are the only sign for most television viewers that anything’s going on at all. Producers won’t run out of sitcom and drama scripts until January.

Source:Valleywag

The wisdom of crowds? We’ll believe it when we see it. Charting the social graph? Best left to people without friends. Forgive me if I greet our parent company’s latest upgrade to our site with a mix of hesitation and chagrin: You can now follow other commenters on Valleywag.

But if you take this for what it is — a useful improvement to the site, not a once-every-hundred-years transformation of media — the new feature will likely grow on you. Once you’ve registered with Valleywag, you’ll see more icons next to users’ comments. In addition to the familiar “reply” and “report” buttons, you’ll see a “plus” icon that lets you follow a fellow reader. You can see the people I follow here. On your commenter profile page, you can also see the people who follow you. After you’ve added some people to your followed list, you’ll get notified about the comments they leave, and also the readers they’ve started following. And, oh yes — everyone else will know who fascinates you. Privacy? Surely you expect too much.

Source:Valleywag

Steve Kirsch, founder of Web portal Infoseek, is facing an incurable disease. [AllThingsD]

Source:Valleywag

I’ve had it. Between you vicious commenters and my cold, ruthless overlord, I’m near my breaking point. So Mr. Valleywag and I are headed west for a week on an abruptly scheduled vacation. (What’s west of San Francisco? I’ll leave that to the geographers among you.) I’m leaving the site in the hands of my former Business 2.0 colleague Evelyn Nussenbaum, pictured here. What really gives me hopes that Evelyn will make it through the week is not her experience at the deuce, as valuable as that is. No, it’s the fact that she spent three years at the New York Post, back to back with the Page Six crew. If she can work for Rupert Murdoch, she’ll manage just fine. Tip your guest editor!

If you’re not a word nerd, you’ll want to skip this post. But for those who pay attention to such matters, a few notes on style. Previous regimes at Valleywag have vociferously rejected CamelCase in company names, but I’ve reinstated it. While I cringe when I see people incorrectly capitalize the “W” in “Valleywag,” I find it equally noisome when people write “Myspace” for “MySpace” or “Linked In” for “LinkedIn.” With all due respect to my predecessors, I don’t think it makes one look hip; I think, rather, that it makes you look clueless and lazy. Likewise, I’m breaking with the vile Luddite practice of lowercasing “Internet” and “Web,” and insisting on their capitalization. Why?

Because they’re proper nouns. An “internet” is any interconnected network of networks; a “web,” lowercased, is any connection of hyperlinked pages. The Internet, and the World Wide Web — the ones we all connect to — are the only ones we actually care about. If you insist on writing about “the internet,” I’ll insist on asking, “Which one?”

Anyone naive enough to believe that online video would democratize, and thereby improve, political discussion in America has been deservedly disappointed. In the recent presidential debates, instead of submitting questions by email — last decade’s fad — Internet users were asked to vlog in their queries to the candidates. The results, far from being unpredictable and populist, were as scripted as any TV show.

The YouTube/CNN debate delivered sophomoric (but stereotypical YouTube) softballs. And any remaining hopes were dashed by the Iowa Republican debate hosted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. The Disney-owned network, like YouTube, implemented user voting in its video-submission process. And, predictably, the result was more “America’s Funniest Home Videos” than New England Town Hall. ABC adroitly crafted its call for citizen submissions to market its televised event, not raise the level of political discourse.

If you followed the marketing hype around ABC’s debate, you may have believed that video questions submitted by everyday people would be central to the broadcast and that the popularly chosen submissions would be selected. Instead, only two videos were used, neither of them top-rated. Zennie Abraham accused the network of “vlogger fraud,” describes one of the lucky two as “the typical, predictable, stereotypical blonde white female that a TV producer would select.” (Ironically, Abraham then turned around and suggested ABC pick typical, predictable, stereotypical blonde white female Amanda Congdon to run the debate instead.)

Of course, a close reading of ABC’s actual call for submissions should have warned Abraham and company of what to expect:

We encourage you, your family, colleagues & friends to vote/rate favorite questions & the highest rated videos will be a factor in George Stephanopoulos’ decision and also have the opportunity to be featured in ABC News NOW’s post-debate Spin room!

No promise that submissions will be included in the debate or that votes will actually matter.

And why would anyone think otherwise? The networks have long known that hard-hitting questions and articulate, thoughtful responses don’t make for good TV. Or, for that matter, win debates. But exploiting the vlogger community? That makes for excellent pre-debate buzz. The fact that the vlogging community was taken in, and is now up in arms, just shows how clever ABC’s marketing team is.

Source:Valleywag

Let me replay a scene from the heated negotiations that brought me to Valleywag. Nick Denton, Noah Robischon, and I are sitting at a table at Balthazar, Denton’s home away from home in New York’s Soho neighborhood. “Minions!” I shout at Denton, upending a few espresso cups as I slam the table. “I demand minions!” Denton shrinks in his chair and looks at Robischon. “We can get him minions, right?” the blog mogul whispers. “Well, maybe if we cut Sicha’s male-hookers budget,” says Robischon, as he whips out his programmable calculator. “Screw Choire!” I bellow. “Minions!”

And so it came to pass.

The place, of course, had a few underlings already, and I haven’t had the heart to issue any of them pink slips yet. There’s Nick Douglas, the site’s redheaded stepchild and my predecessor as editor; Megan McCarthy, our reportedly leggy party correspondent; and Tim Faulkner, our salty New England contributor. Today, though, I’m adding Mary Jane Irwin to their ranks.

Irwin, who goes by “MJ,” was a former intern of mine at Business 2.0, more recently an intern at Wired, and, like disgraced “Dateline” producer Michelle Madigan, a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism. Not that I hold that against her. The first day she reported to me, she welcomed me with a gratuitous insult. And when she wasn’t working her butt off, she precipitated an acid rain of commentary on the less-than-stellar startups which made their way into Business 2.0’s pages. I loved it, of course. And when I started at Valleywag, I knew it wouldn’t be long before she did, too. Please welcome MJ in true Valleywag style.