We hear that Yahoo TechTicker, the online-video show from Yahoo Finance featuring Valley fox Sarah Lacy and red-hot moneymen Henry Blodget and Paul Kedrosky, is delayed, and won’t be airing early episodes next week as rumored. Dammit! Scott Moore, we blame you for this, too.

Source:Valleywag

“The Wall St. buzz is that msft and yhoo are bidding for eBay. My source tells me that Yahoo! has bid 1.76 shares for eBay ($40-41) and is expected to win at that price.” So writes Scot Wingo, the plugged-in CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an auctions-software maker in which eBay owns a minority stake. Let’s dissect that rumor, shall we?

The deal does offer a generous 25 percent premium to eBay shareholders, pricing the company’s shares at the 52-week-high they briefly touched in October. But as proposed, it would be ruinously dilutive to Yahoo shareholders, leaving them with 36 percent of the combined company. Why a Yahoo shareholder would settle for this escapes me, however, unless they have completely written off Yahoo’s management, brand, and assets.

Which is not out of the question. At the levels Yahoo’s trading at, shareholders are essentially paying for its minority stakes in Yahoo Japan, Alibaba in China, and Gmarket in Korea. But if a shareholder would be disillusioned enough to accept this deal, one wonders why they wouldn’t simply sell their Yahoo shares and buy eBay shares on the open market, where they’re considerably cheaper.

I don’t know if this plan is being seriously considered within Yahoo. As many have written, Yahoo and eBay’s assets make a nice strategic fit, in theory; eBay’s PayPal already has a search-ads partnership with Yahoo, and the two companies have other advertising deals. Google is actively pursuing a profitable combination of search and e-commerce through its Checkout initiative, sharpening the threat to both Yahoo and eBay. Not to mention Skype, which eBay has written off but could find a better fit with Yahoo’s mail and IM products.

But in practice? The reality is that both companies are collections of underused assets, with management that has allowed vital talent to flee. Putting them together might provide a needed shakeout of eBay and Yahoo’s overstaffed executive suites, but the transition would be chaotic and painful.

A much simpler course would be selling out to Microsoft or News Corp., which surely remain interested in Yahoo’s online-advertising business, if they can stomach all the troubles that come with it.

That this rumor is circulating, that it’s even being whispered about, suggests that Jerry Yang may have given up on being rescued by a deep-pocketed buyer. Issuing so much undervalued paper for eBay smacks of desperation. It would keep Yahoo independent, but at a very steep price. So steep that, if it’s being seriously considered, can only mean no one wants to buy Yahoo.

Source:Valleywag

Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton’s new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it.

Entrepreneurs You guys think money is everything. That is, you think money is some sort of universal currency into which anything can be converted, and which can be converted to anything else.

• Good writing is one of the things you can’t buy with just cash. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, has proven that again and again.

• Even when you guys mean to be helpful, you get it all wrong.
  (A) You encourage me to demand more money from my editors. The only thing they’ll pay extra for is being famous, because that sells more copies without buyers having to read the article first.
  (B) You offer to let me “pick up a few extra bucks” by writing your kids’ college entrance essays.

• Here’s an idea: Pay me to mention your company and/or product in one of my articles. Not that I would, but I’m sure someone else will. The astounding thing is in 11 years I’ve been offered money for everything but a covert endorsement. You guys have a blind spot there.

Engineers It’s hard to be smarter than everyone else, isn’t it? You tech people never ask anything about my job. Instead, you explain it to me.

• You just know that my life as a professional writer must be exactly like your life as a professional software developer or sysadmin. Salespeople must come by my desk and demand I change my articles so they can close a big deal, right?

• You’re 100% certain that if you wrote the article instead of me, it would have been better. Lucky for you, your fellow engineers are like string theorists: They’ll praise this assertion for its elegance and daring, instead of asking you to prove it with a real-world test.
• You’ll explain to me that my ideas for articles start from press releases, and must be reviewed prior to publication by the companies I write about. If I praise your competition, it must mean they bought an ad. You got this worldview from your company’s PR lady. You have a crush on her.
• Do me a favor: 34 percent of the Internet is comments from engineers that begin, “It is unsurprising to me that …” Look, we get it. Nothing surprises you. So it’s unsurprising to us that it’s unsurprising to you. So shut up already.

Bloggers There is, in fact, a special circle of hell reserved for you. You’re keeping it real! Real long, and real dull.

• The only other fields where people spend all their time bragging about themselves and insulting their rivals are talk radio and gangster rap. There’s your level of intellectual discourse.

• Jack Kerouac? He had an editor. Allen Ginsberg? Spent months rewriting “Howl.” Andrew Sullivan? Face time with the world’s best editors, and he still puts me to sleep when he writes solo.
• Free advice: Every time you type the words “not so much,” or “the internets,” or “Techmeme,” reach for that key that says DELETE and press it a few times fast. You’re a better writer already!

(Did you notice? I don’t hate PR people. Sure, I filter all messages with “for immediate release” or “embargo.” But you guys are OK. It helps that you pick up the tab — not the free drinks, but the principle of the thing.)

Nick Denton’s new pay scale — more to the point, the reactions to it — prompted me to write all this down. The thing that ties entrepreneurs, engineers and bloggers together is they all think they know everything. If you can suffer through 150 know-it-all posts, you’ll find that no one got it right, on two counts.

• I hardly know who Nick Denton is. He emails us all “please log out of nexis” once a week, and has posted one comment to my work: “This post breaks the first rule of internet argument.” Since there’s only one rule of Internet argument and it’s “Don’t be boring,” I ignore him. I’m logged out of Nexis already.

• Denton’s new pay scale works like this: Instead of autobilling him twelve bucks a post, I’m now paid a flat fee in exchange for a minimum number of posts. There’s some traffic bonus, but whatever. The important thing is that my extra posts don’t cost Denton anything. So I can now post anything I want without feeling guilty. Here you go.

Loren Feldman, the transgressive online-video maker and would-be comic, slams Scoble’s “woe-is-me” posturing over his Facebook ban. Play the video, or read on for the choicest bit.

He’s fighting for himself … It’s dishonest and it’s wrong. Facebook has a right to earn money. You agree to give them your data. Everybody knew about it going in, and that’s not good enough for Robert, because he thinks … he’s above another company’s terms of service … For Robert to wrap it up under the guise of “I’m a freedom fighter for your data” is just completely dishonest.

Source:Valleywag

Blogger Om Malik could never have predicted he’d have a heart attack at the age of 41. But he did foresee one thing clearly: He would never build a business on a single blog so closely identified with one author. His spinoff blogs — Web Worker Daily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, and FoundRead — have not matched GigaOm’s success; of the four, only NewTeeVee, in my opinion, shows promise of being a breakout hit like the original. But unlike Michael Arrington, who built TechCrunch solely on his startup cult of personality, Malik has sought to diversify his media startup in a way that it can survive him. Until December 28, this was merely wise in theory.

Source:Valleywag

Nick Denton likes his blogs a bit dark. But his readers seem to disagree. io9, Gawker Media’s sci-fi blog, has been its most successful launch to date, with 750,000 pageviews, followed closely by Jezebel. Shiny, happy futurism and go-girl feminism sell better than bleak wit and sardonic jabs at the powers that be.

I cracked. I read Uncov’s post on Pownce. I still don’t know what it does. More important is the chart Ted Dziuba posted with it.

Pownce, despite being a shitty service, gives us some insight into the Web 2.0 world. I have described this before, but it is best done with imagery:

• Useless service X is released after 2 months of MySQL/CSS development.
• Arrington covers it, thousands of users signup. Mike takes his ad revenue.
• People either stop giving a shit or realize your service does not solve any problems for them.
• Fail.

Source:Valleywag

The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.

“>Fake Steve Jobs is Wired’s Leander Kahney. Former editor Nick Denton’s meticulous analysis of FSJ’s prose leads him to believe a fellow ex-Brit is the pseudonymous Steve Jobs blogger. It isn’t just wrong, it’s patently ridiculous to Kahney’s colleagues — the guy’s just not mean enough.

Drunk employee crashes 365 Main’s colocation site. A tipster uses credible inside knowledge of 365 Main’s operations to pass new editor Owen Thomas a timely, credible story that turns out to be completely wrong. The story delivers 145,000 pageviews worth of wrongness. Lesson: Even autistic sysadmins can be full of baloney.

Mark Zuckerberg cashes out. A rumor published at midnight on a weekend during the holiday season gets sprayed all over the Net inside of an hour. Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher shows up at my door in person to tell Owen he’s a frigtard.

What’s this we hear about Google executive Marissa Mayer’s holiday party, held in San Francisco at her ritzy condo in the Four Seasons this Saturday? A hot Santa with a lump not made of coal? Scandalous! Does her Facebook profile still say she’s looking for “random play”?

Source:Valleywag

The New York Times reports that Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my boss, will take over as editor of Gawker.com, his flagship and our sister site, on January 2. My first reaction to the news: Well, good. This should keep him busy.

Gawker listed the job two weeks ago:

It’s no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker’s evolution.

A later post puts out a call for experienced print reporters to focus on original items. Denton fits the bill: When I first met him, he was covering Silicon Valley for the Financial Times.

Gawker likes to say the New York Times is just a fancy blog. With this change, is Gawker to become just a bilious newspaper? Whatever. Denton roughly doubled Valleywag’s traffic before he handed this site to me. Maybe he’s just eager to prove that wasn’t a fluke.

(Photo by scriptingnews)

The best part of this interview with Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor behind Fake Steve Jobs? Where he describes how he tormented my boss, Nick Denton, by slipping in more and more British slang into The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs in an effort to throw him off the trail. Which, of course, succeeded brilliantly. To keep things balanced, Lyons also takes the piss out of Jason Calacanis. How anyone could hate the bulldog-cute entrepreneur that much is beyond me.

Source:Valleywag

There’s not much surprise left, given the drumbeat of rumors that AOL would be pursuing mass layoffs later this year. But we now hear that layoffs have started at the Internet giant, even earlier than expected, with a number of middle managers getting the chop Tuesday afternoon. Anyone have more details on who’s out, and which parts of the company are getting hit the hardest? Send in a tip.

Source:Valleywag
Even on YouTube, Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis dogs the every step of Nick Denton, the owner of this blog. A promotional video for a new book from Gawker, a sister site to Valleywag, lists an interview with Calacanis as one of its related links.

Not content to let bank runs and and stock exchange breaches be the only financial crises to hit Second Life, financial service First Meta is introducing a virtual credit card. Offered in gold and standard varieties, the MetaCard will be integrated directly into Second Life’s interface, allowing gold cardholders to charge up to 10,000 Lindens a month — a whopping $37. There are only 76 stores currently accepting the MetaCard, but if you can’t charge it, you can always take out a cash advance. It’s only a matter of time until someone sets up a Linden debt-consolidation shop.

Source:Valleywag

Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, the owner of this site and my worthy predecessor as its editor, has weighed in triumphantly on the battle of the gadget blogs, declaring his Gizmodo site the winner in its heated competition with Engadget, the rival site started by founding Gizmodo editor Peter Rojas and now owned by AOL. The last time I covered this fight, I was working at Business 2.0, and an ostensibly neutral party. And so I got a fusillade from all sides. Scarred from that experience, and hardly neutral now, I’m not going to comment, save to observe that in the days to come, you’re sure to hear an elaborate, exhausting point-counterpoint from Gizmodo and Engadget about international licensees, traffic-counting methodologies, and so on and so forth. Trust me, you won’t want to hear it. And anyway, I’m more interested in my boss’s obvious, embarrassing gaffe.

To prove Gizmodo’s ascendancy, Denton cites numbers from Compete.com, an increasingly popular Web traffic-research firm. But he also claims that both Gizmodo and Engadget “have grown at the expense of established tech sites like CNET.” Really, Nick? Because if you had bothered to consult Compete.com on the matter, you’d have seen that the research firm believes CNET has outgrown Engadget. While there’s been a dip in CNET’s readership since the spring, in the past year, CNET has added 3 million visitors — the equivalent of two Gizmodos. Some expense.

Every year, we at Beloit College publish a “mindset list” to identify the worldviews of the year’s entering college freshmen. The “class of 2029″ refers to students entering college this fall, in 2025. Most of these students are 18, which means they were born in 2007. For them, Anna Nicole Smith, Steve Irwin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Saddam Hussein, and Robin Williams’s career have always been dead.

1. No one’s ever worn a digital watch.
2. “I’m Rick James, bitch” is just something old people say.
3. To relax, they’ve always turned on the nightly news. The news has always been delivered by comedians.
4. They don’t know what a LOLCat is or why it talks that way.
5. They’ve always been able to use a cell phone on a plane.
6. Tattoos have always been normal.
7. Mr. Rogers has never taken them to the Land of Make-Believe.
8. Good sitcoms have never had laugh tracks.
9. Apple has always been a big deal, as have Google and Facebook.
10. They’ve never paid for a classified ad.
11. They’ve never danced to “Numa Numa.”
12. Who’s Mario?
13. Katie Couric has still never been a respected news anchor.
14. Kids have always had their own phones.
15. They’ve never “missed” a TV show that they couldn’t watch an hour later.
16. Movies have always come in the mail.
17. They’ve never licked a stamp.
18. Americans have always worried about Muslims.
19. They don’t care if Tony Soprano died, if Ross and Rachel ever got together, who got to be a millionaire, or who was a Cylon.
20. Lindsay Lohan was never innocent.
21. They’ve never read “People” Magazine.
22. They don’t remember Castro or why he was ever a big deal.
23. What’s a mousepad?
24. “Lord of the Rings” looks fake and the effects are laughable.
25. Andy Samberg has always been a movie star.
26. The Olsen Twins have always been legal, but it’s still creepy to want Mary-Kate.
27. There’s never been smoking in restaurants.
28. Saturday Night Live’s good stuff has always been made for the Internet.
29. Pop stars have always worked with rappers.
30. Perez Hilton has always been on TV.
31. Computers have never been beige.
32. Role-playing games have always been played on the Internet. What’s a 20-sided die?
33. All TVs are “high definition.”
34. They’ve never had to pull over for directions.
35. Cafes have always been a place to work on a laptop.
36. The “dot-com bust” means as much to them as the Great Depression.
37. Ipods have always come with a phone.
38. Global warming has always been a major voter issue, and Republicans have always acknowledged it.
39. Vice presidents have never been useless.
40. Quarters have never all looked the same.
41. Abe Vigoda is still alive.

Source:Valleywag

newVideoPlayer(”owen_playboy_gawker.flv”, 475, 376);
In this clip from CNBC, a Playboy executive describes his company’s new social network, PlayboyU, as a place where college students can “commune” with each other. Right. If that’s what you want to call it. My take? “The bunny’s not going to get much of a bang,” I told CNBC.

Source:Valleywag

Inc. magazine is digging into the mystery of who’s running TheFunded.com, a website which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Writer Max Chafkin makes four guesses: Gawker Media publisher and Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Asked by Chafkin, Calacanis denied being “Ted,” the mysterious man behind the site. A curious stance, since until recently, Calacanis was eagerly attempting to take credit for TheFunded.com. Never one for subtlety, he told friends of his plan to leak a rumor to Valleywag that he was behind the site. Alas, no, Jason: You only wish you were clever enough to come up with an idea like TheFunded.com.

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