If you hadn’t noticed, I got married and went on a honeymoon. Did you miss me? Apparently so. Gizmodo gets banned from CES. Golson asks Calacanis for a job. Our very special correspondent pickets against the new pay system. Where’s was Denton with the “too insidery” warnings? Oh that’s right, blogging for Gawker. Here’s what really happened during the first two weeks of 2008, according to a speed-read of my feeds. On my next honeymoon, I’m bringing a laptop.

• Facebook is slower than a bunch of social networks you’ve never heard of, according to Watchmouse. Yes, Zuck’s baby is slower than RateItAll, Infield Parking, Buzznet and most especially, Consumating. Which is of course everyone’s favorite. MySpace is not on the list.

• The Pew Internet & American Life project discovered that Web video was more popular in 2007 than in 2006.
• Robert Scoble appeared on television. Twice.
• Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman told an audience of 450 that, despite what you’ve heard, he’s not actually an asshole.
• Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler posted seven times. 6-word version: Things are great. Ignore stock price.
• Jason Calacanis has 11,900 friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, Mahalo and Facebook. And 495 on Mahalo. By the way, he wants to have dinner with all of you.
• Yahoo’s CEO unveiled a new mobile Web platform at CES that will save the company. Just like it did last year.
• And, most notably, the Flight of the Conchords performed at CES:

(Photo by ThrasherDave)

What a week! On my first trip to Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show, I survived harassment by bulldog aficionado Jason Calacanis, discovered that HP adman Jay-Z uses a Mac, and laughed at Richard Blakeley’s TV-B-Gone prank. Now we hear that he’s been banned from the show. It could be worse. He could be behind bars…

… like this pair of adorably cute bulldogs!(WORLD EXCLUSIVE bulldog photo courtesy of Jason Calacanis)

You know, I’m perfectly fine with funtrepreneur-in-residence Jason Calacanis telling us to “please die.” I’m totally OK when Calacanis emails me “Subject: Idiot,” because I can take a joke, especially when it’s true. But dammit, Janet, Calacanis has stopped posting pics of his puppies. Valleywag has been forced to outsource to Professor Chips (above), winner of last year’s Babies vs Puppies showdown. After a week where the big stories were Larry Page planting one on new bride Lucy Southworth, Heidi Roizen singing her thighs thin, Google ripping off AOL — AOL? — the Times poaching yours truly, and Megan “Leggy” McCarthy leaving Valleywag for Wired, we could all use some face-blurpy time.

I should have taken my colleague Paul Boutin’s recap of the week as a warning. Normally I take the weekend off, and I shouldn’t have made an exception. But that Lucy Southworth is just so geekily adorable in this Stanford-office photo I felt obligated to cover her wedding. If it happened.

Late this night, I got a confirmation that some people I knew had, indeed, traveled to Necker Island for Google cofounder Larry Page’s hitching to the Stanford Ph.D. Okay, the wedding didn’t happen Saturday — yet another error in Wikipedia. This much is for sure: The Clintons didn’t show. As far as I know, the wedding took place today, assuming the celebrity guests weren’t blown down by a gathering storm. I asked Google PR to verify that the company still has a president of products. No answer yet. Which is a problem, since losing Larry is a risk factor the company mentions in its annual report.

The other big nonstory of the weekend? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sale of exactly $0 million worth of stock. What was I, drunk? Yes. I was roundly and deservedly abused for airing the false rumor. This is what I get for working overtime? That’s it, folks: From now on, I’m taking the “end” in “weekend” seriously.

Wow, and we thought last week sucked. Googler Larry Page is marrying the Chiclet-toothed Lucy Southworth tomorrow, but no one has posted photos of the lucky couple yet, so as far as we’re concerned, it didn’t happen. The week’s other near-misses that were nonetheless hits:

• TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington tried to fan some flameage by threatening “war” on Facebook for hiring away one of his techies. His post divided Valley tech workers into two camps: Those who got the joke and found it hilarious, and those who thought Arrington was totally serious and found it hilarious.

• Some girl broke up with her boyfriend on Facebook, then had her Flickr account hacked — or did she?
• Ultravideogenic Natali Del Conte is leaving us for New York City to become CNET’s go-to gal for national TV in January. Just when she’d started hanging out with losers like us! Hurrah for you, Natali, but YOU MAKE BUNNY CRY.

newVideoPlayer(”ugly_game.flv”, 475, 376);
Congratulations, Eidos: You’re officially off the hook. Responding to rumors that CNET fired GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann for slamming a game heavily advertised on the site (check out the highlights in the above clip), spokesperson Sarah Cain told Joystiq, “We do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers.” We doubted that CNET would toss away its credibility so readily.

Kotaku got a longer if less poignant spiel from CNET’s improbably named director of public relations, Leslie Dotson Van Every:

“GameSpot takes its editorial integrity extremely seriously. For over a decade, GameSpot and the many members of its editorial team have produced thousands of unbiased reviews that have been a valuable resource for the gaming community. At CNET Networks, we stand behind the editorial content that our teams produce on a daily basis.”

Stand behind? If CNET stands behind its editorial content, why did it take down Gerstmann’s video review in the first place?

Source:Valleywag

Ahh, that feels good right there. I don’t think we’ll be talking about this week next week. The Facebook pile-on continued. Amazon’s Kindle reader suffered a surprise media backlash. I’d hoped for another bank-employee-in-tutu photo to liven things up. Instead we got Gerstmanngate. At least we still have jobs — oh wait, Valleywag party girl Megan “Leggy” McCarthy is heading to Wired. I think I’ll go curl up in the tub with my INVISIBLE PUPPY. (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

Would someone please shut down the Valley and lock the doors? I don’t know if I can take another week like this. Seriously, can you remember another week filled with such drama? Microsoft showers Facebook with cash, making Mark Zuckerberg a paper billionaire — and turning Facebooker Dave Morin’s relationship with a Googler into forbidden fruit. Meanwhile, venture capitalist David Hornik attempts to have an off-the-record conference in Hawaii and completely fails — because gossip will out. Gossip like BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy throwing a drink at TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, while his CEO, Heather Harde, stays up suspiciously late with WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. Yahoo lost a devoted cheerleader and its top marketer. Larry Ellison tried to reel in BEA. Special correspondent Nick Douglas, meanwhile, demands I stop reading all of my favorite sites. I need something. Not a unicorn chaser. How about ….

… a bulldog chaser?

Thanks, Jason. Everything’s better now. See y’all next week.

Search and ye shall find — steady employment in advertising, that is. That’s the lesson I’m taking from Mike Kelly’s abrupt ouster, announced today, as head of AOL’s ad sales. How abrupt? Mediaweek just named him one of the 50 most influential people in advertising. If you haven’t heard of Kelly, here’s his resumé at a glance: A Time Inc. ad sales guy who rose to become publisher of Entertainment Weekly, Kelly was sent down by Time Warner to fix AOL’s relationships with advertisers. He largely succeeded in that, and also spearheaded the acquisition of Advertising.com, an online ad network that places ads on third-party sites. Advertising.com has provided much of AOL’s recent growth in ad revenues. But elsewhere, AOL’s ad sales have stalled. Especially in search. And Kelly, fairly or unfairly, is getting the blame.

Like Yahoo’s ousted ad-sales chieftains, Gregory Coleman and Wenda Harris Millard, Kelly grew up in the world of print publishing. And banner ads, although smaller than full-page print ads, were comfortably close: Sold in large packages at a CPM rate to brand-minded advertisers.

That’s not, of course, the world we live in today. Some advertisers still pay by the thousands of impressions, but others insist on paying only when users click through, or when an ad actually leads to a sale. The latter forms of ads, of course, dominate search, which is the largest category of Internet advertising today.

To sell search ads, however, you need a search engine. And though Kelly had been running AOL’s search business, he hadn’t been doing a great job of it. Former AOL executive John McKinley excoriated the company for slavishly imitating Google in its search-results design. And even copying Google, which already provided AOL’s raw search results, hasn’t stemmed AOL’s steady loss in search market share.

Stepping into Kelly’s place is Curt Viebranz, the CEO of Tacoda, an ad-targeting company recently acquired by AOL. Viebranz, like Kelly, did stints at Time Inc. and Time Warner, but he has a longer tech and new media resume. He’ll be running a group at AOL called Platform A, which rolls together Advertising.com, Tacoda, and other ad-sales organizations. Perhaps MediaWeek can issue a rush update and slot Viebranz in Kelly’s place.

Source:Valleywag

There’s a truism that every corporate relocation, whatever the ostensible business reason, ends up shortening the CEO’s commute. And AOL’s Randy Falco has accomplished that much. By moving AOL’s headquarters from Dulles, Va. to New York City, he’s able to stop diverting the company jet to White Plains and go back to getting driven into Manhattan. Oh, sure, New York is a better location for an advertising-driven business. With the collapse of AOL’s dial-up Internet business, Dulles’s network operations are less and less important. Falco has much else to say in an internal company memo obtained by Valleywag. The full memo is printed after the jump, and I’ll be back with more analysis of AOL’s big changes.

Dear AOL colleague,

A little over a year ago, AOL announced its new strategic direction as a global advertising supported Web business. And with a series of announcements we’re making today, we are - at last - fully embracing our new direction as a company.

When Ron and I came to AOL, we quickly realized that the advertising industry was undergoing a rapid transformation as audiences fragmented across the Web and advertisers increasingly demanded sophisticated tracking, measurement and targeting tools. To compete, we needed to build the biggest and most sophisticated advertising network — one that reached out across the entire Internet, not just AOL’s piece of it. So, building on Advertising.com, which operates the largest third-party display network, we acquired TACODA, which has industry-leading behavioral targeting tools and its own third-party network. We also acquired ad-serving company ADTECH, and Third Screen Media, which gives us a platform in the mobile space.

We are now bringing all this together in a new entity called Platform A. With Platform A, we can offer state-of-the-art targeting, optimization and measurement tools across our network of third-party sites and our AOL network. These networks attract more than 90% of the domestic online audience. For advertisers, Platform A means advertising programs with more scale and better results. For publishers selling online ad inventory, Platform A means more revenue, more certainty and better transparency.

This is the next big step in our transformation to a full-fledged, consumer-driven Web business. In addition, all our products and programming groups will work closely with Platform A to make sure everything we do as a company is optimized for monetization.

Curt Viebranz will head up Platform A. Curt comes to AOL from TACODA, the behavioral targeting company AOL just acquired, where he served as CEO. He’s a seasoned media executive with substantial print, TV and online experience in both the U.S. and abroad, having spent 17 years at Time Warner and Time Inc. before joining TACODA.

In this new role, Curt will be reporting to Ron. Rounding out the leadership of Platform A will be Lynda Clarizio, who will continue to head Advertising.com, and Kathy Kayse will head AOL brand solutions, which will focus on the top online brand advertisers. Both Lynda and Kathy will report to Curt.

Mike Kelly will not be part of the new organization, but will be staying on to help in the transition as he assesses other opportunities. I want to take a moment here to recognize Mike’s many contributions to the success of AOL and the important part he played in our transition to an ad-supported business.

In his three years at AOL, Mike systematically rebuilt relations with major advertisers, revitalized our sales force, made critical acquisitions, and on his watch AOL’s ad revenues more than doubled. He also played an important role in identifying the trend toward third-party networks, and in particular seeing the value in Advertising.com, which Mike helped AOL acquire in 2004. And he worked closely with Ron and me on the evolution of our network strategy this year and the series of acquisitions we made during this period to realize this vision. We’ve been lucky to have Mike as a part of our team and we wish him the very best in the next chapter of his career.

The next piece of important news is that we will be moving AOL’s corporate headquarters to New York City from Dulles. We’re an ad-supported business now, and New York City is the world’s capital of advertising. By putting our headquarters there, we’re sending a clear signal to the market that AOL intends to lead in this space.

We’ve leased offices at 770 Broadway, and the space is already being built out. Our plan is to have our New York operations - advertising and programming, as well as our executive offices - moved in by early next spring.

I know this change raises questions for many of you, not all of which I can answer here. Suffice it to say that for most of you, this won’t affect your jobs at all. We will continue to have a significant presence in Dulles, and we will continue to have operations in Mountain View, Bangalore and our many other locations.

I’m also pleased to report that while we are making these changes at home, we continue to deliver on our aggressive global expansion plans. Today, in fact, we announced a significant new partnership with HP - the No. 1 PC maker in the world - that will pre-install localized versions of our AOL portal, toolbar and search, and set them as the default on millions of HP computers sold in more than two dozen countries.

This multi-year agreement with HP gives us a way to quickly and effectively showcase our products around the world. And by expanding our audience reach and engagement worldwide, we can extend the reach of our advertising network to monetize this global audience. This comes on the heels of our Italy portal launch, and just days before we launch another new portal in Spain.

In addition to this, we continue to make impressive strides across our programming, products and platforms. Today, for example, we unveiled our impressive new Bluestring product at TechCrunch40. All of this is generating positive buzz about AOL in the market and getting even our toughest critics to take a second look at what we’re offering.

AOL has been undertaking one of the most complex transformations any major company has attempted, and we are doing it very successfully. We have a great future, and by completing our transformation, we are positioning AOL for long-term success as a global ad-supported business.

Randy

Source:Valleywag

Seriously, people. I leave you alone for a week and what do you do?

• Well, if you’re Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, you Pay $1.3 million to park your jet at Moffett Field.

• If you’re Nick Douglas, you go on a Digg strike.
• If you’re Six Apart founders Ben and Mena Trott, you swap out your old and busted CEO for the new hotness.
• If you’re Digg founder Kevin Rose, you break your iPhone.
• If you’re Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, you donate your car to charity and make a nerdy video.

That’s it. I’m never taking a vacation again. You people clearly can’t be trusted to behave yourselves.