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.

Valleywag, this time, has gone too far. Or so some people believe. Yesterday, we posted Robert Scoble’s cell phone number, which is 425 205 1921, in a picture. One reader was so outraged that he woke one of my reporters from a sound sleep to express his ire. This top-secret information has been been posted on every page of Scoble’s own blog for three years — not to mention his Facebook profile. If you wish to think ill of Valleywag for posting the number, our only request: That you direct the same vitriol to Scoble himself. He awaits your calls. At 425 205 1921.

Drew Schutte, the longtime publisher of Conde Nast’s Wired, will now run the sales side of The New Yorker and its website. David Carey, publisher of Portfolio, is adding Wired to his responsibilities. [BusinessWeek]

Source:Valleywag

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After warning me that he was coming to the CES Press Room and to “stay out of his face,” blog blowhard Jason Calacanis stormed over to me to “introduce” himself and slam my boss and brag about how much money he has. Money can’t buy you a snappy comeback, however.

When Calacanis was almost out the door, I yelled across the room, “Google’s better!” — than Mahalo (there’s your link, now quit your bitching), that is, the “human-powered” search engine that’s currently keeping Calacanis off the street. Having no response, he slunk out the door to peels of laughter.

Sarah Lacy’s long-awaited book on Web 2.0 is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The title: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. It’s due for release on May 15, which means we’ll probably see copies circulating in late April. Future reviewers, let us save you the work of coming up with a kicker: Yes, the title practically begs for Lacy to announce a followup oeuvre to prove she, too, is more than just lucky.

Source:Valleywag

Brit broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson, host of Top Gear, was shocked, shocked when a thief “hacked” his bank account, withdrawing $734 and donating the sum to the charity Diabetes UK. Clarkson downplayed the dangers of identity theft after two discs full of child-benefit claimants were lost last October. To prove potential victims had nothing to fear, Clarkson published his bank account number, routing info, and instructions on how to procure his home address in his weekly Sun column. He certainly proved his point.

Source:Valleywag

I’m sitting in the CES press lounge when my editor, Owen Thomas, sends me an email:

Find him and interview? - O.
—– Forwarded message —–
From: Chaela Volpe
Date: Jan 7, 2008 1:35 PM
Subject: Gary Krakow joins TheStreet.com newsroom as Sr. Tech Correspondent, Reports Live from CES in Las Vegas

I announce to the table, which includes a few colleagues from Gizmodo, and early-rising PR guy Peter Shankman, “I love when my editors tell me to interview people and I have no idea who they are. Like this jackass — Gary Krakow from MSNBC. Who the hell is he? I have no idea.” One of the guys across the table, who I don’t know, starts staring at me and tosses his press badge on the table.

After a couple moments of silence, Shankman says, “This is the most surreal moment I’ve ever been witness to.” Then, of course, he writes it up. Thanks, buddy.

By the way, Krakow has this to say about his new job:

Valleywag: Why’d you leave MSNBC?
Krakow: MSNBC wanted to go in a different direction. I needed more artistic freedom.
V: Does TheStreet still exist? Have you been paid yet?
K: Don’t worry about my paycheck. The new, redesigned site will be up within a few weeks with a focus on video.

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)

Few outsiders understand the degree to which the Valley is driven by data. Even your guilty pleasures — like this gossip rag. After Google Reader introduced a feature which tracks users’ most-browsed RSS feeds, people have come up to me and confessed that — mathematically, statistically — Valleywag is their favorite blog. They’re loathe to admit it, but the data reveals it. That’s why I’m not going to do a year-end list of my favorite stories. Instead, here’s a list of Valleywag’s 20 most-read stories. You may pretend to be high-minded world-changers, but you’re really into Facebook, babes, datacenter meltdowns, Google, Kevin Rose, geeks behaving badly, fired Gamespot editor Jeff Gerstmann, and anything written by Nick Douglas. Here’s the list. (Click through to see how many pageviews each one got.)

1. Bank intern busted by Facebook

2. Vlog Hot: Babes Semifinals Heat 1
3. A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about
4. The Console Wars, animated
5. The $160 billion typo
6. Facebook employees know what profiles you look at
7. Digg users take revenge on girl who dumped beau via Facebook
8. Kevin Rose cracks his iPhone
9. “I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google $110 million per year
10. The Genius Bar can help you only so much
11. The seven most annoying things about the future
12. GameSpot editor (?) on fired reviewer
13. Fark founder accuses Fox newsman of hacking
14. Screenshots of first Googlephone app
15. The shortest domain name ever
16. If everything were sold like iPods
17. 10 most embarrassing geek photos
18. NY Post outs Lucy Southworth, Larry Page’s girlfriend
19. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht in iPhone line on CNBC
20. All technology came from sticks

Visits and page views to Valleywag were about 50 percent of a normal weekday both yesterday and today, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As the guy at Tully’s Coffee said, “Any day that half your clientele shows up at the door is a business day.” With half the Net still going at it (see chart: Most of our traffic comes from people clicking links), it’s kind of weird to see the go-go business blogs — TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat — shuttered for the day. Couldn’t you guys have queued something up? The old-media dinosaurs at the NYT managed to print an issue, even if it’s padded with heartwarming holiday filler. I’m starting to think the Objectivists are right: The problem with Christmas is it’s not commercialized enough. Whoops, update: Duncan at TechCrunch just posted some actual news, but it’s already late Wednesday morning for him in Australia.

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.