As we previously reported, Neil Budde, the founding editor of WSJ.com recruited to run Yahoo News three years ago, plans to leave the company. This from PaidContent, the same source which had earlier scoffed at the rumor. Reportedly, new Yahoo media chief Scott Moore never made room for Budde in his new organizational chart. What, Scott Moore pushing out a highly respected underling? Never heard that one before.

Source:Valleywag

Silicon Alley Insider posted this shot, taken at Curbed’s holiday party last night in New York. Sure, Wilson puts a kind, fatherly face on his blog. But as it would be with any VC worth his limited partners’ salt, we’re sure more than a few of Wilson’s fundees have felt like that bull from time to time. Yeehaw!

I recently wrote that videogame developers can’t follow in the footsteps of Radiohead and give away their wares for free. Wired editor Chris Anderson — known around Valleywag for his theory of the “Long Fail” “Long Tail” — disagrees. He disagrees with Valleywag — “>and with Wired. Anderson’s “free games” manifesto, in which he argues for in-game advertising, virtual item sales, and shareware business models, has one severe flaw: he’s talking about the games no one wants to play. In fact, he didn’t name any titles, which makes me wonder if he ever plays. Mr. Anderson, I’ll be glad to return to this debate if we agree to discuss games that are actually, you know, fun.

Source:Valleywag

In explaining Union Square Ventures investment in Tumblr, Andrew Parker goes out of his way to distinguish the service from traditional blogs. But in explaining how Tumblr does not compete with Twitter, in which his firm has also invested, he makes it clear that, well, Tumblr is a blog — while avoiding the b-word at all costs. Tumblr is a just blog, and doesn’t compete with Twitter. While services like Tumblr, Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce are lumped together as microblogging tools because of their brevity, users recognize the dramatic differences in the software behind them and the experiences they create. They are more than blogs. Brevity may be the soul of wit — but it’s not the ghost in the machine.

Source:Valleywag

Is the Internet boring? Well, generally speaking, duh. Except, of course, when blogging luminaries get into a scrap over whether it is. Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban started things a month ago when, in an offhand sentence, he declared the Internet “dead as a growth platform” because of a stagnation in the speed of home broadband connections. He reiterated his comments to Portfolio.com, and then repeated them on his blog. Say something often enough, and people start to notice. People like Web 2.0 venture capitalist Fred Wilson. A classic blogfight — observing the three rules of the genre — ensued.

First, a recap of Cuban’s actual argument — what people actually said being one of those nuances that’s lost in a blogfight:

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home won’t increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

Which brings us to the first rule of a blogfight: Change the subject. Don’t respond to your opponent’s actual point. Instead, respond to the headline, or a phrase lifted out of context, as an excuse to tout your personal brand and projects you’re involved in. In this case, Cuban provided perfect fodder in “The Internet is dead and boring.” Wilson’s response:

My delicious toolbar records my most visited web services. Typepad, Google Finance, Techmeme, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, hypemachine, yottamusic. I did not use one of those services 5 years ago. Not one of them!

In other words, Wilson, an investor in Del.icio.us and Twitter, is an Internet hipster, while Cuban’s an aging Web 1.0 fuddy-duddy.

Which brings us to our next rule of the blogfight: Make it personal. Wilson writes:

Clearly Mark’s not using the Internet the way I am.

Stung by the suggestion that he lacks early-adopter cool, Cuban was forced into a long disquisition defending his Web cred, including the uncomfortable admission that he stays up late on Saturday nights reading Facebook API documentation.

And then Cuban wraps up with the third rule of the blogfight: Assert superior knowledge. In this case, Cuban taunts Wilson, and his audience, with the size of his hidden Internet-startup portfolio:

I have a ton of Internet investments that you don’t and won’t know about.

So there you have it. The three rules of the blogfight: Change the subject, make it personal, and assert superior knowledge. There are actually more rules, but I’m not going to tell them to you, because I find your stance on net neutrality to be annoying.