Valleywag

Gays now entitled to inept online dating [Discrimination]

Owen Thomas — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:40:00 PST

eHarmony does not hate gay people. It is merely ignorant of them. That is the dating site's excuse for excluding same-sex customers — a practice that led a gay New Jersey man, Eric McKinley, to file a complaint with New Jersey's attorney general which eHarmony has just settled, paying a $50,000 fine to the state adn $5,000 to McKinley. eHarmony was founded in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, an evangelical Christian and a psychologist; he is still the company's chairman.

To settle the complaint, eHarmony is also launching Compatible Partners, a gay dating site. But the Compatible site, as proposed is not just separate; it's also unequal.

eHarmony executives have long insisted that they didn't want to serve gay daters because their site used an algorithm based on long-term studies of straight couples. Compatible Partners, which must launch by March, will use the same questionnaire as eHarmony — but the company admits it has no idea if it will work to find good matches. Compatible Partners users will see a warning to this effect: "The statement lets customers know that eHarmony, Inc. has not conducted research on same-sex couples so that they have the information they need to decide whether to use our service."

If anyone shows up that is; eHarmony will give away 10,000 free accounts, but it's hard to think that a dating service chaired by a conservative Christian will prove much more popular than, say, Manhunt, the gay personals site whose chairman donated to John McCain's campaign.

The politics of sex aside, the website's clearly going to suck. This should sound so familiar to people who build websites for a living: A poorly thought-out product, based on insufficient research, rushed out on an artificial deadline. But in this case, it's the government, not inept managers, who are ordering it up. They're from the government, and they're here to help your dating life! If gays can't get married in California, don't they at least deserve the benefit of their own pseudoscientifically valid hookups?

(Photo via Magicmud.com)

Facebook less like a college dorm than you'd think [Cubicle Culture]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:00:00 PST

One imagines Facebook as a geek utopia, where hackers who dropped out of college play Rock Band all day, then stay up all night coding. The reality: It's as depressingly Dilbertian as any other company — and COO Sheryl "No-Fun" Sandberg is making sure it keeps getting more boring every day. Take the latest tiff we happened to hear about — in the social network's business-development department, the home of glad-handing charmers who negotiate deals. You'd think they'd be experts at sucking up to each other. Tim Kendall (shown left), the company's director of monetization — Valleyspeak for "guy who comes up with ideas to make money" — was left fuming after his boss, VP Dan Rose, instructed him in the art of time management.

"Every day, you need to create a to-do list," Rose told Kendall. "You put the items you need to do on the list, and you need to review the list with me every day. As you do them, you need to cross them off." Kendall's retort, which he delivered not to Rose but to friends within and without Facebook: "No shit Sherlock, I didn't get to where I am today without knowing how to manage a to-do list!" What's odd about this rumor: Rose doesn't have a reputation as a micromanager, and the two both worked at Amazon.com before joining Facebook. They put on a convincing buddy act for the New York Times recently, too. Anyone care to play Encyclopedia Brown and help piece together this puzzle? My only conclusion: The best algorithms can't predict what will break a friendship.

(Photo by Chris Pan)

A taste of their own medicine [Antitrust]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:20:00 PST

Microsoft, harried by regulators in the 1990s, once lobbied Congress to cut spending on antitrust enforcement. Now, it's profiting from their efforts. The software giant's lobbying budget nearly doubled from 2006 to 2008, helping it sink Yahoo's deal to have Google sell ads for its search pages. The failure of that deal helped speed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang out the door, and could set Microsoft up to win Yahoo's search business. CNET News]

Smile for the camera [Caption Contest]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:00:00 PST

A tipster sent in this photo of Facebook's business-development team, taken in bubblier times at a September offsite in St. Helena, north of San Francisco, where they played a croquet tournament. (Rules about wearing white after Labor Day don't apply in northern California's bubbly clime.) Now more than ever, Facebook needs to develop a business; can this crowd swing their mallets? Suggest a caption in the comments; the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: godospoons for "Jerry Yang explains Internet to Best Buy employees." (Photo courtesy of a thoughtful tipster)

[Sponsored] Save Our Kids Foundation Holds Its First Annual Celebration

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:00:00 PST

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Vint Cerf's dream of porn in space comes true [The Olds]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:20:00 PST

NASA deemed successful a month-long test of image transfers to and from the Epoxi space probe, currently 20 million miles away somewhere near Mars. Alleged Internet inventor Vint Cerf helped NASA design the enabling technology, known as Delay Tolerant Networking, a decade ago. (I know: What does that guy do now?)

For NASA, DTN means not having to send exact signals at an exact time to a spacecraft. A missed connection can be tried again until it succeeds. If you've been around long enough, it sounds conspicuously like USENET back in the acoustic-modem days. NASA touts the technology's usefulness in communicating with deep-space robotic craft. Who are they kidding? The real win is that when human beings inevitably go back into space, they'll be able to keep up on Earthbound puppycams. (Illustration by NASA)

Google CEO has no time for your privacy [Your Privacy Is An Illusion]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:20:00 PST

Is Google becoming the king of the Web? Well, duh — that happened about five years ago, before anyone really noticed. But activist groups, now and again, worry about whether Google knows too much about us. Yesterday, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson quizzes Google CEO Eric Schmidt about whether his company is doing enough to guard our privacy.

You have to admire how Schmidt bats the question aside: Google engineers have thought long and hard about this, and concluded that protecting users' privacy would make pages load too slowly. What he doesn't mention is that this is a problem because the slower pages load, the fewer Web searches we make; and the fewer Web searches we make, the fewer ads Google can sell. Google could make the Web safe for our secrets, in other words — its whiz kids know exactly how to do it — but it would just take too long. The king has spoken.

Google CEO pulled over for driving with a cell phone [Rumormonger]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:20:00 PST

No man is above the law — not even multibillionaire Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At least that's what we hear from a well-placed tipster, who says Schmidt recently confessed to having been pulled over by the cops last month in Los Angeles for talking on his cell phone while driving. (California law recently changed to require the use of a headset.) Oh, but it gets worse for Schmidt.

We haven't gotten anyone from Google or Yahoo to confirm this bit, but we're told cops interrupted a call Schmidt was making to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to discuss how to get a proposed advertising deal past government regulators. The deal was blocked. Schmidt, who endorsed Barack Obama late in the election cycle and got tapped to his board of economic advisors, could use his newfound political clout to get the pesky law overturned. The cell-phone rule, or the antitrust one — we're not sure which one is more bothersome to him. (Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Microsoft: "We are done with Yahoo" [Steve Ballmer]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:20:00 PST

Microsoft's chair-hurling 800-pound gorilla slammed the door on talk of a renewed Yahoo acquisition deal at today's shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington. "We are done with all acquisition deals with Yahoo ... We did our best. We've moved on." In business, this often means: We'll be back. For now, though, Ballmer said he'd rather cut a deal to serve Live Search results to Yahoo users — as a vendor, not an owner. Why can he speak with such confidence? Because he's already snapped up Yahoo's key search engineers.

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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:20:00 PST

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Mark Cuban's overclocked lifestyle -- the 60-second version [Clips]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:00:00 PST

"My blog, because the press never gets it right." This 2006 Hewlett Packard ad featuring Dallas Mavs owner and dotcom bazillionaire Mark Cuban shows why it'll be fun to watch him fight with the SEC over a chump-change $750,000 windfall from what the lawmen claim is insider trading. Cuban is a crazy super-multitasker who gets 1,000 emails a day, yet still had time to do Dancing with the Stars. Halfway through this ad, he checks off The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary about the Enron scandal that he coproduced. My guess on this week's insider trading charge against him? He did it, not thinking through the risks. But he's going to make the SEC look like a bunch of dolts on the Internet. Pass the popcorn!

Electronic Arts kills nonexistent outsourcing project [Layoffs]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:40:00 PST

No one knew exactly what the Blueprint division of videogame maker Electronic Arts was up to. Officially, it didn't exist. Now, it officially hasn't been shut down, but there's no one working on it. An ex-employee who blabbed to Variety tried to explain: Blueprint's dozen or so staff were charged with creating a way for EA to reliably develop games without hiring onsite, full-time employees. Now more than ever, you'd think that's a businessworthy project. Instead, Blueprint seems to have confirmed there's no substitute for a building full of crazed code monkeys with all the hardware and free snacks they need to crank out Madden NFL 09.

Obama's net neutrality man plays Warcraft [Kevin Werbach]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:20:00 PST

Supernova conference organizer Kevin Werbach is part of President Change's FCC transition team. I've hung out with the guy, and I never would've guessed he belongs to not one, but two guilds in World of Warcraft. Here's his take on WoW's benefits to grownups:

What the game does is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think [massively multiplayer online games] will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.

(Photo by Brian Solis)

Follow the hackers [Valleywag Calendar]

Adriana Nunez — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:00:00 PST

From personal computing to extreme sports, hackers out for a good time have been pioneering new ways of doing things. Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly Media, thinks we should follow them. To find out what O'Reilly thinks alpha geeks tell us about the future, make your way to the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium at 4:15 p.m. Want to know what's next in mobile? Nokia research is sharing the results of a two-year field study on consumer mobile phone use. Get tips on mobile product design and strategy at the Berkeley Center for New Media Commons from 6-7:30 p.m. Only thinking as far as your next drink? Web Analytics Wednesday will be networking with wine at the Press Club from 6-8 p.m. while Digg lovers meet up to drink up at Mighty from 7 p.m.-12:00 a.m. (Photo by Rodrigo Paoletti)

Got something to add to the calendar? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com.

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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:00:00 PST

Is Yahoo done with search? [Exits]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:20:00 PST

Among the many windmills Jerry Yang tilted at in his brief career as Yahoo's CEO was his devotion to Web search. It veered on an obsession for him. It played into his decision to resist Microsoft's offers to shower him with cash, first for his whole company, then for just its search business. Is it a coincidence, then, that Yahoo's top search engineer has left a day after Yang stepped down? A tipster tells us Sean Suchter resigned yesterday, and speculates that he may be joining Microsoft.

If so, Microsoft may have gotten Yahoo's search business on the cheap. Our tipster writes:

Today is the end for Yahoo Search. Sean Suchter just left for Microsoft. Everyone in the office is shocked. I've been on the Yahoo Search team for a while and he is the one key executive that it all depends on. If Microsoft has convinced him to leave and join them, they won't need to buy Yahoo Search. We will just all join Microsoft anyway. I am definitely going to send him my resume.

Rumor has it that Yahoo already lost a search executive, Qi Lu, to Microsoft; but Suchter commanded the loyalty of many within Yahoo's search group. These names may not mean much to anyone outside engineering circles in Silicon Valley, but they amount to this: If Microsoft has recruited Suchter, it has gotten the heart of Yahoo's search technology without the fuss of actually buying it.

That will please many on Wall Street who want Yahoo to get out of search; the company could save billions of dollars a year in expenses by dropping the business altogether, and serving up search results from Microsoft or Google's index of the Web instead, as sites like Facebook and AOL.com do today. Yang had an expansive vision of Yahoo as a one-stop shop for advertisers where they could buy both search and banner ads. But he dealt the image of Yahoo's search a blow when he tried to do a deal with Google to have the search giant sell some of the ads that appear on Yahoo's search results. Regulators in D.C. blocked the deal, but the damage was done.

Engineers like to be on a winning team — or at least one that's fighting the good fight. Microsoft may be an underdog in Web search, with a pitiable market share which keeps shrinking, but its top executives are obsessed with beating Google — and they seem more secure in their offices than Yang. Microsoft still has an unsavory image in Silicon Valley, but for coders who have been dealt a drubbing for years by Google, it's an adequate revenge vehicle.

Here's the memo on Suchter's departure:

From: Tuoc Luong
Date: 11/18/08 3:43 PM
To: Yahoo Search Team

Hi Everyone,

Unfortunately, I have to give some bad news to you. Sean Suchter has resigned. Sean’s last day will be December 19th.

Some of you will find this news shocking given that Sean has been a Gibraltar rock at Yahoo and in particular for the Search team. . I understand this.

I will point out that we’re on a good trajectory. We’ve released some good products and capabilities and the industry is beginning to take notice. We’ve closed the gap in Algo relevance and making great strides in building the next generation differentiated search experience and step function in relevance – not to mention infrastructure overhaul that prepares us for the future.

I came here to take on Google because I believe Yahoo above all is best positioned to take the battle to Google. I think we’re on the right path to changing the tide and would love to see everyone make the journey but I respect Sean’s personal decision. I’m committed to continue the battle against Google as long as Yahoo positions Search to be competitive (and I believe we are). I hope each and all of you feel the same way and stand with me to battle Google.

I’ve asked Arnab to step up and take over Sean’s role as head of YST. Just as Sean has been a strong arm for me, Arnab has been a strong arm for Sean. Although Sean casts a large shadow, I believe Arnab will step up to fill the hole with your support. Arnab will cast his own shadow as the new leader of YST and it’s the same YST team that has deliver great products like Search Assist, Secure Scan, SearchMonkey, BOSS, numerous MLR and QRW release to close the GAP in core relevance.

Sean and Arnab have been communicating to the YST leaders about the changes. Arnab has been thinking and discussing the new organization with people. He will send out an e-mail describing his organizational thoughts and plan for YST soon. I believe with the support of other leaders (myself, Bharat, Yongdong, Nam, ..etc), Arnab will fill the void and continue the battle with Google. I urge everyone to support Arnab in his new endeavor.

Tomorrow, I’ll be holding an all managers meeting to discuss the changes and Q&As.

Please wish Sean the best in his future endeavor and congratulate Arnab in his new role.

Thanks

Tuoc

(Image via donquijote.cc)

PC Magazine kills print edition [Death Of Print]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:59:10 PST

Why, God, why? PC Magazine was such a nice, safe publication. It never hurt anyone. It sort of kept to itself around the neighborhood, but it seemed perfectly normal. Not at all like those rowdies at Infoworld. Ziff-Davis, the publisher, has already gone through bankruptcy. Wasn't that enough ? In a word: No. Seventy percent of PC Mag's revenue now comes from the Internet, according to Ziff's CEO. Valleywag alum Nicholas Carlson has a tidy little reblog of the whole situation.

Walmart to kill iPhone's cool on December 28 [Rumormonger]

Paul Boutin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:28:59 PST

I'm skeptical, but Boy Genius Report has what's supposed to be an internal document from Walmart. It details the launch timeline to begin selling iPhones at Walmart on December 28. Here's what nags at me: Why not start the day after Thanksgiving, instead of three days after Christmas? It's not because unprepared staff and long lines would be a problem. Please explain to me how this is all part of His Steveness's master plan.

81-year-old monk has 1,166 Facebook friends -- and a get-rich-quick scheme [Internet Famous]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:00:00 PST

The Internet is relentlessly eliminating the entertainment value of fame in favor of commerce. In the old days, you'd get a publicist in L.A. or New York in the hopes of garnering the attention of some producer or director and becoming a star. The end result: You get rich by titillating the masses. Now, you hire a "social media marketer" in Malaysia to drum up mentions in blogs to increase your Google rank and thereby win more random Web searches. The end result: Increased online-advertising revenues. At least that's what we think is what Burt Goldman, an author and self-described "American monk," is after.

Internet fame is not Internet fame unless it can be quantified. Goldman has 1,166 friends on Facebook. 88,390 people subscribe to his blog. And he just turned 81. (If, in fact, he exists at all.)

How did I learn about Goldman? An email from Amir Ahmad, a "relationship marketing and social media strategist" from an outfit called MindValley Labs. MindValley cofounder Mike Reining wrote up how he parlayed a YouTube video by Goldman into $3,400 in sales of Goldman's home meditation product. And Reining, of course, is selling his ability to sell whatever you're selling. On the Internet! From the comfort of your home! (The pity of it all: Ahmad's pitch was so nakedly brazen that it succeeded in getting me to write about Goldman.)

This is the future: Why become a celebrity and then wait until your career starts to wane before you start to cash out with infomercials? Why not just go straight to the hard sell? This is the future Google is building for us, with its search results, keyword ads, and countless videos: We will all have something to offer. And you will know us by our sales.

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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:00:00 PST

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Fire Yahoo's board! [Armchair General]

Owen Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:40:00 PST

After a CEO's ouster, the knives always end up in the wrong person's back. Take how Jerry Yang is being ritually badmouthed now that he's out of Yahoo's top job: Such a nice guy. We all loved him. But he couldn't make a decision to save his life. Now, Yahoo's board of directors is being lionized for giving the nice guy the boot, and heroically engaging in a search for his replacement. But aren't they guilty of the same sins?

What rank hypocrisy! Where's the blame for tapping Yang for the job in the first place? For not pushing him out sooner? And for that matter, for not having a hot-swappable substitute in the executive ranks when Hollywood dude Terry Semel abruptly quit last year? Those are all grave transgressions to which Yahoo's directors ought to confess.

Chairman Roy Bostock should be first out the door. An old-school adman ridiculed within Yahoo as an "empty suit," Bostock has added nothing to the company. And he shredded any remaining credibility by brazenly lying to Newsweek about Jerry Yang's status as CEO, saying he was firmly ensconced in the job even as the board discussed his ouster.

Add to the list investors Ron Burkle, Gary Wilson, and Art Kern, whose ouster I called for earlier this year. Can anyone say what Yahoo has gotten from their collective 26 years on the board?

Corporate raider Carl Icahn, too, should make his stay on Yahoo's board brief and symbolic, a prize won for waging a fierce battle with Yahoo management over its failure to sell the company to Microsoft. He may have been right about Microsoft, but I can't believe he has the company's long-term interests at heart.

And Jerry Yang, who has been allowed to keep his board seat, should resign it. Yahoo needs a clean break from his mismanagement; a lingering presence will only hurt the company he professes to love.

Whoever Yahoo picks as its next CEO should make a priority of mucking out the boardroom; candidates for the job should demand that these six directors offer their resignation before they sign on the bottom line. Otherwise, the job will be untenable.

The rest of the board I'd recommend Yahoo's next CEO keep, at least for the time being. Frank Biondi and John Chapple are too new to pass judgment on; venture capitalist Eric Hippeau and Hewlett-Packard executive Vyomesh Joshi actually have knowledge of the marketplace that's valuable to Yahoo; and telecom exec Maggie Wilderotter is a credible candidate to step in as Yahoo's CEO, should the board choose one of its own.

Googlers take turns insulting P&G marketers [The Human Stain]

Owen Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:20:00 PST

Nothing, it seems, can stop Google — except the overweening hubris of its employees. Every time Googlers venture outside the Googleplex to demonstrate their charitable embrace of the digitally unfortunate, they end up just reinforcing their snobby superiority. So it went with the search giant's job-swap program with starchy old-media marketer Procter & Gamble.

Tim Armstrong, the Google sales guy who came up with the program, had the best of intentions. Wall Street will keep punishing Google's stock until the company can prove it has another trick besides selling text ads linked to search terms. Television advertising is a huge market — in the U.S. alone, it still generates $70 billion a year. Google wants a piece of that business. At $8.7 billion a year, Procter & Gamble's TV budget is the largest in the country; who better to learn from?

The only problem: A detailed look by the Wall Street Journal at the program, which had two dozen Googlers and "Proctoids" — P&G employees — spending weeks at each other's employer showed the Proctoids learning and the Googlers laughing.

For example: P&G marketers snagged actress Salma Hayek for a Pampers promotion, but, to the disbelief of a Googler, didn't invite any mommybloggers. A useful insight: Pampers brand managers corrected the omission. Proctoids also learned how to track the popularity of online search terms. What did Googlers learn at P&G? When a Proctoid presented a 1950s-era television ad, and told them it reached 70 to 80 percent of the audience, they scoffed. That kind of historical data did not fit their algorithm.

A fruit of the companies' joint work was a campaign for YouTube users to create spoofs of P&G's "Talking Stain" commercials. That's vastly cheaper than running a television advertising campaign; Google, which has hardly figured out how to sell ads on YouTube, foots P&G's bandwidth bill for the videos, and gets little visible in return.

Google's Armstrong may have hoped his salespeople would learn how to pitch Procter & Gamble for a piece of its multibillion-dollar ad budget. They were too busy giggling while their counterparts at the staid soap-and-diapers company were learning how to market their products cheaply online. P&G got the beter end of this bargain: It may well save money, but it's not clear Google will get much of it. At that rate, P&G will have the last laugh.

Why air taxis failed to take off [Meltdowns]

Owen Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:00:00 PST

A classic tech dream: Reinvent every facet of an existing business, from top to bottom. The personal computer industry was built on the impossible dream that there would one day be a computer on every desk — an example which inspires countless attempts to reengineer the virtual world. Most prove to be expensive busts. Like the air-taxi business. Eclipse Aviation, which made small jets which its backers hoped startup airlines would fly from point to point at a cost lower than private jets, failed to meet payroll last week, and only now has scraped up financing to pay its employees.

Vern Raburn, the big dreamer behind Eclipse, left the company this summer — a condition without which the company would not have raised a round of financing. He had envisioned Eclipse building fleets for countless air-taxi operators, which would operate from new, small-scale airports — a whole new air-taxi economy, dreamed up from the ether, which he would monopolize. DayJet, the most notable air-taxi startup, shut its doors in September.

But Eclipse failed not just because all the component pieces of Raburn's vision failed to come together. It would be easy, surely, for him to pin the blame on operators who didn't deliver on their part of the bargain. It's not clear that there ever really was enough demand for the service in the first place. As much as people complain about commercial air travel, the major airlines move millions of people a year, at a cost its customers pay, albeit with grumbles.

Asked how large the air-taxi market would be, Raburn told a magazine in 2007, "The only thing you can say about predicting the size of new markets is that you will be wrong." Give Raburn credit: He was right about that.

(Photo by AP)

Sirens at Yahoo [Yahoo]

Owen Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:00:00 PST

Sirens greeted Forbes reporter Brian Caulfield when he visited Yahoo's campus in search of quotable employees after CEO Jerry Yang announce was stepping down: "Paramedics, police and a fire truck responded after a Yahoo employee suffered a seizure, a company security guard said. It's unclear what caused the seizure, but employees at the company's headquarters are bracing for 1,500 jobs cuts that are expected next month." Anyone know who the unlucky Yahoo was, and if he or she has recovered? [Forbes.com]

mew [Commenter Of The Day]

Alaska Miller — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:40:00 PST

For better or worse, Yahoo now doesn't have a leader. At least the market thinks that's a good thing and Yahoo shareholders got rewarded with a $1.3 billion bump. Today's featured commenter, mew, has a different idea about Jerry Yang leaving:

Call it a brown paper bag, convenience store hold-up style, if you want. When Jerry is adamant about staying just a few weeks ago, and suddenly he changes his mind, something convincing came his way. Convince = Incentive at his level.

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Jerry Yang explains Internet to Best Buy employees [Caption Contest]

Owen Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:00:00 PST

Now that he's stepping down as Yahoo's CEO, will Jerry Yang ever take a public stage again, as he did at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January? Suggest an appropriately elegiacal caption in the comments; the best will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: ShreeCeto, for "Hey Jason! What's going on with your valuation?" (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

Google makes it easy to rip off Life Magazine [Blogging For Dollars]

Alaska Miller — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:40:00 PST

Pictures from Life's centuries-old archives will now be available as part of Google Image Search. The images will be hosted on Google servers, however they carry no clear usage instructions. At least it's now easier for bloggers to spice up their posts with something that has a bit more gravitas than 4chan images. (Image via Time Inc.)

October e-commerce up a humiliating 1 percent [Stats]

Paul Boutin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:20:00 PST

The accompanying chart from TechFlash says it all: Online sales just aren't growing anymore. October's 1 percent growth over October 2007 is the worst performance measured by ComScore since they began tracking stats in 2001. TechFlash quotes Gian Fulgoni, chairman of the research firm: "We can only hope that the recent sharp drop in oil prices will cause a continued easing of inflation and a strengthening in consumer spending as [we] enter the critical holiday shopping season." We can only hope? Dude, we can get down on our knees and pray.

Mark Cuban fights back [Insider Trading]

Paul Boutin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 PST

Dallas Mavericks owner and dotcom jillionaire Mark Cuban has posted an SEC P2 filing to his personal blog. Cuban can run a team, but he's a bit sloppy trying to put the paperwork in context. In short: The SEC has accused Cuban of ordering the sale of his shares in Mamma.com in 2004, based on inside info, to avoid a $750,000 loss. Here's what Cuban is trying to say with his post:

The SEC doesn't have a statement from anyone saying that Cuban knowingly ordered an insider trade.
Regulators dropped an investigation of Mamma.com over allegations of securities-law violations days before starting their investigation of Cuban. Cuban's unspoken implication: Someone must have made a deal.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, as seen on Dancing with the Stars, makes a better target for ambitious SEC staffers than the forgotten Mamma.com team.
Oh, but Cuban's got a blog. Eat this, SEC!

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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 PST

Newsweek bosses ensure Fake Steve Jobs blogger will blog no more [Confirmed]

Paul Boutin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:40:00 PST

My worst fears for a favorite writer have been confirmed: Dan Lyons told Valleywag alumnus Jordan Golson via phone that (A) Newsweek, his new employer, ordered Lyons to remove a blog post calling Yahoo publicists "lying sacks of shit," and (B) rather than continue to blog under the boss's watchful eye, Lyons — once Internet-famous as the Fake Steve Jobs — has stopped blogging altogether. The man has two kids and Newsweek pays real money, so I'm not going to toss rocks. Except at Newsweek, which hired Lyons because of Fake Steve Jobs, his hilarious fake-Apple-CEO persona; urged him to blog outside the magazine; then freaked out when Lyons continued to write honestly in his spare time. You maniacs! You blew it up!

What's Jerry Yang worth to Yahoo? $1.3 billion [Stocks]

Owen Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:00:00 PST

Yesterday, Yahoo was worth $14.7 billion. Today, it's worth $16 billion. Why the boost? Stock traders bid up Yahoo's stock after CEO Jerry Yang's surprise ouster — partly out of speculation that Microsoft might make a new bid for the company with Yang out of the picture, and partly, we think, out of sheer relief.

Yang's resignation post returns error 999 [Yahoo]

Paul Boutin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:20:00 PST

Can it get any dumber? Jerry Yang's post on Yahoo's corporate blog, "Stepping down," is throwing me an error message that suggests Yahoo has banned the IP address of my Sprint wireless Internet card, but only for their corporate blog. And yet the post is visible on the blog's homepage. It seems too bad to be true: Yang can't even say goodbye right. Update: The "999" error indicates that the server automatically throttled itself to prevent a surge in traffic from taking the site down. Yang's resignation blog post had made the front page of Digg, the news-discussion site. What does it say about Yahoo's competence at building reliable websites if Digg can take down the boss's blog?

Mark Zuckerberg wants to know how you feel [Facebook]

Owen Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:00:00 PST

Why have social networks blossomed in as antisocial an environment as Silicon Valley? Because they allow computers to become a crutch for a task most engineers find imposing: dealing with other human beings. Turning relationships into a social graph that can be fed into a database and ruled by algorithms is a genius move for tech's clumsy savants. Alex French, a writer for GQ, interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a profile, wonders if his cold stare and cagey responses are an incredibly calculating attempt to intimidate, or merely a sign that he's awkward. Either way, Zuckerberg shows a disdain for displays of emotion. Asked if he celebrated Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook, Zuckerberg seems puzzled by the question's premise. And yet emotion is at the core of Zuckerberg's plan for world domination.

In a conversation — conducted on instant messenger, the computer-moderated communications mode of choice for the socially impaired — Zuckerberg reveals that he hopes Facebook will one day broadcast its users very emotions. French probes him on this issue in the following exchange:

(12:25 p.m.) Alex: How’s things?
(12:25 p.m.) Mark: There’s this definite evolution happening. Where the first part of the social web was mapping out the social graph. And the second phase is now mapping out the stream of everything that everyone does. All of human consciousness and communication.
(12:29 p.m.) Alex: Imagine if you could broadcast people’s emotions into a feed?
(12:30 p.m.) Mark: I think we’ll get there.
(12:30 p.m.) Alex: So how are you going to map all of human consciousness and communication?
(12:30 p.m.) Mark: We don’t map it directly. We give people tools so they can share as much as they want, but increasingly people share more and more things, and there’s this trend toward sharing a greater number of smaller things like status updates, wall posts, mobile photos, etc. A status update can approach being a projection of an emotion.
(12:31 p.m.) Alex: That’s what I use it for.
(12:31 p.m.) Mark: So it’s not so crazy to say that in a few years people will be doing a lot more of that. It takes time for people to be comfortable sharing more and for the social norms to change.

Facebook will one day broadcast our emotions. He's kidding, right? It's easy to dismiss Zuckerberg as someone who watched The Matrix one too many times on late-night cable at his Harvard dorm.

Be careful, though: Neuroscience, the study of the human brain's electrical wiring, is one of Silicon Valley's nerdy obsessions of the moment. (Palm founder Jeff Hawkins has a startup, Numenta, devoted to it.) How long before the Bluetooth headsets we wear start listening to us 24/7, using voice-recognition software — already in use at call centers — to deduce our mood, and send it to Facebook, which then broadcasts it to our friends?

This frightening future may be closer than we think. If he realizes his ambitions, Zuckerberg will know not just who you're poking, but who you're thinking about poking. It would be less disturbing to contemplate this power in the 24-year-old CEO's hands if we had any idea what he was feeling.

Newsweek reporter unpublishes himself [Dan Lyons]

Paul Boutin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:00:00 PST

In theory, pro journalists can climb to the top of their fields without sacrificing their built-in urge to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In practice, even the loosest cannons find themselves battened to the hatch, or whatever the right sailing metaphor is. One of my role models, former Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons, seems to have been forced by his new employer to undo his own writing. Here's what happened.

Dan Lyons is a cruelly funny man. He's been a journalist and fiction writer for decades, but Lyons is best known for the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog he launched in 2006. Writing from home at night, Dan vented his frustrations as a Forbes writer by inventing a fictional Steve Jobs character. Fake Steve said everything about the tech industry's titans that Dan wasn't allowed to print in Forbes. (Check out "I love to fuck with car salesmen" and "Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer.")

Today, it seems Dan has taken down a post, for the first time any of us can remember. From most reporters, I'd consider this typical pointy-haired management, what can ya do, etc. But seeing Dan Lyons self-censor his own honest work makes me wonder if I'll be able to stay true to my own after I leave Valleywag's free-fire zone next month.

What's changed for Lyons? Simple: This past summer, Newsweek hired him away from Forbes. After a long series of talks with both old and new editors, Lyons shut down Fake Steve Jobs and started a new blog, Real Dan Lyons.

Yesterday he blogged a potty-mouthed, Fake-Steve-style rant about Yahoo's PR people yanking his chain in his official Newsweek reporter role. Today that post is gone. Dan's not answering his cellphone or email today, so I have to presume it was his Newsweek editor who made him take it down. Certainly, I've never seen Lyons wake up in the morning and rush to undo his previous night's typing.

Here's the timeline:

A month ago, Yahoo's PR reps put Dan on the phone, as a Newsweek reporter, with Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman.
Bostock swore up and down, over and over again, that Jerry Yang was not being challenged as CEO of the flailing, sprawling company he co-founded more than ten years ago. A side note: A lawyer Yahoo PR put in touch with Lyons also swore that a lucrative deal to have Google sell ads for Yahoo was going to make it past antitrust regulators, no problem.
Yesterday: Whoops. The Google deal never happened, and Yang has been forced out of the CEO seat.
On Monday, Lyons posted to his own blog, blasting Yahoo's PR people as "lying sacks of shit."
Today, that post is replaced with a 404 error. I dialed Dan's cellphone and got a robotic message saying this customer is not accepting calls.
We can't think of a single Fake Steve Jobs post that Dan redacted while at Forbes. Can you?

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Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:00:00 PST