My god, can we shut up about Kathy Sierra? As everyone who’s covered this story agrees, the death threats and murder-rape scenarios that anonymous forum users posted about the game developer and author are despicable. (The backstory: Sierra cancelled a speaking engagement at ETech, a major tech conference, after anonymous commenters on a third-party forum spewed the aforementioned hate speech at her.) Since Sierra announced the incident on her blog this Monday, readers have posted over a thousand comments. But the uproar didn’t stop there; every damn blogger has chimed in. Even the blogger-obsessed San Francisco Chronicle ran the debate on the front page. The topics: Whether the owners of the forum are responsible, whether women should protect themselves, whether men should protect women…It’s great that we all got a chance to spout off for a week. That’s fantastic, I’m proud of all of you for taking that BOLD STAND and not supporting rape and murder. But aren’t we forgetting to, you know, track down the perps? And maybe we should all shut up until that’s done?
What could I possibly say to improve this clip of the Internet’s most famous ninja interviewing the stars of Blades of Glory? “How many people did you kill with your blades?”
“Hey everybody, I’m skating circles around Scott Hamilton!”
I heard a rumor recently that Lockhart Steele, owner of the Curbed network and managing editor of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire, may leave the latter soon. That wouldn’t be a shock; Lock has the brains and the savvy to work on his own projects full time. What would be a shock is if he left just to work for another boss.
Unknown: Whether Lock has equity in Gawker Media, whether he’ll really leave this year (although it seems inevitable that he’ll jump ship some day), and whether he’ll continue expanding Curbed, which recently launched NYC shopping blog Racked.
I commissioned the following from Blogebrity’s new writer, Cole [last name withheld so Mom can't google him]. Give him a hand, everyone.
I wasn’t sure what to think when Nick asked me to make fun of this MySpace page of a fake person named Kayla. In case you didn’t know, Nick, making fun of MySpace pages is the internet equivalent of a Monica Lewinsky joke. Since Nick is in such dire need of edgy social commentary, here is a thing that I thought about this page.
1. It appears that all of Kayla’s commenters are other fakespacers. It’s kind of like those porn ads that link to other porn ads and you’re like “WHO IS PAYING FOR ALL THIS ADVERTISING?” but even more than that you’re like “WHO ACTUALLY PAYS FOR PORN?” Just when you thought that they couldn’t squeeze any more ads into the internet, MySpace comes along and provides a way to do it for free. At least they add a face to the company so I can have someone to run over my car with in my personal imaginary moments.
Is that enough for you, Nick? When you’re ready to move on from MySpace, I have so many more jokes up my sleeve. How about those “Punch the Monkey” ads? It’s like, I hate that monkey!
When Wired Magazine promised last year to go “transparent,” I understood they’d be talking about their own writing and editing process in the webpages of Wired.com. I didn’t know they’d also air their innards at other sites.
When Wired writer Fred Vogelstein published a dossier on himself — a dossier Microsoft’s PR firm Waggener Edstrom had compiled to “steer” him toward writing a positive story of Microsoft for Wired — on Wired.com, Valleywag publisher and interim editor Nick Denton noticed that someone Wag-Ed thought Fogelstein would send the firm a copy of his article before it went to press. Of course, that’s something respectable magazines just don’t do. So Fogelstein and his editor Chris Anderson defended themselves — in the comments form on Valleywag. Having edited Valleywag for Denton (see my permanent disclosure), I know this must’ve filled Denton with sweet tabloidy glee. How lovely to get free content from the subjects! In fact, isn’t that the secret purpose of Valleywag?
Bonus: As of Wednesday evening, Wired.com is down and displaying a technical error. Aha, Fred and Chris realized the only way to get read tonight was to post somewhere else!
In what’s been called the first “death by Web 2.0,” 42-year-old Briton Kevin Whitrick threatened to kill himself, then hanged himself live on a webcam on the video chat site Paltalk after users in an “insult” channel encouraged him to, reports the Evening Standard. (Chatters told the Standard they had thought he was kidding.) It’s a tragic event, but someone out there must be looking for the video. How could they get their hands on it?
For now, they can’t. There’s no footage of the event on YouTube, and any copy would almost certainly be deleted for violating the site’s terms of service. Those present in the webcam chat room during the hanging aren’t revealing their identities to the press. And according to BBC News, investigators have asked people not to distribute images of the hanging.
What would it take to break through the silence? Presumably one could log into PalTalk and start searching around for people who were in the room. (Good luck figuring out which of these rooms is the “insult” room.)
The DuPont deal isn’t doing anything to endear Congdon to ABC News staffers, who have already complained to Radar about her low traffic, cloying online persona, and snotty posts on her blog about how lame ABC News’s website is.
It’s not typical for a journalist to do promo work on the side; it’s seen as a conflict of interest. Amanda argues that okay, if those are the rules then she’s not a traditional journalist. Those who’ve seen her interview Dan Rather and parade around as a “new media” queen may call that bullshit. Well, I have to take Amanda’s side. She doesn’t really buy into the whole “do research, cooperate with the studio giving you resources and access, act like a professional” deal. She’s not a journalist, she just plays one on TV.
Remember when the tech blog TechCrunch was all done by founder Michael Arrington, and in even the sketchiest product review, you could at least count on him for some insider knowledge? Well the site’s gone big, and it ain’t that special any more.
Take this review of Dodgeball and Twitter, for example. Writer Blake Robinson has, like, four Twitter friends, and he clearly hasn’t used Dodgeball. He proves the ignorance of the two mass-messaging services with his own screenshots. Blake treats the two services as competitors, even though Dodgeball is used for announcing location and Twitter is used for quipping or microblogging. (In other words, you use Dodgeball to announce you’re at the bar. You use Twitter to repeat what your drunk friend just whispered to you.) In fact, many of Dodgeball’s core users joined Twitter and now use both services.
But back to this useless TechCrunch review. The facts are wrong (you can use something other than SMS with Dodgeball). The analysis is wrong (Facebook’s web-based business model would make a Twitter clone an annoying side project). It’s just rubbish, and it’s clogging up a site that’s usually quite useful for tech news scoops. So all that to say: until TechCrunch hires some reviewers who bother to use the product, don’t trust a TechCrunch product review.
Jason Calacanis, the blogger who founded the dozens-strong Weblogs Inc. network, just gave the world a horrible plan for becoming an A-list blogger.
While rebutting a lame claim that “blue-collar bloggers” can’t profit from their blogs without whoring out to paid review services like PayPerPost, Jason claims anyone could become an A-lister in three months. Step two on that get-big-quick scheme is “Go to 2-3 events or conferences a week.” Now that is a classist insult on the level of “let them eat cake.” That kind of event schedule is for power networkers, not good bloggers. Step four is basically “write about tech.” Actually, that’s a way to get ignored by the tech crowd and make everyone else scared or bored.
Look, some of the top “A-listers” that everyone reads are the four writers at Boing Boing. They have their own lives, write about anything they want, and when they cover tech it’s on their own terms. And they get over ten times the traffic that media critic and supposed A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis gets. They also dwarf former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who now only gets attention when he complains about not getting attention.
In other words, what Calacanis calls the A-list is really the C-list. Why does he delude himself? Maybe because he’s part of that C-list; maybe because his vision really is that small. Or maybe Calacanis wants the whole world of blogging to be reduced to bitter little men arguing about the future of RSS and HD-TV.
Also wanted to take a moment to thank all of our fine panelists — Nick, Amanda, Henry, Karina & Casey. What started as a bit of a PowerPoint-induced mess (f-ing scroll lock) turned into a rather spirited debate on how we measure notoriety in the blog world — be it page views, inbound links, WHO those inbound links come from, RSS views & downloads, PageRank, or just good ol’ cash money.
Thanks also to everyone who participated. Please don’t hesitate to continue the discussion, be it in the comments of this post, via email, or on your own blogs. And for those of you who couldn’t be there — either due to rain, a panel you thought would be better, or just b/c you weren’t in Austin at all — never fear, a podcast of the panel will be live shortly, and we’ll be sure to post the link just as soon as it does.
I wrote an article at Valleywag (disclosure: I write articles at Valleywag) about the future internets that never happened: Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, Cyberspace, and other stillborn internets. My favorite is Bill Gates’s Road Ahead, which is now brought to you by Steve Jobs.
I heard a rumor recently that Lockhart Steele, owner of the 
In what’s been called the first “death by Web 2.0,” 42-year-old Briton Kevin Whitrick threatened to kill himself, then hanged himself live on a webcam on the video chat site 
Jason Calacanis, the blogger who founded the dozens-strong Weblogs Inc. network, just gave the world a horrible plan for becoming an A-list blogger.
