Gawker: valleywag, daniel terdiman

L.A. quake catches Twitter user in ladyparts exam

Owen Thomas — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:40:00 EDT

An earthquake is just an earthquake. But the tech press corps is desperate to make a commonplace natural event, like today's shaking down in Los Angeles, into a story about their favorite companies. Take Twitter user MissRFTC, who was in mid-pelvic exam when the earthquake struck, and announced this to the world. An hour later, MissRFTC was on the phone with "a senior writer from CNET." (Our first guess was Daniel Terdiman, a CNET reporter who often writes about the Internet's quirky culture, but it turns out it was the utterly straitlaced Dawn Kawamoto, better known for hardnosed reporting on Hewlett-Packard board scandals that led the computer company to sic investigators on her.) We're not sure who worries us more: The compulsive oversharer who felt obliged to Twitter about her 15 minutes in the stirrups of fame, or the reporter who thought this might be a story. But mostly, we're jealous we didn't pick up the phone first.

The flying penis menace moves offline in Russia

Jackson West — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:00:00 EDT

In a stunt reminiscent of something from Second Life, an unknown perpetrator let loose a remote-controlled flying dildo at a speech yesterday by Garry Kasparov, the famed chess champion defeated by IBM's Deep Blue who now heads up Other Russia, an opposition party that seeks to wrest power from the Kremlin government dominated by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. As Andy Baio at Waxy points out, it's unclear if the pranksters knew about the infamous interview between Second Life baron Anshe Chung and CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman, video from which is embedded after the jump.

I'll be the first to count such outbursts as a sign of growing democracy — Putin and new president Dmitry Medvedev could have just jailed Kasparov like former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the opening of the video featuring Kasparov, his bodyguards jump at first, presumably expecting something more menacing before swatting it out of the air. I asked Terdiman how he thought the situation was handled, as he was one of the first people to confront the flying penis menace, but he declined to offer an opinion.

Kasparov, for his part, was unperturbed and said (approximately translated) "we should be grateful that we've been shown one more time that we need to raise the level of political discourse" to applause from the audience.

CNET reporter, still employed for time being, asks EA and Take-Two to stop fighting in public

Jackson West — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Industrial-sized video game publisher Electronic Arts is in negotations to buy the only real competitor in the sports game market Take-Two Interactive. Take-Two's shareholders want more than EA is offering and may be stalling until the release of the latest Grand Theft Auto installment. The two companies have taken their negotiations public by issuing dueling press releases — and CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman is tiring of it.

Get your highly-paid keisters into a meeting room. Order some takeout. Lock the doors. And work this out yourselves.

With all due respect to Terdiman, Valleywag loves it when companies air their grievances in public. It's like hip-hop MCs exchanging dis rhymes, but with less rhythm and poetry! So to everyone on the EA and Take-Two negotiating teams, feel free to send us anonymous tips and call each other the dirty, backstabbing double-dealers you know you want to. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

The secret to making money in Second Life

Mary Jane Irwin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:24:52 EST

CNET senior writer Daniel Terdiman says Second Life is rife with business opportunities. While researching his book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse, he interviewed a whopping two dozenresidents who count on Second Life for their monthly income. His sage advice? "Only the cream of the crop is going to make that kind of money. Most people who do this successfully are going to find that it's not quite that lucrative." Terdiman doesn't mention this one, but we think there's an even more surefire way to make money off of Second Life: Write a book about it.