Gawker: valleywag, dave mcclure

Robert Scoble, other Valley bon vivants subject of latest ego-stroking linkbait

Jackson West — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Vancouver-based NowPublic is ostensibly all about citizen journalism. But since Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to it and signed up as an advisor, it's becoming better known for publishing flattering lists of "influencers," supposedly ranking them according to various social media metrics. The first "Most Public" list focused on New York, but a new list for the Valley and San Francisco is "coming soon." And by virtue of being included in the latest edition, we received an early copy as a press release. Who comes out on top? Ubiquitous attention slut Robert Scoble, naturally. Full list after the jump.

Robert Scoble

Michael Arrington

Jack Dorsey

Biz Stone

Matt Cutts

Pete Cashmore

Dave Winer

Guy Kawasaki

Loïc Le Meur

Kevin Rose

Merlin Mann

Stowe Boyd

Jeff Atwood

Jeremiah Owyang

Veronica Belmont

Kara Swisher

Scott Beale

Marc Andreessen

Ryan Block

David Sifry

Emily Chang

Om Malik

Timothy Ferriss

Nick Douglas

John Battelle

David Cohn

Louis Gray

Tom Foremski

Tim O'Reilly

Ariel Waldman

Matt Mullenweg

Dean Takahashi

Philip Kaplan

JD Lasica

Sarah Lacy

Brian Solis

Charlene Li

Rafe Needleman

Dan Farber

Howard Rheingold

David McClure

Margaret Mason

Jason Goldman

Leah Culver

Chris Shipley

Jackson West

Liz Gannes

Owen Thomas

Adeo Ressi

Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

"Rock Band" music video debut with Scoble and the gang

Owen Thomas — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:00:09 EDT

AUSTIN, TX — Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg) and Revision3 COO David Prager have done it again. She rewrote "Roxanne" as "Rock Band," an homage to the popular Harmonix videogame; Prager, though he didn't pair up in front of the camera with Jayne as they did in iPhone parody "Doncha," helped produce the video. In the clip below, Robert Scoble, Digg CEO Jay Adelson, Facebook fanboy Dave McClure, and media raconteur David Spark headline. They play undistinguished louts who, by playing the game, transform themselves into real rock stars. The backup singers include Jayne and Rana Sobhany, a marketer who's planning a SXSW party tonight at Six Lounge. The video:

SXSW bar crawl begins in earnest

Owen Thomas — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:12:37 EDT

AUSTIN, TX — A confession: Between the rain pouring down and the rumors pouring in, I didn't even make it to the Austin Convention Center today for any of SXSW's official programming. A show veteran granted me absolution: "No one makes it to the third day." The third night, however, was not optional. The hot ticket: Facebook's Get.friends party at Pangaea. The Crush party at Six Lounge a half-block down Colorado Street was the chill-out alternative. Scott Kidder and I hopped between the two, snapping pictures all the while. Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni of OpenHulu fame joined up for the party tour. At Six, I found myself sandwiched between Sarah Lacy and Julia Allison, SXSW's two controversy magnets. Back at Pangaea, I spotted Dave McClure grooving ecstatically to BT, the electronica artist Facebook evangelist Dave Morin picked for the event. (Don't tell Morin: BT has a MySpace page.) The afterparty? It took so long to get going anywhere that we ended up having it outside on Colorado Street, where Wired's Megan McCarthy administered breathalyzer tests. More photos:

With Randi and Brandee, Dave McClure feels dandy

Owen Thomas — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:20:30 EDT

At Sunday's SXSW afterparty, Facebook fanboy Dave McClure acquired a fan club: Facebookers Web-video auteur Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg) and Brandee Barker, chief damage-control officer. More photos from the party, after the jump; your best headlines in the comments.

(Photos by Brian Solis)

Stanford grads to make the world a spammier place

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:01:22 EST

Stanford professor BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy extraordinare Dave McClure put on a class this fall for Stanford students interested in building their own Facebook apps. To the likely detriment of all involved, the class turned out to be a rousing success.

Here are the stats, according to the instructors.

Over 10 million Facebook users installed Stanford student apps
Over 1 million daily active users on the apps
5 student apps rank among Facebook's Top 100 (competing with 9,000 other apps)

McClure and Fogg will hold "an evening of insights and demonstrations" tonight on campus. There you'll learn how you, too, can make no money off vampires, zombies and pirates.

Facebook's Beacon ads revealed

Owen Thomas — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:40:04 EST

So what do these Facebook ads which have MoveOn.org in an uproar actually look like? The ads, despite all the fuss, are cussedly hard to find. Mark Zuckerberg's hundred-year media revolution seems to be taking about that long to get underway. But Facebook fanboy Dave McClure has found an example in the wild. By buying a T-shirt on Busted Tees, he was able to capture screenshots of the ads MoveOn claims violate Facebook users' privacy. What do you think?

Poke epidemic reaches crisis proportions

Mary Jane Irwin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:55:16 EDT

What the hell is a poke? Facebook's proprietary pestering system, the poke, is about as ambiguous as waking up on the couch of a good friend after a wild night of partying, followed by blacking out. Is it a friendly wave? A solicitation? An accusation? There's a whole social graph of plausible "poke" translations authored by Silicon Valley tool and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure. One little poke could mean everything from "yo" to "let's have sexual relations." Charming, yes? Here's a far better idea.

Facebook should offer a drop-down menu of suggested interpretations to ensure an innocent poke doesn't turn into a restraining order. This will, of course, kneecap application developers who have spent hours, if not minutes, developing Super Poke, X Me, and other improvements on Facebook's original poke routine. But McClure's call to arms shows that it's time for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to put egotism before ecosystem, and solve this problem himself. Maybe we should poke him until he does something about it. (Illustration by Dave McClure)

Stanford joins the Facebook application frenzy

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:22:41 EDT

Stanford has hopped aboard the Facebook application bandwagon with a new class: noted developer BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure (who may not be employed by for Facebook but is awfully busy flacking the company) will be teaching "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook." Although offered through the computer science department, the course appears more geared to business students. Pupils will be graded based on the number of users they can garner rather than quality of code, and there will be an event at the end of the course to pitch the applications to investors. Is it any surprise Facebook moved to the west coast and that Stanford leads Harvard in incubating technology companies? As VentureBeat notes, while Stanford jumps on the latest tech fad and offers students a chance to strike it rich, Harvard ironically had admonished Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg and shut down a precursor to the popular Facebook for privacy violations and political correctness concerns while he was a student.

Meet Spock, the happy fun robotic slanderer!

Mary Jane Irwin — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:16:30 EDT

The Internet has already busted the extremely creepy people search engine Spock. It's bad enough that the site trawls social networking profiles, amassing every personal statement you've ever made online. Now it's an outright slander brigade. A few high school students who used a Spock-built Facebook application that generate amusing stories, a la the old Mad Libs fill-in-the-blank books, were surprised to learn they had been tagged as a "fat, retarded pimp who likes screwing prostitutes," or as "a man-whore who hangs out at stranger's houses and drinks rum and Coke." (Sounds like some bloggers we know, but no matter.) Those, however, are the least of Spock's scary lies.

Blogger John Aravosis learned that he ranked in the top search results for pedophile, presumably, he notes, because he covered the Mark Foley trial. Scary! After hearing this, I prudently checked the Spock profile for Mary Jane Irwin. My adoring fan Dave McClure, who's gone from playing Facebook fanboy to being a Spock advisor, has tagged me as both a "Luddite" and a "Spock lover." Both completely untrue. He's also tagged colleague Megan McCarthy as "naughty" and "likes twins," among other things. Apparently accurate, so score one for McClure and Spock.

As Wired News writer Dan Tynan points out, the truly scary thing is that, unlike Facebook or MySpace, you have very limited control over your Spock profile. Claiming it does little more than alert you to changes. It does nothing to safeguard your online reputation. Users can post disparaging tags to their hearts' content. Your only hope is that enough people will vote the offending tag as inaccurate to warrant its removal, or Spock will favor your request for deletion (as it has done in the Mad Libs and Aravosis cases).

Spock CEO Jaideep Singh's basic excuse is that this is the Web, and that you should get over it. "The best way to ensure that Spock will not index Web documents about you is to remove all documents about you from the Web," he says. At this point, I don't think that's even possible. But the least we can ask is that those documents be interpreted accurately. A better idea? Remove Spock from the Web, until it deploys its robots more responsibly.

Who's Dave McClure, and why is he a Facebook fanboy?

Owen Thomas — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:23:41 EDT

Entrepreneur, programmer, man about town — if by "town," you mean "Palo Alto." That's our Dave McClure, part of the PayPal gang and now, in geek semi-retirement, an extreme fan of Facebook, the buzz-ridden social network. I've known Dave a long time, and respected his critical thinking skills (as well as his avid commenting on Valleywag). Which is why I've never understood why he joined right in the Valley's Facebook frenzy instead of standing back and, with all his experience, questioning the hype. For the answer, roll the tape.

Interviewing him for Valleywag, Sarah Meyers, to her credit, got an answer out of McClure: He hopes to consult for the company. Asked if he's considered working there, he fesses up: "I might be helping with some outreach and events they're doing in the future." You're so busted, Dave. I still love ya, man, but for that, I'm handing you an award as Valleywag's latest Silicon Valley Tool.

(Video by Sarah Meyers and Enric for Valleywag)

Geeking out: ETech 2006, Wednesday

ndouglas — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:01:00 EST

Everyone's famous on the Internet! And the webstars really shine in Scott Beale's Wednesday photos from O'Reilly ETech 2006. In this edition, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, 3/4 of the Boing Boing crew, and an episode of escalating violence.

Ed Batista, attention pimp.

Dogster's Ted Rheingold and ex-Technoratian Niall Kennedy give the white man's gang sign.

Simply Hired's Dave McClure, moments before shrieking "Your sun! It burns me!" and running back to his Gevil lair.

After the jump, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

"Dear team: kicking into high-gear networking mode. Send more striped shirts."

Mark, Xeni, and Cory of Boing Boing rest between glamorous international spy missions.

Geek-hobo proliferation reminds O'Reilly what they left out: "Oh damn! We always forget the CHAIRS!"

"Hmmm, I just might have a 'project' I could fit this pipe into, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN."

Ted didn't actually use his laptop — just sat there all day posing. It's tough being pretty.

"Sure, you could use these gadgets for their intended purposes, but where's the fun in that?"

Tech writer Annalee Newitz blasts away at MAKE Magazine's marshmallow shooter.

And she stood there for an hour, waiting for something to happen.

This would've been the perfect moment for Ted's "I play trumpet in a ska band" hat.

The marshmallow projectile beaned a bellhop and neatly severed the Internet connection. Only the latter got noticed.

MAKE Magazine pits Roombas in an armed fight to the death.

"House meeting, everyone. Okay, have we learned our lesson about shooting and fighting today? Now I want you all to make Annalee a nice 'Get Well' card."

ETech 2006 Photos [Laughing Squid]
Earlier: Geeking out: ETech 2006, Tuesday [Valleywag]
And: Geeking out: ETech 2006 [Valleywag]