I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Owen took the Valleywag reins from our overlord Nick Denton himself and has fiercely worked his Silicon Valley sources for gossip and scoops. In December, Valleywag was merged into Gawker, and when we tried to talk him into staying, he said he misses the management headaches of running his own site. He's keeping mum on his new gig, but we hear it involves the letters N, B, and C and will focus on Bay Area news.

As Gawker's night editor, Ryan lets me sleep easier at night. But it's time for him to rejoin the land of the living and the tech beat is a natural for him. Based in San Francisco, he started his journalism career at mags like Upside and Business 2.0 before the dot-com boom went bust. He joined Gawker last year from San Francisco Business Times. The night gig is by design one for a generalist, but he's come up with plenty of news at the intersection of business and media, such as Bloomberg's premature obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs and exposing the underbelly of Arianna Huffington's blog empire. Now part of the larger Gawker family, he'll still have room to write about his other areas of fascination, like military aviation shills and Fox News' slimy PR shop.

And that means there's a job opening at Gawker. I'm looking for a new night editor who's primarily responsible for keeping track of any breaking news after about 7 p.m. East Coast time, as well as getting a jump on the dawn's news stories. Since hours pretty brutal in the U.S., I'm especially interested in hearing from people who live in Australia or Europe. If you're reading this from overseas or are nocturnal by nature, email me.

The relentless pace of news has overwhelmed the blog format of old. Interesting news gets buried as new headlines flow onto the page.

If you liked the classic view, you can select "Expanded" in the View menu in the gray bar at the top of the page. There are other tools for sorting items there, too. Oh, and if you don't like change, our apologies — more are on the way as we integrate Valleywag more closely with Gawker.

• Some guy named Denton can't figure out how to sell ads on Valleywag.
• So he's going to sneak Valleywag posts onto Gawker.com, where Ketel One is happy to buy banners.
• Valleywag.com the URL will still work. Valleywag's RSS feed will still work. You will not have to go to Gawker.com to read Valleywag stories.
• In 2009, Owen will be posting full-time, maybe 6-12 posts per day. Everyone else is fired.
• Denton's trying to follow Wired's footsteps: Take an insidery, localized publication and make it a national daily read. Will it work? Maybe. Will Chris Tolles still reload obsessively? That's the challenge.
• Valleywag's traffic isn't enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page. Denton's keeping Owen instead of me, because Owen likes to write about boring money issues that, in theory, Chris Tolles thinks are way more important than photos of Steve Jobs parked in a handicapped space.
• I'm here until December 1. Owen gets his Thanksgiving vacation. I get an extra month's rent.
• TechCrunch gets to pretend we don't exist, which makes them look like a bunch of five-year-olds. Everybody wins!
• You're worried about me? I owe the New York Times one short freelance article, that's all I feel comfortable saying. I'll be fine, because I'm nuts. Nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Rooskies!

Tip your editors:
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Valleywag elsewhere on the Web:
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Managing Editor:
Owen Thomas
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Posts | Comments

Valleywags Emeriti:
Nick Denton

Nick Douglas

• Nicholas was the first to get a look at Yahoo's Buzz:
  Screenshots of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg competitor
• His historical analysis of why newspapers keep failing to grasp the online opportunity was widely read in the industry:
  5 ways the newspapers botched the Web
• He covered the craze for Facebook applications on its way up — and down:
  The Valley's Facebook frenzy fades
• Google's Chrome browser provided endless comedy:
  Uh oh, the b-tards got their hands on Google's Chrome comic
• He dug into what really made some tech gigs suck:
  Tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs
• The fiery implosion of Pay By Touch, a biometrics company, provided Carlson with one of his best ongoing stories. A former Pay By Touch employee recently complimented him for his work, telling me that his stories on Valleywag were the best source of information on what was happening to the company:
  Pay By Touch story archive
• And most recently, Nicholas uncovered the love connection behind Michael Arrington's MySpace scoops:
  Michael Arrington pounding his MySpace source

• Melissa's debut column was not afraid to be servicey — and also telling about the Valley's peculiar sex culture:
  How do I get a Stanford girl to blow me?
• The first question Melissa got asked: "No one actually goes to sex parties in the Valley, do they?" The second: "Can you get me in one?" That prompted a column:
  Sex parties in the Valley — how do I get invited?
• The sexographics of the Web's top companies:
  Googlers getting laid way more than Microsoft, Yahoo
• We called the SXSW conference in Austin "spring break for geeks." Melissa lived it:
  The art of the SXSW orgy
• Melissa tackled the Web's relentless misogyny with wit:
  Five reasons why women really do need to get off the Internet
• And she also critiqued the media's writing about the business of sex with an insider's eye:
  How the New York Times missed the latest escort scandal
• My all-time favorite?
  
  How to lie to your friends with Web 2.0

• An expert in online video from his film-school days and his stint at NewTeeVee, Jackson was not afraid to be servicey when the Olympics rolled around:
  The definitive guide to watching the Olympics online
• Jackson was one of the first to publish the news that sex blogger Violet Blue had been unpublished:
  Blogger completely deleted from Boing Boing archives
• Apple cofounder, cable-TV star? Jackson knew pageview gold when he saw it:
  Steve Wozniak and Kathy Griffin all broken up
• The surreal estate of the Valley's rich and famous was a constant obsession:
  Larry Page's $7 million manse
• Who needs venture capital when you've got a trust fund?
  How daddy's money paid for Andrew Baron's Rocketboom
• Jackson and I loved to disagree about San Francisco's gay-marriage- and hair-gel-loving mayor:
  The east coast's love affair with Gavin Newsom
• Google executive Marissa Mayer was this site's first obession, but Jackson's fashion sense took his critiques to a new level:
  Marissa Mayer and friends on display at department store
• Who can forget the time Jackson got TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington a milkshake? Readers drank it up:
  Michael Arrington drinks Valleywag's milkshake

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The big tech pubs have been shuffling their A-team players lately. Steven Levy jumped from Newsweek to Wired. Dan Lyons left Forbes to replace Levy at Newsweek. Forbes is now doing some high-end poaching of its own. (Can we vote for Brendan Koerner?) And the New York Times is staffing up for battle with the Wall Street Journal. Here at Valleywag, we heard that perpetual hanger-on, WSJ book reviewer, Wired kibbitzer and Bono impersonator Paul Boutin was being pulled into interviews for some of these big gigs. Paul, we told him, why bother? No matter where you end up, every single article you write will be 100-worded and openly mocked on Valleywag. Why don't you just finally join the team and post the stuff yourself here? Cracked Boutin, "That seems easier." He starts July 1.

The back story: Boutin and I met 11 years ago when we were both working at a dotcom called HotWired, a long-forgotten online offshoot of Wired. He emailed me asking for schwag from Suck.com, the site on which I worked; I left stickers and postcards and every other sort of branded giveaway on his chair, from which he was invariably absent. We eventually managed to meet — our door-desks were only 30 yards apart, after all. From those virtual beginnings came a fine bromance, and any number of coconspiratorial collaborations. Over the years, though, we never managed to draw a paycheck from the same place at the same time.

Until now. While he's contributed to Valleywag in countless ways since its inception, his work has always been tempered by employment obligations elsewhere. No more! At last, Paul's all ours — which means, gentle readers, he's all yours.

Boutin's not the only one signing on for more. Alaska Miller, one of our more vociferous commenters, is joining us as a summer intern. And while we're sad to lose calendarist Dianne de Guzman, who's starting a master's program in journalism at the University of Southern California in August, we're happy to have found a replacement, Adriana Nunez, who will pick up her duties starting in July.

• Our Sitemeter link hides in plain sight at the very lower left corner of the front door.
• Our internal stats counters report daily and monthly pageviews by author. There are three Paul Boutins listed. This explains my schedule.
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