Gawker: valleywag, ina fried

The Twitterati Panic Because Twitter's Down

Owen Thomas — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:36:55 EDT

What happens to the Twitterati when the site goes down for scheduled maintenance? Why, they temporarily turn into Facebookerati, lest the world be deprived of their every last thought.

Social media enthusiast Adam Jackson embraced the new medium.

Valleywag commenter Matt Ghali dryly noted Twitter's new maintenance routine.

Los Angeles tech scenester Sean Percival suggested a new hangout.

CNET News reporter Ina Fried had a straight-up freakout.

Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan pondered his options.

How did you survive the great Twitter blackout? Report your experience in the comments. 140 characters max!

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Hacks Wracked by Flack Attacks

Owen Thomas — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:47:39 EST

Journalists pretend to hate PR people, but they secretly think about them all the time. Anita Bruzzese, Todd Bishop, Ina Fried and others revealed their obsession with flackery on Twitter, reporters' oversharing medium of choice.

Syndicated columnist Anita Bruzzese demanded prompt service from flacks.

TechFlash blogger Todd Bishop listened to a Googler sugarcoat the search engine's cutbacks.

Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News was less than thrilled to get pitched on pig spooge.

Twitter user Andy Ihnatko did not want to learn about the power of Twitter.

CNET's Ina Fried reported on Microsoft's new spin doctor.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Transgender journalist caught in Wikipedia edit war

Jackson West — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:20:00 EDT

Ina Fried, the veteran technology reporter and a regular source of good Microsoft dish, is very open about her status as a transgender woman — her CNET blog is titled "Beyond Binary." She knows she's female. But some users of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia any bigot can edit, aren't convinced. An anonymous Wikipedia user in Knoxville, Tenn. however, refuses to accept hers as the last word on the subject, and has been changing pronouns from "she" to "he" on Fried's listing with repeated edits in the last six weeks. The justification offered:

I am a med student with an additional major in Clinical Psychology. Ina's self-proclaimed gender is debatable (and any debatable factoids should be left out of an encyclopedic entry).

This particular Wikipedia editor must not have gotten to the chapter on gender identity disorder in doctorin' reference texts like the DSM or ICD. For everyone's sake, I hope this Wikipedia editor goes into podiatry.

As Fried rightly points out, for reference materials, it's a matter of style. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, for which Fried serves as a vice president, has a handy stylebook supplement that might help.

But Fried now has a bigger problem with Wikipedia: Her entry has been deemed insufficiently "notable" for the online encyclopedia.