Gawker: valleywag, obvious

Google, Blogger veteran Jason Shellen quits LiveJournal after three months

Owen Thomas — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:20:00 EDT

LiveJournal, only months after Six Apart sold the blogging site to Russian Web firm Sup, has resumed its tradition of corporate drama. Jason Shellen, the company's VP of product management, just announced he'd left the company. I asked him if this had anything to do with the ruckus over LiveJournal's elimination of unpaid, advertising-free accounts. "No," said Shellen, who worked at Blogger and then Google after the search giant bought the blog startup. "In social media, you have to have a thick skin." What did Shellen in was the 10-hour time difference between Moscow, where Sup is headquartered, and LiveJournal's San Francisco office.

Shellen's going back to his first plan: Running a startup incubator called The Secret Agency. His model: Blogger founder Evan Williams's Obvious, which recently spun off Twitter as its own company.

Chris Sacca leaves Google, continues do-nothing plan

Owen Thomas — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:33:30 EST

In a long-overdue move, Chris Sacca, Google's "~~director~~ head of special initiatives," has left the company. Cleverly, though, he's moving into a new career where he can continue to talk a lot and let others do the work: He's becoming an angel investor, working with Evan Williams's Obvious, the company which spun off Twitter, and Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator specializes in funding companies with utterly adorkable names. We figured Sacca's career at Google might be foreshortened when Google listed an opening for a "director of other," since that pretty much sounded like Sacca's job. Doing anything other than work. Congratulations, Chris: In a Valley that unfairly discounts laziness, you're now the ultimate value stock.

"There's a thin line between irony and travesty,...

Megan McCarthy — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:22:49 EDT

"There's a thin line between irony and travesty, and Twitter erases it." [ddj.com]