Gawker: valleywag, reality check

Server logs show no one cares about SXSW

Paul Boutin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:56:28 EDT

Good news for Web 2.0 embedded reporter Sarah Lacy: Compared to Gene Simmons's sad, sad sex video and rumors of Jimmy Wales's misbehavior, most of the planet couldn't care less about your Mark Zuckerberg interview trainwreck in Austin over the weekend. In fact, hardly anyone wants to read about the South by Southwest conference at all. Zuckerberg's keynote limped in at 1/700th the traffic of my last Steve Jobs event for Engadget. Maybe next year SXSW can do a panel on the risks of getting your worldview from Techmeme.

Lessig abandons bid for Congress

Paul Boutin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:02:25 EST

You can watch Stanford Law prof Larry Lessig's five-minute video explaining why he's decided not to pursue the 12th Congressional District seat vacated by the late Tom Lantos. Or you can read the snappy summary by my anti-free-culture overlords at The Wall Street Journal: "He had no chance of winning against fellow Democrat Jackie Speier, a highly popular former state senator who was endorsed by Lantos shortly before his death." Pretty funny how The Internets thought they were going to blog and tweet Lessig into Washington, without first finding the 12th District on a map.

Open-source trap or sign of weakness?

Tim Faulkner — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:09:58 EDT

Open source conspiracy theorists warn that Microsoft's effort to make the code behind .Net, its software-development framework, open to the public to view — but not modify— is a trap. The goal? It's aimed, they claim, at tainting Mono, an open-source implementation of .Net, with the software maker's intellectual property. And why does this matter? Mono, you see, allows programmers to easily port software meant to run on Microsoft's Windows to Linux and other competing operating systems. But really, might Microsoft's critics be giving it too much credit for cleverness?

While Microsoft has been known to try just about every tactic in the book to undermine the competition, this paranoid theory mischaracterizes the open source community's beloved Mono. True, Mono, in theory, weakens Windows. But only in theory. In practice, Mono is not a threat to Microsoft — rather, it's spread the popularity of .Net far beyond Microsoft's Windows-developer base, and thereby tied the open-source developers who use it to Microsoft's software-development roadmap.

No, rather than a devious and elaborate ploy concocted in Microsoft's legal department, the right way to see Microsoft's Shared Source program is as a feeble attempt to mask its inability to move its business to the open-source model, as rivals IBM, Sun, Novell, Adobe, and Apple have done to varying extents. Sure, Microsoft could start suing developers — with the result, of course, that they'd simply drop .Net and move to other development tools untouched by Microsoft's hands. (Photo by BotheredByBees)

Jajah adds to eBay's click-to-call nightmare

Jordan Golson — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:56:47 EDT

We'd hardly blame Meg Whitman if, after this week, she decided to hang up on the phone business altogether. On Monday eBay said they were taking a $1.4 billion charge related to their acquisition of VOIP startup Skype. On Tuesday, we noted that one of Whitman's major goals in buying Skype, bolstering its auction business in China, where rivals were using click-to-call features on their auctions to close sales, has turned into a complete failure. And then, yesterday, things somehow managed to get worse.

Skype competitor Jajah launched click-to-call buttons that connect potential buyers and eBay sellers, accomplishing an integration into the auction site that Skype hasn't. In response to this affront, eBay last night deleted all auctions with Jajah buttons on them. Reportedly, eBay and Jajah had reached some sort of tentative agreement giving Jajah users the go-ahead to put Jajah buttons on their auctions — but that deal is now clearly dead.

So where does that leave things? eBay screwed up so badly with Skype that some in the Valley say the botched acquisition could burst Facebook's ridiculous valuation bubble. Stifled by eBay's bureaucratic inertia, Skype let a rival beat it on its own home turf.

It's high time for eBay to sell Skype to someone who cares. eBay succeeded with PayPal because it was a natural fit with eBay's customers, both buyers and sellers. But now, the only thing that makes less sense than buying Skype for $2.6 billion is continuing to hang onto it. (Photo by Ryan Fanshaw Photography)

Tech blogger on HuffPo: "Can you say IPO?" Answer: "No."

Jordan Golson — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:36:05 EDT

The new editor at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, has gotten a little IPO-crazy in these heady days of Bubble 2.0. The best guess we've seen on a Huffington Post valuation is $60 million which, for a media company, is a drop in the bucket. We can't remember a tech or media company going public with a valuation anything like that. Huffington Post is the most unlikely IPO candidate since Wired in 1996 — and Wired had substantially more revenues and a real magazine business. Maybe we were onto something with the whole cheese thing. More likely? An acquisition.

Yahoo News and Huffington Post have had a syndication deal since launch; buying HuffPo, as it's affectionately known, would boost Yahoo's blogger cred.
AOL may be looking to augment its Weblogs Inc. stable with some good political commentary. HuffPo cofounder Ken Lerer was a bigwig at AOL back in the day — though that may not help him much with Time Warner's current leadership
HuffPo's pseudo-namesake, the Washington Post, already has a syndication deal with them and a number of WaPo columnists blog for Huffington. The New York Times — heck, aren't they just a fancy blog already?

Really, any media company would be interested in the company that Lerer and Huffington have built — as a cheap add-on, mind you, not at a frothy IPO price. But why sell?

Even if HuffPo had any shot at an IPO — and, as Schonfeld's readers have hastened to tell him on TechCrunch's comments, it doesn't — it's not like its founders need the money. Huffington is a successful writer and got a fat divorce settlement. Lerer was a top executive at AOL and Time Warner and started his own PR firm in New York. This is their pet project and I can't see them selling anytime soon. Huffington — like Michael Moore — has world-changing aspirations. With plenty of money in her pocketbook, she doesn't have to worry about cashing out.

(Disclosure: I consulted for Huffington Post briefly in 2005.) (Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images)