<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, secrets]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, secrets]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/secrets http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/secrets <![CDATA[NYT Blog Tries to Unpublish 'One of the Best Kept Secrets in Brooklyn.' Fails.]]> Yesterday, the New York Times' blog about the Fort Greene neighborhood published a post on a "secret underground climbing gym" in Brooklyn. Today, they took the post down. For a preposterous reason! Now it's getting way more attention.

The blog's explanation for pulling the post:

Basically, we believe that parties who are the subjects of an extensive and sensitive post like yesterday's should know they are being written about. This is both the neighborhood-y, Local thing to do and simple journalistic ethics.

In this case, the author of the piece identified himself to several climbers but not to the people who run the space. We were unaware of this lapse. We had concluded, based on the author's initial pitch, that he planned to be upfront with everyone, and we neglected - our bad - to confirm this after the piece was filed.

Well that's all well and good and friendly, but it's really the type of thing to decide before you publish the extremely extensive post about "this bizarre hybrid of subterranean climbing gym and hippie speakeasy" in Fort Greene. Because the entire thing is, of course, cached by Google. All anyone has to do is click here to read the whole thing, or visit AnimalNY, where they put up a screen shot of it. Now, Jed Lipinski's post on "one of the best kept secrets in Brooklyn" is going to get far more readers than it would have had you simply left it up.

See: The Streisand Effect.
[The Local's 'Why We Unpublished" statement and the original post, via Animal NY

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<![CDATA[Noah Kagan, the martyr of Facebook]]> With Facebook friends like these, who needs enemies? Noah Kagan, who left his job at the social network abruptly in mid-2006, now has a Facebook group in his honor: "Boycott Facebook until Noah Kagan is re-hired!" Valley prankster and Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams created the group. We pinged Kagan, who's now working happily at online personal-finance startup Mint.com and blogging at Okdork.com. Kagan, when pinged on IM, was as bemused as we were to hear about the group, but had no idea why Abrams was starting it a year after his departure. The Facebook group, however, might not be telling the whole story about the Facebooker's departure: A well-placed tipster says Kagan was fired for leaking company secrets to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

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