Gawker: valleywag, slashdot

For once I believe Jimmy Wales

Paul Boutin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:20:00 EDT

Slashdot and the BBC are reporting something we blogged a week ago: Former Novell chief scientist Jeff Merkey claims Wikipedia big-dog Jimmy Wales approached him for a $5,000 donation to the cause in exchange for cleaning up Merkey's Wikipedia entry. UPI tidily summarizes: "Wales did erase a previous entry, replacing it with an entry with limited editing access." True, here's Jimmy's note about it. So why don't I trust Merkey? Because I've read his post-donation Wikipedia entry. Even after filtering the freetard hysteria from his open-source enemies, the guy's record says "crank" to me.

"A lot of these community news sites are...

Jordan Golson — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:29:33 EST

"A lot of these community news sites are all about Ron Paul. Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily... With sites like Digg, it's the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you're going to get." — Slashdot founder Rob Malda on Digg and other social news sites. [Bits]

Miniature golf and cocktail parties

Megan McCarthy — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:23:57 EDT

Tonight, Birthday parties, office open houses, and the best name for a lecture ever populate today's Valleywag Calendar. Read on so you don't miss out on the fun.

Video blogger Schlomo Rabinowitz leads an Innovation Salon discussion on integrating Web 2.0 into daily life entitled "How I Learned to Twitter Your Flickr." 7 p.m. at 835 Market Street [BAVC]
Spark PR is hosting a cocktail hour at their offices on 2 Bryant St., Suite 100. Starts at 5:30 p.m. [Going.com]
PBWiki founder David Weekly is celebrating his 29th birthday by renting out all of Golfland Sunnyvale for free miniature golf and arcade games. Everyone's invited, and bring your friends. (Psst, happy birthday, David!) [Facebook]
Startup Podaddies is throwing an office party at 333 Bryant, Suite 160 [Facebook]
There's a 10th anniversary party for nerdly news aggregator site Slashdot at Blue Chalk in Palo Alto. [Slashdot]
The Bay Area Interactive Group has an event on "Holding Hype Accountable - Techniques for evaluating emerging media within an integrated media plan" at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco. We think that might have something to do with putting ads on Facebook. [SFBIG]
Schilling vs. Jimenez in World Series game two at Fenway. We know two people who have been in Valleywag who are attending this game. Can you spot them in the crowd shots? (Oh, yeah, Go Sox!)
Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar:

The know-it-all-dom of crowds

Paul Boutin — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:04:52 EDT

Valleywag was Slashdotted twice over the weekend. Thanks for the traffic, but scanning the site's comments makes me wonder if there's a mathematical relationship between the parochial, presumptive arrogance of a site's readership and the sheer volume of their yappy remarks — wait, make that surface area, because volume implies depth. Most of the posts can be summarized as, "I'm in IT or grad school, so I could probably teach David Pogue at The New York Times a lot about his job." In this respect, Slashdot reads like a massively parallel Scobleizer.

Old tech site reminds you why you left for new tech site

Nick Douglas — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:00:44 EDT

Digg, the social news site that inspired a thousand knock-offs, was created (well, commissioned) by Slashdot user Kevin Rose after the venerable tech news site dismissed his suggestions. Now the old green lady has introduced a "Slashdot Firehose" page that vaguely reproduces the Digg method of listing headlines and allowing users to vote them up or down the page. But compare these current Digg headlines to some Slashdot heds.

Digg

Show Soccer Skills on Youtube; Get Recruited by Manchester United!

Slashdot Firehose

This comparison is, of course, unfair, like comparing Fox News to KQED. Of course, we all know who gets the bigger audience.