WASHINGTON (AP) - Get real, people. That is not a naked woman reflected in Vice President Dick Cheney's sunglasses. Although it kind of appears to be. It you blow up the picture, you can see it is Cheney's hand gripping the handle of a fishing rod.
"At first, she wore a va-va-va-voom dress. I told her she'd catch pneumonia. Now she wears a sweater and jeans. I'm very proud of that." — Valleywag editor and sweater bear Owen Thomas, bragging — bragging! — about his campaign to stamp out the last remnants of glam in Silicon Valley. Thanks for nothing, bosstard.
In its latest list of billionaire bachelors, Forbes lists Facebook investor and hedge fund Midas Peter Thiel as "single." Technically true, I'll give the magazine's factchecker that much, if it means "confirmed bachelor." Thanks to California's marriage laws, he doesn't have much choice in the matter. In fact, I hear Thiel is getting less single every day. One tipster close to his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, shares this rumor: that Thiel may have hired his boyfriend, Matt Danzeisen, away from BlackRock Securities, thereby discarding plans to relocate the fund's headquarters to New York. Aside from being convenient for the pair, it would seem like a good career move for Danzeisen.
Jon Friedman's media columns for MarketWatch rarely leave me short on words. But the worst thing I can say about his latest one, which hails Valleywag as a new media creation which he says has surpassed its New York "cousin" Gawker, is that it goes on far too long. 726 words of logorrhea on a gossip rag? Even on a slow news day, that's too much to bother reading. Forthwith, a 100-word version of "How Valleywag trumps Gawker — and enlivens Silicon Valley":
When will the Pulitzer committee allow online reporting to be considered for an award? People have been asking that question for more than a decade. But blog-sympathizing critics of the prize really need to ask is whether including online news would make a difference in who won.
Did you hear? Doing business in coffee shops is all the rage in San Francisco! Especially at this trendy little spot in the Mission you may not have heard of, Ritual Coffee Roasters. Seriously, if getting a table at Ritual wasn't hard enough already, you can thank the Times for making it that much harder — now every wannabe in khakis and a biz-dev-blue shirt will be jostling with the skinny greys set arriving on fixies for prime seating real estate. Since the Times seems to love reusing blog posts from 2006, I'll throw them a bone and present "The four cafes Times readers can be expected to ruin by 2009":
For some of the Web's more respected names, it's a really special day. They get to treat their readers and fans with the contempt they hide most of the year. Below, five pranks today that show just how much the Internet hates you. And I do mean you.
Nate Westheimer, a New York entrepreneur best known for holding a Silicon Alley popularity contest, attempted to persuade Valleywag to participate in an April Fools' joke. We said we'd cover it, so here's the story: Right about now, if Westheimer's prank goes as he told us, Mashable, CNET blog The Social, and Silicon Alley Insider should be attempting to persuade you of the existence of a new startup called Urlrurl.com. The website converts long Web addresses into shorter ones, as TinyURL does. Unlike TinyURL, its shorter URLs all redirect users to a YouTube page with a Rick Astley video, a silly stunt known as "rickrolling."
Tabloid newspapers are alien to the Valley. A scandal sheet like the New York Post rarely covers tech — and those are the only days you read it. We understand that it's jarring. Here's how to decode the Post's recent report on Microsoft's attempt to cobble together a Yahoo board.
At the PSFK Conference in New York earlier today, NASA and auction site Etsy joined to invite the craftsmen who sell their goods on Etsy to compete to see who could make the best NASA-themed handmade good. "We'll send the two winners into space," Etsy founder Robert Kalin told the crowd. The crowd, along with News.com's Caroline McCarthy, took him at his word. Visions of a ride on Virgin Galactic took hold. Only to be dissolved. Because sadly, it turns out Etsy will not send any two people into space, but only their prize-winning goods. (Photo by pingnews.com)
Industrial-sized video game publisher Electronic Arts is in negotations to buy the only real competitor in the sports game market Take-Two Interactive. Take-Two's shareholders want more than EA is offering and may be stalling until the release of the latest Grand Theft Auto installment. The two companies have taken their negotiations public by issuing dueling press releases — and CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman is tiring of it.
Soon-to-be JPMorgan Chase subsidiary Bear Stearns will lay off 7,000 workers. The worst of it, reports Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, is that today's tough job market on the Street makes it a particularly bad time to get laid off. Fortunately, Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget also reports, Silicon Alley Insider is hiring! Where Blodget learned to describe the job market in such a self-beneficial way, nobody knows."We won't drown you in cash the way Bear would have," former financial analyst Henry Blodget writes, "but we need those same same analytical, writing, and competing skills."
In an article on Salon's Machinist blog today, Farhad Manjoo gives tips for getting around the Wall Street Journal's paid-subscription barrier. WSJ.com allows some featured articles to be read for free, but puts much of its content behind what's known in the business as a "pay wall." The dirty secret Manjoo exposes: Many of the "hidden" articles can be easily accessed with a little technical know-how. What he doesn't stop to ask: Why has new Journal owner Rupert Murdoch made it so easy?
Wired.com editor Leander Kahney writes up received Google fictions peddled by the search engine's PR division as fact in this month's Wired magazine. Google's employee perks are a common topic in the press, but our readers tell us the reality is far from the earthly paradise Google sells to gullible journalists. Leander makes working at Google seem like heaven:
Fox News felt, perhaps, a bit upstaged by ABC News' sensationalized report on how Hillary Clinton slept in her own home 11 years ago, so the cable news network decided to flood the zone with even more of its own tabloid hype than usual. FoxNews.com started with "Woman Gets New Anus Instead of Leg Operation" then moved on to "Is Your Vagina Depressed?" (Sex site Nerve.com spotted the racy headlines quickly.) Fox's report on vagina pain, aka Vulvodynia, was noteworthy not just for the headline, but also because a paid Vagisil consultant and advisory board member, Dr. Adelaide Nardone, touted a Vagisil product for the disorder, and neither she nor Fox disclosed to viewers her relationship to the feminine hygiene brand. Perhaps these sorts of stories are inevitable when you give your medical correspondent his own blog called "Dr. Manny After Hours." After the jump, video of the Vagisil plug, plus Dr. Manny encouraging a woman — her vagina, really — to buck up and look at the bright side of life.
Fortune magazine, ever servile, provides a ready platform for the powerful with something to say. The latest on stage: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners VC with a seat on Facebook's board. Breyer has a fair point: We may be seeing the cyclical bursting of another Silicon Valley bubble. Breyer says this happens once every seven years, roughly. But his timing is suspicious. Last October, Breyer gladly took Microsoft's bubbly $240 million for a microscopic stake in Facebook. Declaring the bursting of a bubble now may help hasten its advent, and in the process, make it harder for Facebook's rivals to raise money. But for Fortune readers' tech-stock portfolios, an early warning might have been more useful. Why didn't the magazine ring him up last fall? Fortune never mentions this. (Illustration by Sean McCabe for Fortune)
MSNBC.com streamed Obama's speech on race in America live on its website today. Naturally, MSNBC ran some advertising along with the stream, but it wasn't the smartest product placement. Have a look:
Senior executives from Microsoft and Yahoo met on Monday, the WSJ confirms. In fact, Microsoft execs even presented their "vision of a combined company." But don't call it a negotiation, the Journal's Matthew Karnitschnig writes. Will your Yahoo sources let us call it an afternoon tea, Matt? [WSJ]
BusinessWeek reporter Catherine Holahan dropped in on BitStrips, a Web-comics startup showing off its wares at SXSW. (Really, who goes to the SXSW trade-show booths?) In Holahan's blog post on the subject, she faithfully transcribed BitStrips founder Ba's thoughts on why he created a website that automates the production of cartoons which look like they were drawn by 5th-grade students. But oddly, she didn't hit on something far more topical: How Ba himself attacked her colleague Sarah Lacy for her keynote interview with Mark Zuckerberg in an "editor's pick." That comic strip, which I'm betting you won't see on BusinessWeek.com anytime soon:
