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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/2524027657_e2bbe47524_m.jpg” width=”160″ height=”240″ /Following every poll to watch swing states move from left to right and back again? A 24/7 news cycle feeds our craving for instant information, but separating fact from hype is trickier than ever. Join reps from YouTube, The Real News Network, BettyConfidential.com, and Google for a Churchill Club discussion on a href=”http://www.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=782″spin and politics/a in the age of online journalism at the SRI International Building tonight. If you have a post-World Series hole in your heart, fill it with beer. The Ubuntu a href=”http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1191651/”8.10 Release Party/a will be at Thirsty Bear at 7 p.m. for a low-key celebration of the latest in Linux’s rapid-fire OS updates. Meanwhile, the creator of Movable Type and TypePad, a href=”http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1264802/”Six Apart/a, is celebrating the a href=”http://team.vox.com/library/post/were-throwing-a-birthday-party-youre-invited.html”second anniversary of its Vox blogging service/a from 6-9 p.m. at its 4th Street headquarters in SoMa. em(Photo by a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkeleher/2524027657/”Paul Keleher/a)/em/p piframe src=”http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/valleywag.com/embed?title=Valleywag23999999src=valleywag.com_qf5t82ftrvf9s8f0472f4bak1o23B1365Fctz=America%2Fvw aug post 2 - Google DocsLos_Angeles” style=” border:solid 4px #777 ” width=”463″ height=”200″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”/iframe/p pGot something to add to the calendar? Send it to a href=”mailto:calendar@valleywag.com”calendar@valleywag.com/a./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/080310-cuban-vmed-6p.widec.jpg” width=”298″ height=”373″ align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ /Of all the people corporate raider Carl Icahn nominated for Yahoo’s board, Mark Cuban, the loudmouthed Internet entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner is the guy we wished had made it. If only for the boardroom theatrics with milquetoast Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. Take Cuban’s a href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204sid=a1jGD.azxfgYrefer=technology”latest comments to Bloomberg/a: “Jerry’s too nice a guy. He cares too much. They’ve got a lot of avenues they could take but all of them depend on being a lot meaner and a lot more aggressive and that’s just not their style.” Cuban should know: He took Yang for $6 billion during the dotcom bubble by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, then made sure to collar his shares so they kept their value while Yang’s fortune plunged. Never heard of Broadcast.com? Exactly Cuban’s point./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/yahoobust.jpg” width=”494″ height=”303″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /One sure thing worse for morale than a layoff is a multiple-stage layoff. a href=”http://valleywag.com/5067450/americas-fun-new-way-to-lay-off-everybody”Jason Calacanis told you/a not to do that. Valleywag’s publisher sacked everyone a href=”http://valleywag.com/5058760/valleywag-cuts-60-percent-of-staff”early, and at the same time/a in multiple timezones. So the old saying was true: “If you don’t know what’s going on by now, it means you still work here.” I get to sweat it out for Owen for another quarter. A Yahoo employee mdash; for now mdash; tells us it’s the other way around there. The scariest part of the job, says our tipster, is not knowing whether to work or go jobhunting./p blockquote pI am a member of Yahoo Sales Operations Finance Team in Sunnyvale and over the last couple days the number of people taking off is astonishing. I think the majority of Yahoo’s have decided to jump ship before the ship sinks. After the a href=”http://valleywag.com/5059650/myspace-brings-in-yahoo-veteran”departure of Valeh/a a month or so ago it seems that she has been very successful at taking with her some of Yahoo’s top salespeople. Within the last 3 days, Andy Wiedlin regional vice president of Yahoo out of San Francisco has taken off to join Valeh at MySpace and Mitch Kreuch, another RVP based on the east, is also taking off and will be handling MySpace sales operations on the east. The scariest about being at Yahoo right now is that despite the numerous reorgs that have gone on, there was one more today regarding the finance department even though it is clear that more than 50% of the department will be laid off. I guess if they move you closer to the door and take your stapler, you can take the hint and start looking for something else. This morning at the printer I found 5 resumes. i guess just a sign of things to come. Oh! did I mention that friday was my last day!!!!/p /blockquote br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/fs.jpg” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”494″ height=”232″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /Eight years ago Philip Kaplan, aka Pud, turned his anonymous rumor site FuckedCompany into a modest advertising business. Today, Kaplan is chief something-or-other at AdBrite, a Sequoia-backed startup whose CEO has dutifully slashed its payroll down to profitability. By contrast, sloppy typist “FS Crew” at FuckedStartups has already a href=”http://www.fuckedstartups.com/2008/10/29/fuckedstartupscom-for-sale/”thrown in the towel/a. “We have incredible pipeline of rumors and tips,” promises the For Sale post atop the site. “We have other projects and don’t have the time to focused (sic) our 100% attention on this project.” What FS Crew really means is: “Fuck, this is hard. Someone please pay me to quit.” Sorry, but on Web 2.0, it’s the other way around: Your customers quit you, for free./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/sarahlacytwitter_01.png” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”608″ height=”229″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /Sarah Lacy works at Yahoo. Sort of. As the anchor of Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker show, Lacy is a contractor, an employment status which already makes her a second-class citizen on the Yahoo campus. But Yahoo’s ostracism of its Web-video star goes further. She’s not listed in Yahoo’s electronic directory, and her badge doesn’t admit her anywhere on campus. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s nervous-nelly CEO, seems afraid that the longtime Valley reporter might stumble across his secret layoff plans. What his ban has really accomplished: a href=”http://twitter.com/sarahcuda/statuses/980867975″Obstructing floral deliveries/a./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/yahOL.jpg” width=”283″ height=”110″ align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ /“This is a href=”http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081028/the-deal-dance-aol-and-yahoo-and-even-google-and-microsoft-continue-to-waltz/”not just unloading AOL/a for us,” a source close to Time Warner told Kara Swisher. “It is also an important strategic move for our future to get this right.” I love the way anonymous sources lie so convincingly. The truth, Swisher blogs, is both simpler and more boring: Yahoo and AOL don’t really like each other. Neither company holds much attraction for the other. emImportant strategic move/em means an arranged marriage, forced on both sides by dwindling market value. Which reminds me: We should plot the number of Google engineers whose pending marriages have been “temporarily rescheduled for 2009.”/p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/arringtonhuh_01.jpg” width=”275″ height=”183″ align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ /I understand it’s still Tough Times, Tough Decisions month. But a layoff at TechCrunch would have been better than a post by TechCrunch’s leader a href=”http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/28/ten-comments-you-think-are-cool-and-insightful-but-arent/”criticizing the site’s commenters/a. It’s a slow news morning here, too, so I’ll reblog the best entry, No. 3:/p blockquotepem [random trolling, often with a wish that we'd die or are unethical in some way]/em - We get lots of these, and delete as many of them as we can. But first we check the IP address against previous comments left on the site. About once a month we see a really nasty anonymous comment that’s left by an IP address that had always been used by a single named commenter before that. Most of the time we had just posted a critical review of the person’s company right before the comment was left./p pWe don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great./p pIf you are going to say something nasty, use your real name or learn about the magic of proxy servers /p/blockquote br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/scribdlogo.gif” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”450″ height=”60″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /I’ve always thought Scribd, the online document-posting startup, was set up mostly so a href=”http://valleywag.com/374293/scribd-holds-anniversary-at-investors-22-million-mansion”its investors had an excuse to throw parties/a. They may not have that excuse much longer, if FuckedStartup’s a href=”http://www.fuckedstartups.com/2008/10/26/rumor-scribdcom-running-out-of-money/”report/a that Scribd is running out of money is accurate. At a time when any number of startups are running out of money, why fret about Scribd’s bank-account balance? Because Scribd was manufactured in angel investor Paul Graham’s Y Combinator startup factory./p pGraham, who sold a company to Yahoo in the ’90s, had become microfamous for Y Combinator, which provided both a social club and seed-stage funding. The summer (and winter) camp for young entrepeneurs spun off any number of companies, which then got venture-capital financing, and then a quick exit courtesy of Google or Yahoo’s shareholders./p pIn the bubbly years when Yahoo and Google were snapping up startups freely, Y Combinator’s offspring thrived, or appeared to thrive. Got an online PowerPoint clone? Google will buy it! Graham still seems to be living in his someone-will-buy-it dreamland; he recently proposed that companies a href=”http://www.leveragingideas.com/2008/10/13/paul-graham-attitude-startup-acquisition/”hire “chief acquisition officers,”/a to specialize in consuming the fare he dishes out. But the giants of the Web have put acquisitions on hold, and few others are stepping up to the plate./p pIs Scribd, once described as Graham’s “a href=”http://grou.ps/emresokullu.blog/?p=392″greatest success/a,” in trouble? We don’t know that for sure. We do know that hiring 20 people to create software that lets people post PDF documents to the Web always seemed silly. Having a cocky 20something Harvard grad as CEO may work for Facebook, but we don’t think Trip Adler is the next Mark Zuckerberg. But Scribd itself isn’t the real story. It’s whether Paul Graham’s magical startup machine is grinding to a halt./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/elance.jpg” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”476″ height=”148″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /Dear Mike: Love your site. But Ted Dziuba and I would like to see one little enhancement to your a href=”http://www.techcrunch.com/layoffs/”TechCrunch Layoff Tracker/a. It doesn’t list false positives. That is, if someone spamblasts everyone in the tech media on a Saturday night with an email that says “Elance laid off 20% of its staff on Friday,” I want to be able to search the Layoff Tracker for Elance and find out if your ace reporting team has embroken the story/em or not. I don’t want a match on “freelancer.” I want “Elance: TechCrunch has not yet broken the news on Elance layoffs.” It’s what, ten lines of PHP? I can pop down to Atherton and type it in. No wait: Have Ted do it. He needs something to do in between his a href=”http://teddziuba.com/2008/10/a-double-dose-of-my-pimping.html”new weekly columns/a for The Register. Watching Pressflip run out of money gets old./p br style=”clear: both;”/
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