ValleyWag

Dave Winer, the old guy who takes credit for blogging, podcasting, and other tech trends, is mad at Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Why? Because Williams is making people — people who are not Dave Winer — famous.

Poor Williams! He's just the latest target of Winer's wrath. The irascible Internet fussbudget has gotten mad at Jason Calacanis for being self-promotional, mad at Internet commenters who do not acknowledge his contributions to the Internet, mad at Twitter for not doing what he says, and mad at Hillary Clinton for being alive. (We've also long suspected that he is secretly mad at the New York Times because they will not hire him as a columnist and run his verbal spew unedited.)

But Winer's latest rant is hilariously hypocritical.

Williams's sin, according to Winer, is playing favorites with Twitter's "Suggested Users" page, a feature meant to help bewildered new Twitter users navigate the messaging service's real-time, 140-character spasms of pointless puffery. He writes:
I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...

Think about it this way — do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones — they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now.

Makes sense! Who would want the phone company to do that? Except Winer did the exact same thing himself with his own blog-software company, Userland Software, in 2003, writes former employee Rogers Cadenhead. Moreover, unlike Twitter's Williams, he actually took money to promote a blogger — former MTV veejay Adam Curry. In 2003, Curry wrote:
Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...

The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

Williams hasn't said anything about charging for placement on the Suggested page, but it can generated tens of thousands of new followers a day for featured Twitter accounts. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis — yes, the one Winer feuded with — has offered to pay $250,000 to get featured on it. Which makes us think: Winer isn't mad at Williams because he's playing favorites. Winer is jealous because Williams is far more effective at playing favorites than Winer will ever be.

Who's the most popular guy in the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades? Why, none other than Nouriel Roubini, New York University's own Dr. Doom. He just got back from a world tour.

Roubini, a doomsaying economist who's as well-known for his Tribeca loft parties as his increasingly grandiose predictions of worldwide economic collapse, took a break from wooing young women on Facebook to post a few photos of a copter ride in Brazil. (He simply had to spring for a helicopter "as Sao Paulo car traffic is THE worst in the world.) Check out who he hung out with: New York Times loan shark Carlos Slim Helù, disaster-exploiting hedge fund manager John Paulson, and demise-of-empire chronicler Niall Ferguson. They know all about meltdowns, too!

Are all the Twitterers headed to the SXSW festival, like Digg's Kevin Rose? Actually, no! Here's where Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, Salon.com edi-bore Joan Walsh, and Politico's Patrick Gavin recorded their time-wasting thoughts:

Politico's Patrick Gavin ogled the oglers.

Salon.com editor-in-chief Joan Walsh confirmed people's general opinion of her.

Geek overlord and Digg founder Kevin Rose prepared to rule Austin at SXSW, the geek spring-break festival.

Former AOL employee and Engadget alumnus Ryan Block gloated over the firing of incompetent AOL CEO Randy Falco.

Boing Boing blogger and intergalactic space princess Xeni Jardin reported in from Africa.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

At last, AOL has done something right: The Time Warner Internet unit has hired Google's Tim Armstrong as its new CEO, booting the laughably incompetent duo of CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant.

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.

Twitter, the twee San Francisco messing startup, is all hope, no revenues. That makes it irresistable to Silicon Valley's best and brightest — like Google's top designer, Doug Bowman, whom we hear Twitter just hired.

Why is a designer switching teams such big news? Jason Fried, the influential founder of Web-software company 37signals, hailed Bowman's 2006 hire as Google's "best acquisition to date." Google even created a grand new title for him: "visual design lead." But now Bowman's leaving after less than two years.

People switch jobs for all kinds of reasons. And Bowman had to work for every designer's nightmare client, Google executive Marissa Mayer. But Bowman, a veteran of the industry who pioneered Web design at Wired (where we were briefly coworkers), is a telling barometer.

Earlier in this decade, in the midst of another downturn, Google was the black hole for Silicon Valley's most talented people. Two years ago, it was Facebook. Now Twitter — a revenueless startup with just 30 employees — is the startup with the pick of the litter.

Talent has always flowed this way in the Valley, drawn by money and hype and the shared belief that a small group of people can, through sheer force of all-night coding sessions, change the world. (Change the world, that is, from one in which they are poor to one in which they are rich.) Here's to Bowman keeping the dream — or delusion — alive.

(Photo via Fawny)

Can anything stop Steve Wozniak, the goofy billionaire Apple cofounder who's waltzing across TV screens nationwide on ABC's Dancing With the Stars? Apparently not — not a roasting by the judges. Not even a fractured leg.

Woz was photographed leaving dancing practice with a cast on his left leg. His next dance will be "wild and fast and all-over crazy and fun, just like the first one," he told fans in an email that one republished on his Facebook page. Entertaintment Tonight reports that an ABC spokesperson has confirmed Woz's plans to keep competing.

Wild, fast, and crazy, with a fractured leg? That's the kind of braggadocio that led Woz to create Apple's first hit computers, the Apple I and Apple II three decades ago — and led him to enter the dance competition in the first place. But human bodies are not mutable digital objects, like the silicon chips and digital bits he manipulated into personal computers. We can admire his resilience even as we scratch our heads at his quixotic terpsichorean quest. A leg fracture isn't simply something you can debug. But this drama — geek obstinance versus corporeal decomposition — makes for must-see TV.

(Photo via Entertainment Tonight/Adrian Varnedoe/Pacific Coast News)

Google cofounder Sergey Brin and wife Anne Wojcicki are so unconcerned with privacy that they're donating their newborn son's DNA to science. So surely they won't mind if we tell you the kid's name.

A tipster tells us that "for security reasons," Brin and his wife, who's the cofounder of genetics-testing startup 23andMe, have given their son the official name of Benji Wojin (a combination of "Wojcicki" and "Brin").

And sure enough, someone has privately registered the domain name benjiwojin.com. Of course, the legendarily bizarre Brin, who posted pictures of himself in drag, got married in a Speedo, and had guests show up in diapers to a baby shower.

Papa Brin is already putting his son to work as a test subject for mom's business, according to the New York Times, which reports that he plans to have Benji tested for Parkinson's disease:
Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki said they would check whether their son, who was born in November, also has the mutation, though he will not be able to donate his DNA in the usual way - putting saliva in small tubes, as 23andMe has promoted at celebrity-studded "spit parties."
"Babies can't spit into a tube," Mr. Brin said.

The disease is genetic, and runs in Brin's family. His mother, Eugenia, already has developed it, and Brin announced last September that he runs a high risk of developing it himself.

So Brin announced on his blog that he is funding a study that will subsidize the cost of having people with Parkinson's get their DNA tested through 23andMe; they will pay $25 instead of $399, with Brin's grant, one presumes, making up the difference.

This is at once a noble contribution to science — and an outrageous case of nepotism that raises questions of tax evasion.

23andMe is backed financially by Google, which became an investor as it repaid a personal loan Brin made to the company. (Anne Wojcicki's sister, Susan, is also an executive at Google — a position she got after she served as the company's first landlord.)

Previously, Brin had contributed money to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a prominent charity backed by the actor, who also suffers from Parkinson's. The Fox Foundation then went on to fund a Parkinson's study at 23andMe.

23andMe officially announced the study today — and confirmed that Brin himself provided the funding:
The initiative is made possible through funding by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Mr. Brin's commitment comes from his personal interest in Parkinson's disease. Brin's mother has Parkinson's and he discovered through 23andMe that he has a genetic predisposition to the disease as well. He explained, "We can make significant progress in understanding Parkinson's disease if individuals join together and contribute their personal experiences to scientific research. Individually, our genes and experiences are lost in a sea of statistical noise. But, taken together they become a high power lens on our inner workings."

Mr. Brin's personal donation substantially underwrites the cost of genotyping the participants, who will pay only $25 compared with the usual commercial price of $399. Individuals who join through the PI and MJFF partnership will have the exact same data, information, tools, and access as individuals who have paid full price for the 23andMe Personal Genome Service.

Let's get this straight:

• Brin is making a charitable donation, presumably tax-free, to the Fox Foundation.
• The Fox Foundation is turning around and giving that money to 23andMe, a for-profit startup cofounded by Brin's wife and financially backed by Brin's company.
• 23andMe will get to count the tests paid for by the charity as revenues, thereby pumping up its financial results, directly benefitting Google and Wojcicki.

We can all applaud Brin's contributions to science. But did he really need to go through what looks like a money-laundering scheme to make them?

(Photo via Edge.org)

FBI agents have raided the former office of Vivek Kundra, a D.C. official tapped to be Barack Obama's chief information officer. A Kundra lieutenant has been arrested on bribery charges. But Kundra's clear, we think!

Or so say the geeks. Kundra isn't being implicated in the bribery investigation which resulted in the arrest of Yusuf Acar, who has been filling in as the District's chief technology officer on an interim basis since Kundra's nomination.

But why is the nerd press hastening to clear Kundra's name before the investigation has finished? The argument that the likes of Wired are making is that Kundra's mission to open up government databases and use cheap or free Web software is too urgent to quibble over a little thing like a bribery scandal. In other words: We use Google Apps, Kundra uses Google Apps — so lay off!

It's utterly ridiculous. If Kundra were actually a success at making D.C.'s technology operations transparent, wouldn't he have instantly detected the bribery scheme unfolding in his own office? And if he had really moved a substantial part of D.C.'s computer operations onto low-cost technology, what would possibly be worth a bribe?

Let's leave aside the question of whether Kundra is a technological P.T. Barnum without any real accomplishments besides his PowerPoint presentations. Yes, the economy is in shambles. Yes, we need to make the government more efficient. But are we supposed to suspend all critical thinking in the rush to find a rescuer?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah share one goal: They want to know what you're feeling. Zuckerberg prefers you tell him via computer, though, so why's he going on her show tomorrow?

In past interviews, whenever Zuckerberg was greeted by a personal question, he usually returned it with a blank stare. Why are you wasting my time? was the unspoken thought. But Brad Stone reports on Bits that Zuckerberg's parents will be in the audience for tomorrow's broadcast — so it seems like family questions will be on the agenda. This could be the best Oprah trainwreck since Tom Cruise jumped the couch.

Of course, Oprah being Oprah, Oprah will also be on the agenda. She's almost certainly going to plug her new Facebook page, one of the first to adopt an advertising-friendly redesign. So after some awkward banter, we expect the pair will get down to the real business at hand: mutual self-promotion.

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Did you hear? Digg founder Kevin Rose was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday. As was Rose's forgettable Diggnation cohost — what's his name? Ah, yes — Alex Albrecht, who we hear wants out.

Rose is a geek hero, famous first for his stint hosting a tech-focused TV show on Comcast's G4TV. Diggnation, an online video show where Rose and Albrecht drink beer and discuss popular headlines on Digg, Rose's social-news site, is the centerpiece of Revision3, Rose's online-video startup. Appearing on broadcast TV, though, is a high-water mark for this icon of geek culture.

While Rose has a burgeoning mini-media empire which has won him magazine covers, Albrecht has languished in relative obscurity — the "blond guy," as Fallon called him.

Which is why when we heard that Albrecht wanted out of his contract, we didn't dismiss the rumor out of hand. As lucrative as the Diggnation gig must be for what is, let's be honest, an excuse to drink in front of a camera, Albrecht could well be frustrated at being Rose's sidekick. (The job does have one perk, though: The ability to say scathing things about Rose and get away with it. Rose is a famously prolific dater whose brief entanglements have included egoblogger Julia Allison and L.A. TV personality Shira Lazar. Albrecht's comment at a party: Rose "has basically plowed through everybody.")

We asked Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who was also up late, what gives. "His agent hasn't complained to me," Louderback said. "Sounds like posturing." Posturing? You mean, the kind of crick one gets from perpetually playing second fiddle?

Here's the clip of Rose and Albrecht's appearance — watch closely, because if there's anything to this rumor, it might not be repeated:

Every year, instead of heading to the beaches, geeks flock to Austin, Texas, to engage in a rite of spring called "South By Southwest." There's a conference, but who goes to that?

I mean, yes, okay, technically there are thousands of people employed in the Internet industry whose employers, despite the recession, have paid for plane tickets and hotel rooms and passes to a conference called "South By Southwest Interactive," or "SXSWi," or "South By," if you're painfully hip, which starts this Friday.

And technically all these PHP coders and social media marketers and wantrepreneurs and pretty girls with webcams and Hollywood interactive business-development types will be physically present at the site of said conference. But no one actually goes to the conference.

They do go to the convention center where the conference is held, only because there are so many tweets on Twitter during SXSW that it is impossible to make plans electronically, so they are forced to meet up in person to discuss which parties they plan to attend. Plus, they talk about Twitter. And then they go to the parties and drink and talk about Twitter.

Then they wake up the next day still drunk and go to whichever 10 a.m. panel offers free breakfast tacos, which are exceptionally tasty in Austin and good for curing hangovers and make excellent subject matter for Twitter.

Also, Wired editor Chris Anderson will give a keynote, presumably about his book, Free, which lays out an already outdated theory about how everything will be free, except that it won't because everyone is broke, even Google.

This is why I'm not going this year.

But we have found one redeeming thing about South By Southwest. One!

It is a rap song, "South By Girls," by former Facebook interaction designer Eston Bond, who is something of a perfect parody of a South By Southwest attendee. (Under 25? Check. Web designer? Check. Lives in Palo Alto but kind of wishes he lived in San Francisco? Check. Disturbing love of guns? Check.) There are lyrics — with footnotes, because this is a nerdcore rap.

If you use his rap song to create an especially amusing video, you might win a gift card for an iPhone, a prize we only mention for its pointlessness. Anyone who would listen to this song and be inspired to create a video already owns three iPhones. But Bond managed to rhyme "Zivity" and "productivity," so we forgive him.

Here's the song, with Bond's gold-Treo-bedecked visage and some photos from last year's SXSW as visual backup:

newVideoPlayer("/sxsw_song_gawker3.flv", 506, 423,"");

(Video by Ryan Tate)

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and "fee" is replacing "free."

More than anyone, Google popularized the notion that free websites could be supported by advertising, touching off the insane Web 2.0 boom that led self-promoting social media marketers to overrun San Francisco and drove venture capitalists into fits of expensive madness. If Google could give away its Web searches, why couldn't, say, Ploorkle monetize its users' ploonks?

Google didn't just serve as an example. It actively funded the free-everything boom with its AdSense ads, matching keyword buys from advertisers with every last blog and Web app.

The Google-spread delusion of "free" as the perfect price infected such lofty minds as Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired who penned first a cover story and now a book due out in July on the subject.

What does it mean for the freetards, then, that Google is starting to charge left and right?

The latest and most notable price hike came today on Google Checkout. The credit-card processing service for online merchants will soon match PayPal's fees, which run as high as 2.9 percent of a transaction.

When Checkout launched, it offered free processing for stores which spent heavily on Google ads, with the notion that free payments would lure vendors away from Amazon.com and eBay. Google is eliminating the AdWords discount, making Checkout just another PayPal clone.

Google has also raised prices on its once-free hosted computing services for startups which don't want to bother running their own servers.

The hikes have mostly hit Google's business customers. But how long before Google will raise prices for, say, extra Gmail storage? How long before it spackles ads on services previously kept pristine, as it's already done with Google News?

The advent of ads to Google News is notable. Just last summer, Google VP Marissa Mayer argued that Google News made $100 million a year from the Web search traffic the site generated, and therefore didn't need its own ads. Looks like she lost that battle with the green-eyeshades brigade. YouTube, too, is burying its videos in every imaginable form of advertising.

Google is widely expected to announce disastrously bad results for its first quarter. Industry trade groups have cut their forecasts for search advertising, Google's mainstay. Rumors of layoffs are sweeping Google's Mountain View campus. And even Google's Pollyanna CEO, Eric Schmidt, admits that the economic situation is dire.

Far more than a temporary belt-tightening, the cutbacks are a far-reaching change in mindset. It's no longer okay to invent something new and figure out how to pay for it later, as Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin once did. At today's Google, products must pay their own way, and with actual receipts, not business-model whiteboarding.

Who cares that that's not how Larry and Sergey did it? The billionaire founders are flying around the world somewhere on their private jets. The rest of Google has a business to run. And their paychecks don't come free.

Mark Zuckerberg owns 27 percent of Facebook. That's great, right? Except Facebook is not worth $15 billion anymore (if it ever was). That means he's no longer a paper billionaire, says Forbes.

What's Twitter good for? Knowing that your life of quiet desperation is shared by the rich, powerful, or merely well-read, for starters. Steve Case, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Rob Corddry deserve twitty pity:

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones economized.

Children's Hospital star Rob Corddry stabbed, then rinsed.

New York Times writer Jenny 8. Lee planned a party with, no surprise, fortune cookies. (Yes, but is she bringing her millionaire Googler boyfriend?)

Former AOL CEO Steve Case tried to feel relevant.

Author and sometimes entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson dined alone with his Kindle.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Whatever happened to Chris Hughes, the Facebook cofounder who joined Barack Obama's fledgling campaign in 2007 and powered it to victory using social networking? He's joined a D.C. PR firm. How crushingly disappointing!

Hughes has kept a low profile since the election. He gave a speech in Washington, D.C. in January, and attended Google's inaugural ball. He only recently popped up again on Twitter. When asked if Hughes would be signing up with the Obama administration, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro was curiously coy. Even sources at Facebook expressed hope that Hughes, who served as the social network's first spokesman, might return.

The firm that has signed Hughes up as a strategic advisor, GMMB Communications, worked with the Obama operation during the campaign. It's a subsidiary of PR conglomerate Fleishman-Hillard. It will be a commute: GMMB has offices in D.C., Los Angeles, Seattle, and London — but not New York, where Hughes is currently living. (Brooklyn, the preferred borough of Internet hipsters, to be precise.)

It seems like a maddeningly prosaic gig for a 24-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a company which now counts 175 million users, and who then went on to lead an Internet campaign effort which many say got Obama his job. And perhaps it's not the end of the story: Hughes, in a text message, says GMMB is not "a full-time gig." "Other news on that in a week," he adds.

We do have an idea for one client he could sign up. Hughes is gay, and the same-sex-marriage movement, which suffered a disastrous defeat in California, could use an effective spokesman. How about it, Chris? You started Facebook. You got Obama elected. Get gay marriage legalized coast to coast, and you'll earn your place in history. Seems a lot better than being known as a flack.

The geniuses at Google, the world's most arrogantly clever ad sellers, have announced plans to target ads to Internet users based on their "interests." You can opt out — but there's a catch.

Susan Wojcicki, the Google vice president who's also the sister-in-law of cofounder Sergey Brin, announced that Google would start tracking the websites people visit, wherever Google serves ads — which is something like 90 percent of the Internet worldwide. Google will then assign "interests" to those users based on their online browsing, and serve up ads accordingly.

As Google product manager Shuman Ghosemajumder explains in the clip above, Google is making it easy to modify the interest information Google stores. You can opt out, but then the "ads will be less relevant to you." (The horror!) What Ghosemajumder, Wojcicki and the rest of the Googlers are really hoping you'll do is add or subtract interests to the list rather than opt out — and thereby give Google even more information about you.

If anyone bothers, that is. In a survey of Internet users from March 2008, 91 percent of respondents said they would make use of privacy tools if better ones were available. But they are — Google's hardly a pioneer. Yahoo announced a similar opt-out scheme last year, and less than 1 percent of users bothered to visit the ad-preferences page.

The truth is that privacy is a problem everyone likes to talk about in public, and no one actually bothers with in private. It's a handy bugaboo for activist groups, a reliable topic for pundits and journalists. A trendy thing, perhaps, to whine about in online message boards.

But is it relevant to our online lives today? In an age of oversharing, when we update Facebook with every emotion and Twitter every Web page we come across, when we blog, blog, blog it all, is Google really the biggest threat — or is it us?

And if it's us, where's the preference setting to turn it off?

Well, our array of omnipresent blinking gadgets has officially rendered us totally incapable of normal human action. The proof: David Prager, whose reaction to having his home broken into was to Twitter about it:

No words for this. I mean, no words. We present the entire feed as it occurred:

# ok, maybe I should lock my door - I swear a random dude just walked into my bathroom and I can't believe I haven't freaked out
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# and I can't believe I'm tweeting about it while he is still in there — in wonder of he is sleep walking - or if maybe I should freak out
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# ok - he's still in the bathroom and Im now thinking a combo of hobo and drunk and sleepwalking dude - he seems late 20s - hmmm what next ?
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# I'm thinking the hobo part cause I can smell BO - and I really am wondering why I haven't freaked the F out
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# maybe I should mention I live in a relatively rustic studio apartment in SF
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

Yes, please, tell us more.

# there is no TP in my bathroom - wonder if that is complicating things for him - was gonna wait for him to come out and kick him out
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# hmmm — should I call the cops like you guys have recommended? find a blunt object before opening the door? my gut tells me he's harmless
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# but ... I could be wrong about the harmless assumption
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# I'm now thinking maybe he's passed out in my bathroom — I guess that's better than violent — but I have no idea. time to freak out??
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# ok - about to make move - putting shoes on first
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# glad that GF wasn't here
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

As is she.

# ok - have weapon if I need it - but don't plan on any confrontation with it - about to go in
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# haven't gone in yet ..... debating calling cops but just feel it's not needed for some reason (and probably contrary to all logic)
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# ok - still haven't done anything - he is still in there - gonna setup a ustream now I think - standby
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

# http://www.ustream.tv/channel/revision3
about 4 hours ago from web

At this instant American manhood reached its nadir.

# going in
about 3 hours ago from Tweetie

# if u haven't been watching my ustream -the dude passed out in my bathroom and I just dragged him out
about 3 hours ago from Tweetie

# ok - I think the drama is over - intruder is out - door is locked - think I finally need some sleep
about 3 hours ago from Tweetie

David Prager, American man. Prager is an exec at Internet TV site Revision3, a dodgeball coach, and a character already known to Valleywag.

Update: And of course, his ustream is now a youtube. Watch the hero at work:

San Francisco Chronicle journalists are trying to talk investors into buying the foundering daily newspaper and restructuring it as a nonprofit, writes the SF Appeal. Who are the ink-stained wretches courting?

The editorial workers would invest some of their own money, a Guild representative told the Appeal. But they could hardly acquire the Chronicle on their own, even assuming a heavy markdown from Hearst's 2000 price of $660 million.

Possible buyers fall into a few broad categories:

Old San Francisco money: There's been chatter among Chronicle journalists for years about the possibility of a local investor like private-equity billionaire Warren Hellman or Gap founder Don Fisher buying the paper. It's hard to imagine either of those red-blooded capitalists giving up on the idea of a profitable local newspaper, but then one never puts money into a cash-hemorrhaging hometown paper for purely rational reasons.

New dot-com money: If it's hard to imagine local elders funding a (purposely!) non-profit Chronicle, it's even harder to picture Silicon Valley's many Google million- and billion-aires doing likewise. Newspaper philanthropy would hardly be a hot topic of conversation among young founders on the Web 2.0 cocktail circuit.

Craig Newmark: The San Francisco-based Craigslist founder likes to think of himself as being in a different, entirely more altruistic class of startup founder. In the case of newspapers, he does stand apart, and not just because of his instrumental role in ushering along the decline of print journalism: Newmark has a peculiar (for the tech world) obsession with journalism and politics, leading to investments in content aggregator Daylife and citizen journalism initiative NewAssignment.net and advisory roles at the Center for Citizen Media and Sunlight Foundation.

But even assuming he wanted to buy the Chronicle, it would seem a stretch for Newmark to do so on his own. Craigslist throws off maybe $100 million or $130 million in annual profits, which Newmark must split with other shareholders. The Chronicle is losing $50 million a year just operating, to say nothing of the purchase price.

With enough cash from employees, a fire-sale price from Hearst and maybe one or two more rich investors, it's possible to imagine Newmark picking up the paper, should some sort of expensive guilt complex compel him to do so.

The Chronicle would then be the largest nonprofit paper in the country, ahead of the Poynter Institute's St. Petersburg Times.

More likely, though, would-be newspaper philanthropists will come to the same conclusion as would-be newspaper investors: It makes little sense to invest in fixing the old problems of a dying industry when you can net much more glory or profit starting from scratch.

Aaron Klein, the WorldNetDaily writer who invented a scandal about Wikipedia censoring an article about Barack Obama, demanded we retract that claim because, in fact, he had someone else do the work for him.

According to Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for the extreme-right-wing website, he is not "Jerusalem21," the Wikipedia user whose rejected edits to the Obama article formed the centerpiece of Klein's reporting. Wired and other publications raised questions about Jerusalem21's identity when a blogger noted that Jerusalem21's sole contributions to the free online compendium were edits to the Obama page and Klein's own Wikipedia article.

"I am not 'Jerusalem21,' but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story," Klein writes, adding that he "personally" oversaw "Jerusalem21"'s edits. In other words, Klein masterminded the creation of the supposed scandal he wrote about.

Klein doesn't see things quite that way. He claims our article was "defamatory." But the truth cannot defame. Klein himself freely admits that he was intimately involved in the creation of the supposed news event he wrote about. Here's Klein having his say:
Mr. Thomas —

I demand an immediate retraction of your Gawker article today, which is defamatory. (http://gawker.com/5167585/right+wing-writer-invents-his-own-obama-wikipedia-scandal)

Your headline states as fact, "Right-Wing Writer Invents His Own Obama Wikipedia Scandal." You then quote from Wired.com, which, you relate, stated that one Wikipedia user cited in my article is "almost certainly Klein himself." "Almost certainly" is not enough to justify your very certain, defamatory title.

First, I am not "Jerusalem21," but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama's page. I wanted to personally oversee whether indeed criticism of Obama was being deleted. For your information, often investigative journalists engage in exactly this kind of testing – like seeing if they can bypass mandatory disclosures while donating to a candidate (several newspapers did this prior to the November election), or if they can register a dog to vote in Illinois. Thus, even if I had personally edited Obama's page as a test to investigate allegations of scrubbing, this is entirely legitimate journalistic practice.

Second and more importantly, your article is entirely misleading; it paints a picture that my piece from yesterday was reliant simply upon "Jerusalem21" being barred from entering information on Wikipedia that is critical of Obama, suggesting the controversy was both "invented" and based on that one account.

But my article from yesterday notes that "multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately."

The article further notes that WND monitored Obama's Wikipedia page for one month and observed as criticism on all kinds of issues (Ayers, Wright, etc) was scrubbed. This can easily be confirmed independently by simply going through the tens of thousands of attempted edits to Obama's Wikipedia page and seeing how a large number of critical edits are erased, including edits seemingly backed up with third-party media references.

Further, WND published a follow-up today noting many users were still being blocked from attempting to add key issues to Obama's Wikipedia page and other pages, quoting some users. See: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91257. Indeed, WND has been flooded the past two days with e-mails from readers with their own "Wikipedia stories" of how they were barred from entering what they claim is legitimate, backed-up criticism on Obama's Wikipedia page.

My article from yesterday noted what is clearly a major trend at Wikipedia and is a very legitimate piece. I demand your Gawker article be immediately corrected. The title must be changed, the false accusations about "Jerusalem21" must be updated and the article should note the wider trend on Wikipedia outlined above, instead of wrongly claiming the controversy is limited to one user. Do not simply and misleadingly update your article just by stating that I know "Jerusalem21" and leaving in the defamatory portrayal that I somehow invented a controversy, when indeed there is indisputably a much wider, documented trend.

Sincerely,
Aaron Klein
Jerusalem bureau chief, WorldNetDaily.com

Twitteronia is a scary place to be. A Googler got violent, an NBC TV host swore, and we frightened a top AP editor — while Michelle Malkin had a breakdown. Today's twittiest tweets:

Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, now a Google engineer, contemplated violence. (There's some kind of thing about guns going around on Twitter! We don't get it, but we sure hope that's what Schachter's referring to!)
KNBC TV personality Shira Lazar corrupted the youth of America.
Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara expressed an entirely legitimate concern.
Bizarro right-wing conservatrix Michelle Malkin made it official: She is not PC.
New Yorker writer Tad Friend cried in public.

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