Valleywag is dead (or, at least, diminished), as CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports. About time. I used to like Valleywag, but then it started trying to drive page views by breaking "news" about the sex trade in Silicon Valley, trying to foment controversy around Peter Thiel's personal life, and so on.
When it broke news, even scandalous news, it was good. When it didn't, well, it wasn't.
Contrast that with TechCrunch. TechCrunch routinely breaks real news. It covers startups that matter (and many that don't). It has become an hourly read for me, as it offers content that I don't easily find elsewhere.
Is it unique in this? No. CNET breaks a lot of technology news and has done some interesting work with blogs (pats himself on the back), plus it remains a must-visit product reviews site. Nobody does general business news better than The Wall Street Journal. The Register? It provides a great deal of exceptional content with a fantastic, biting tone.
Valleywag? Increasing snide, decreasing substance. Owen Thomas did much better work while he was at Business 2.0. I like his writing. I just think he had to pander to the wrong elements at Valleywag. Hopefully we'll get the best of Valleywag (and Thomas) as it's folded into Gawker.
Perhaps it was just a stunt to drive traffic (It's working!), but I enjoyed Valleywag's collection of the "10 most terrible tyrants of tech." It's perhaps telling that some of the industry's top companies (Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce.com) are headed by some of the most difficult people with whom to work:
Here's to the screaming ones. The chair-throwers. The death-threat makers. The imperious gazers. The ones who see things differently -- and will stare you down until you do, too....[T]hey have no respect for conversational decibel levels. You can cower before them, hide from them, quote them behind their backs, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they're so damn loud.
That's the description. Here's the list. You'll need to visit Valleywag, however, to find out just how abrasive these people can be:
- Apple CEO Steve Jobs
- RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser
- Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff
- VMware cofounder Diane Greene
- Ex-Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg
- Microsoft chairman Bill Gates
- Ex-AOL sales chief David Colburn
- TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington
- Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Enjoy.
Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.
I think it's much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O'Reilly might suggest.
Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that's a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can interweave into its other services.
Data that could be used to map out a wide-ranging social graph.
Valleywag pegs the number to be paid at $200 million. For that data, I'd pay a lot more.
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