The Social

The Gawker Media-owned Valleywag might tout itself as "Silicon Valley's tech gossip rag," but the effervescence of Bubble 2.0 has expanded far beyond Sand Hill Road. So far, in fact, that the San Francisco Bay Area tattletale blog--following in the footsteps of TechCrunch, which hired Business 2.0 veteran Erick Schonfeld last month--has picked up a New York correspondent.

The "Alleywag" in question is tech writer Nicholas Carlson, whom Facebook tells me is a 2005 graduate of Davidson College. Valleywag editor Owen Thomas confirmed to me that Carlson is a "newly hired associate editor" at the blog.

What does this mean for New York's tech scene? Expect more scrutiny of the online ad industry, something that's largely fallen under the radar on Manhattan media-gossip blogs like Gawker, Jossip and FishbowlNY--there's still enough dirt on the print industry to keep them busy. New-media advertising, meanwhile, has been a high on the agenda for the start-up Silicon Alley Insider (not to mention my esteemed colleague, reporter Elinor Mills.)

And with Google's expanding presence in Gotham, expect that to be a hot topic as well.

Tech gossip blog Valleywag is attempting to counter the TechCrunch-spawned rumor that MySpace.com will be following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up its site to developers.

Sources in touch with the Gawker Media-owned blog allegedly said that MySpace is indeed brewing a developer platform strategy and that the News Corp.-owned social networking site will be making an announcement at next week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco--but the two are unrelated.

The announcement, according to Valleywag blogger Megan McCarthy (no relation), will instead deal with MySpace's instant messaging client. Additionally, she wrote, MySpace will be expanding from its Los Angeles base and opening a San Francisco Bay Area office.

McCarthy went on: "Apparently, Web developers, like vampires, shun warmth and sunlight. Unable to find enough talented engineers in L.A., MySpace has decided to open up more fogbound digs to tap San Francisco's pool of snooty, entitled, arrogant Webheads."

It's important to take this rumor with a grain of salt: Valleywag is first and foremost a Silicon Valley gossip publication. Additionally, this could be infused with a bit of TechCrunch-Valleywag rivalry, with one eager to debunk the other; it's no secret that the two blogs have a bit of friction between them.

Valleywag, whose bloggers like to refer to TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington with the epithet "horny," is typically banned from TechCrunch functions.

Guess we'll see who's right next week.

On Tuesday morning, tech gossip blog Valleywag posted a rumor that TechCrunch's small blog network might not be doing quite as well as its parent brand: Valleywag editor Owen Thomas said that gadget blog CrunchGear had made significant pay cuts and that at least one blogger had been fired. In a message to Valleywag, CrunchGear editor John Biggs attempted to clear the air, saying that some writers are "on hiatus" while the gadget blog works out its new ad sales program and transitions from a per-post model to a monthly salary.

Some blogging insiders, CNET News.com has heard, aren't buying Biggs' insistence that the CrunchGear kids are all right. Despite the star power and influence of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, CrunchGear still isn't in the same league as older hardware blogs Engadget (owned by AOL's Weblogs Inc.) and Gizmodo (owned by Valleywag parent company Gawker Media). Disclaimer: CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks also operates a gadget blog, Crave, which competes with all three of those titles.

But another source at CrunchGear, with whom I spoke on Tuesday afternoon, said that while there has been some reorganization, it shouldn't be considered an earth-shattering shake-up or an indication of failure at CrunchGear. "There are adjustments," the source said, adding that CrunchGear "decided to scale things back to a more core staff" and that "some writers were put on hold and some were let go as part of standard site growth."

He added that the site had reached a point where there were too many writers, and it seems as though something had to be done to clean things up and streamline operations. While the source would not go into detail on Valleywag's claim that CrunchGear bloggers had previously made $3,000 per month and it's now down to $1,500, he did say that "it's nothing drastic like that."

The rumor, as a matter of fact, may have had its roots in conversation that went on at last night's TiVo-Rhapsody party in New York, where representatives from multiple gadget blogs were present and alcohol from the open bar was flowing freely.

CrunchGear, which is largely based in New York, recently celebrated its first anniversary.

(Credit: Zuma)

I don't think you could quite say that Valleywag's Owen Thomas and I have started a meme yet, but we sure have been having fun with elaborate comparisons of Facebook to the tabloid phenomenon that is the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie union. Unfortunately for the Web 2.0 history books, we both claim to have been the first to think of the analogy. But, as in the now-high-profile ConnectU vs. Facebook trial, there were no contracts signed and no paper trail created, so perhaps we'll never know for sure. Consequently, I believe that I gained the upper hand by being the first to vocalize it on cable news. (Video here.)

But this time around, Owen beat me to the punch. His latest, pertaining to Facebook's minor security mishap this past weekend, which exposed the site's front page source code to a number of users: "Facebook is the Brangelina of tech, and Brad and Angelina just got naked." CNBC's On the Money just started to resemble Access Hollywood a teensy bit more.

Click here for the video. Watch me crack up! Hilarity ensues!