Ocean Ave. Books proprietor Diane Goodman acknowledges sending angry, cursing Yelp messages to reviewer "Sean C." after he posted that her store was a "TOTAL MESS." But she vehemently denies his version of subsequent events. Sean C. said in a Yelp comment thread that Goodman tried to force her way into his house and had to be taken to jail.

Goodman tells us she came in peace, after tracking down Sean via clues in his Yelp profile, like his occupation as a veterinary technician, and via some searches on Google and online white pages. She had already sent Sean a "profuse" online apology for her online "outburst, which I regret. I wanted to apologize... I got too hot to handle in the heat of the moment and I'm sorry... Also, I don't like having unresolved stuff with people in the neighborhood."

So, Goodman says, she knocked on "Sean C.'s" door and introduced herself as a neighbor. Sean made a gesture that she should come in. Then, as she started to come in, Goodman said, "I'm here about the Yelp thing."

He said, 'You fucking bitch,' and jumped out and grabbed me, and we were struggling and rolling down the steps together... He ran over me. We were rolling down the steps and I was fighting to get away from him.

Goodman later clarified that she never "punched" or hit Sean coming down the steps or at any other point, although she did struggle to get away when he allegedly grabbed her initially, "like a bearhug." She also said she never went to jail, and that in fact she was the one who called 911 to report the incident and was treated at San Francisco General Hospital for bruises on her lower back and flank.

Still, she acknowledges getting a ticket from the police for battery. She's been told she and Sean C. will both answer to a judge at a forthcoming court date.

Goodman said she would have set the public record straight sooner but she was working all day yesterday as a poll worker in the local election. She said she's surpised how quickly Sean C.'s tale spread online:

I don't want this guy to escalate anything. I'm not interested in revenge of any kind. I do want to put it out there what happened....If i'd known it would be like this i wouldnt have went

We still don't know Sean C.'s real name — we're not Google pros like Goodman, apparently — but are trying to track him down for a rebuttal to Goodman's rebuttal. By phone or email or something. No housecalls on this one, is what we're thinking.

UPDATE: We've found Sean's full name and are trying to get a comment from him.

Fellow Yelpers were initially skeptical about Sean C.'s claims in this Yelp comment thread until he produced apparently authentic screenshots of the owner's angry private Yelp messages to him, and until a Yelp admin weighed in to say "we're here to help Sean out in any way we can... there's no telling how this person may have unearthed Sean's place of residence, but rest assured, that information was in no way.... provided by Yelp."

Sean C. never bought anything in the store in question and has an unlisted address which he never provided to Yelp, so he's truly baffled how the owner tracked him down. But track him down she most certainly did, the reviewer said in a series of posts:

Tonight I get a knock at my front door - I open it and a woman tries to force her way in... it seriously took all my strength to get her out.... and I had to wrestle with her on my front steps... was trying to pin her down incase she had a weapon.



Finally I was able to shut the door and call 911 - the police showed up and took her away. Turns out it was the business owner! ... They took her to jail and will try to put a 72 hour psychiatric hold but they said it's up to the doctor that examines her...

Now Sean C. is trying to get a restraining order, which he said the police offered to serve while the woman is still in jail. (UPDATE: The store owner denies most of his account. See bottom of this post.)

You can find Sean C.'s original, two-star review followed by the owner's alleged private messages below, caling the reviewer a "pussy boy" and a "coward." There are surely loads of other business owners who have been sorely tempted to try and do likewise, though good sense, respect for the law and the tendency of Yelp reviewers to be anonymous and thus un-find-able tend to dissuade them.

Key to the entire Yelp enterprise is how it enables a passive-aggressive approach to customer feedback: You say anonymously — but in public, online — what you couldn't bring yourself to say directly (and perhaps more politely) to the staff when you were in the actual place of business. This provides consumers with tremendous new powers — and business owners with a frustrating new set of headaches. Maddeningly frustrating, it would seem.

UPDATE: The store owner says it was Sean C. who attacked, that she never forced open his door and that she came to his house to apologize. More here.

(Top pic: by Steve Rhodes)

Kimball (pictured) is the fellow who wrote a wrongheaded and nakedly self-serving New York Times op-ed about how much internet recipes suck, and how the web's terrible food writing basically killed Gourmet magazine. Where can you turn for quality recipes? Cook's Illustrated, naturally.

Now that the op-ed has drummed up controversy, Kimball is trying to stage a fight, between himself and "the WIKI [sic]:"

The current rage is the WIKI [sic] recipe notion... I am willing to put my money, and my reputation, where my big mouth is. I offer a challenge to any supporter of the WIKI or similar concept to jump in and go head to head with our test kitchen.

Well, of course Kimball wants to cook off against something from a Wiki. Cooking is a chemical process, and tinkering with what is fundamentally a science experiment via the Wiki's trademark mass, open editing process is... well, it's a recipe for disaster, as Kimball surely knows.

Far more interesting would be to see Kimball square off against a reasonably popular food blogger. Here is just a brief sampling of some of the free online material I gathered in five minutes from various food blogs I track from home in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• A restaurant pastry chef's recipe for Madeira Cake.
  
• A restaurant sous chef's recipe for jams, pickled vegetables and cooked vegetables.
  
• A farmer's recipe for canning your own tomatoes.
  
• An urban farmer's guide to when the fruits and veggies grown in the backyards of my actual town are at their peak ripeness.
  
• A restaurant cook's guide to frying an egg "Spanish-style in olive oil... my new favorite way to devour these culinary jewels." See also his "Least popular recipe ever."

Of course, acknowledging that this stuff even exists would slightly undermine Kimball's point that the internet is an eater's idiocracy in need of rescue by his fine magazine (which, side note, I subscribe to, being a proud media omnivore). But at least it would make for an interesting cook off rather than the contrived burning of a culinary straw man.

(Pic by Laurie Chipps)

Thomson Reuters' media group president Chris Ahearn recently tweeted that his company "stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP," the Reuters competitor that has proclaimed it is "mad as hell" at various internet fiends. AP is trying to charge people for quoting as few as five words of its content.

Ahearn has elaborated on his "alternative" in a blog post, writing that too many traditional media organizations waste manpower "recycling commodity news" and that they should instead seek to retool, including by forging a new "win-win relationship" with new media. The executive dispenses bluntly with those who would point the finger, like AP:

Blaming the new leaders... or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works... Let's stop whining and start having real conversations.

It sounds like Ahearn has started just such a "real conversation" himself. TechDirt has already blogged back. And Reuters is even authorizing bloggers to "hyperlink" and excerpt its side of things, as God and the U.S. Code intended. Imagine that.

(CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Ahearn was president of all Thomson Reuters; in fact he is president of the firm's "media group.")

(Pic: Reuters)

To summarize this little media controversy: reporter Ian Shapira profiled Anne Loehr, a consultant who gets companies to pay her to explain the mysteries of Gen Y. Our own Hamilton Nolan wrote an item about it in which he reprinted four of Loehr's most laughable quotes and ridiculed them. After initially being pleased that his metro profile got some play on a widely read blog, Shapira changed his mind when he got an email from his editor: "They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?" This led Shapira, in a piece for the Post's Outlook section, to conclude that his job is doomed. To quote steal, Shapira wrote:

The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it — the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others — but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.

Shapira is right. Blogs are killing newspapers. But it's not by mindlessly cutting and pasting from newspaper web sites. Gawker would go out of business if that's all we did.

The bigger threat is that blogs say the things that hidebound newspaper editors are too afraid to let their reporters write.

Rereading Shapira's nearly 1,600-word piece (Hamilton's post runs just over 400), the closest I can come to anything resembling a point of view is a tangled mass of clauses that takes Loehr and her consultant pablum at face value. Again to quote steal:

The collective fretting over Generation Y — also known as the millennials — has turned into an industry for entrepreneurs such as Loehr: The former Kenyan hotel executive, based in Reston, is a "leadership coach" and generational guru, one of several who market themselves to corporations, the military, and federal and local governments as anthropologists interpreting today's 70 million to 80 million 20-somethings or early 30-somethings — those who came of age with the kiddie dinosaur show "Barney," high-speed wireless Internet and Barack Obama.

Sounds riveting! Hamilton succinctly digested Shapira's piece and gave his post a headline ("'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job") and lede ("The fakest job corporate America ever created was 'Branding Consultant' — until now") that probably resembled what Shapira wanted to write but couldn't. It's hard to imagine that in the course of working on his piece — a process that Shapira describes as two hours of sitting in on one of Loehr's courses and what must have been four truly grueling hours of transcribing the session — he didn't have a chuckle or two at lines like, "I want to touch 500,000 lives this year. I am going to touch 500,000 lives this year. I do have spreadsheets that mark how many people I am touching." He suggests as much in his Outlook piece, complaining that Hamilton got to "cherry-pick the funniest quotes." (Emphasis mine.) So why wasn't there an ounce of humor in the profile?

Now confronted with existential threats, newspaper people rarely look at the failings of their own editorial product. After all, it's tough to criticize something when you're arguing it must be saved at all costs. Last week at an event in Dallas, This American Life host Ira Glass gave some gentle suggestions and painted an interesting picture of some future newsroom "where you would have the tone of The Daily Show — talking in normal language, but they would be real reporters."

So, it's unsurprising that Shapira's piece has been used by the newspaper navelgazers to kick around the idiotic notion that their work should enjoy some sort of special super-duper copyright protection. We'll leave that discussion for others, except to note that a more stringent copyright regime would probably be a bigger threat to newsgathering than that of any blog. A less cumbersome way for newspapers to head off the threat of blogs would be to beat us to the punchline.

But if you're going to fixate on blog links as the death knell of the industry, we have a lead for you: The threat is coming from inside the building. Nearly every day — 26 times in July alone — a Washington Post staffer not only sends us links to its expensive reporting but even pulls out the most interesting quotes so as to make it easier to pirate. I have strong feelings about revealing the identity of any Gawker tipster, but in this case it seems the public interest is simply too pressing and we must reveal this threat to journalism:

Maria Cereghino
Manager, Communications
Washington Post Media

George Smith, who does online marketing for Crocs, wrote about a blogger at the conference who was upset the company ran out of free pairs of its inexplicably popular plastic shoes. The blogger started out timid, but grew brazen:

"Ya know, if you don't give me shoes – I could totally write something bad about you on my blog."

"Excuse me?" I asked – hoping she would laugh or give me some indication that she was just joking around. Nope…

"It's just a pair of shoes. It's a lot easier to give them to me than deal with the negative press I could make."

Smith hadn't heard of this "nobody" and dispensed with her quickly:

She looked shocked – like she really thought her sad attempt to blackmail me would work. In a second, she walked away and, before I could really gather myself, disappeared into a sea of bloggers. I never saw her again.

Blackmail over a $30 pair of Crocs? Really? Talk about small time. If bloggers can be bought so cheaply, it's sad to think how many glowing posts the free schwag at BlogHer is generating. The conference featured giveaways in the SocialLuxe "pampering" lounge, including makeovers and Smith's Crocs, as well as gift cards and laptops on offer at the conference website.

Bloggers insist ample freebies don't influence what they write. But those at the feeding trough are bound to get their egos bruised sooner or later; how many will be able to avoid a pathetic, prideful outburst of "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM??" schwag extortion?

(Pic: Smith by @greeblemonkey, via)

After Kneale's repeated on-air outbursts against bloggers, in which he has called them "dickweeds" (see June 30 video above) and "digital imbeciles," Kneale told our source who spoke privately with him that the crusade was dreamed up with his producer, former Fox News man Jerry Burke. The idea was to draw attention and drum up buzz.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it, that a major cable news channel is trying to scare up viewers in the puny financial and media blogosphere. Still, there's an outside chance the strategy could eventually produce PR gold; Kneale scored yesterday with a friendly article in the Observer.

Without specifically addressing what he's said to other people, Kneale told us in an email his feelings are "particularly heartfelt:"

My "animus" toward vicious, anonymous bloggers and blind comments pre-dates my joining CNBC... Look at the scary and brilliant Forbes cover story on net anonymity, which I edited, in October 2007: it should make bloggers feel ashamed.

Kneale's campaign against shame is something of a transformation for the one-time Forbes editor whose antics became legendary after editor Bill Baldwin lured him from the Wall Street Journal in 1998. The most famous story — we've heard others, but this is the one that was widely told on the Forbes staff; i.e. the kind of gossip that pre-dates blogs — occurred at the company Christmas party shortly after he was hired. As relayed by people who worked for the magazine at the time, it goes like this:

After the party, Kneale shared a cab back to Park Slope, Brooklyn, with three other people: a female Forbes writer, a male Forbes staffer and the staffer's wife. Somehow, in the course of the ride, Kneale managed to grope both women. The next morning, the male staffer showed up at Kneale's house to avenge his wife's honor, and when the story reached the office Kneale had to beg several layers of the Forbes masthead to keep his job.

The incident was purportedly the foundation for this Feb. 12, 1999 Page Six blind item:

WHICH business-magazine editor, who keeps a jar of blue jellybeans on his desk labeled Viagra, was called on the carpet for feeling up an underling's wife? The co-workers and their spouses were in a taxi heading to Brooklyn after an office party. The underling later went to the groper's home to get an apology. The groper's boss told him that if it ever happened again, he'd be fired.

Kneale declined to comment on the story, writing, "As a rule I do not respond to blind comments... if Gawker will publish the names of the people behind these 11-year-old rumors, maybe I'd have more to say." We know the names of two of the people said to be in the cab with Kneale and emailed them for their version of events. We'll update if we hear back.

We don't begrudge Kneale some purported drunken mistakes in his past. We all have them. Though the number of tales that have crossed our transom in recent days suggests Kneale has more than his fair share. And so we have to wonder if his hype-seeking crusade against gossipy, anonymous bloggers is less about principle and more an exercise in self-defense.

The satirical publication has done websites, a blog — and now it's moved to Twitter, per a recent editor's note. The transition would seem to be a success — updates have been much more frequent since the posts started appearing on the microblogging service; AdRants proclaimed that the site had "returned triumphantly."

One could imagine this sort of thing happening to one of those websites that used to be an actual big-time newspaper, except that such a thing is almost too sad to contemplate.

(Top image via)

The CNBC Reports host clearly wanted to push back at the "cowardly" critics, and a CNBC segment about his feud gave him the chance to call his online enemies "dickweeds" and slam one in a live interview (see heavily-edited excerpt above). In the end, though, it's the bloggers who win: Whatever his ratings, Kneale's on-air pushback against a lone, anonymous blogger is sure to be a traffic boon to the targets of his ire — and a revelation to viewers who might never have heard them.

Full video:

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing guidelines around products, referral fees, travel and other freebies given to bloggers, the Associated Press reports, and intends to "clarify that the agency can go after bloggers - as well as the companies that compensate them - for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest."

Bloggers are so very dirty. AP:

Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers... The blogosphere is quite different.

Except not really. The New York Times, for example, "for years... accepted free cellphone service, satellite TV service, music-download service, whatever," columnist David Pogue wrote in 2006 (the paper only changed this practice in the wake of a a controversy around Pogue's free use of a $2,000 data-recovery service). Over at Hearst's Esquire, restaurant reviewer John Mariani often eats for free, which is nothing compared to the free travel and resort stays other print writers accept.

At fashion-heavy magazines like those run by Condé Nast, free schwag helps make up for lackluster pay, a practice that became more widely known with the Vogue roman-à-clef Devil Wears Prada, in which an assistant's raid on the magazine clothes closet is a key plot point.

If the FTC is truly interested in protecting consumers, it will start its anti-shilling campaign with the media that accept the biggest gifts, make the most money and reach the most people. For the moment, at least, that means traditional media.

UPDATE: The FTC confirms to All Things D that it plans to go after even simple Amazon affiliate links.

Twitter allows its users to mark some tweets they find particularly amusing, insightful, witty, informative, or whatever as "favorites." Rifling through the founders' favorites is a pretty good way to get a sense of what they think Twitter is good for: crude jokes and narcissistic status updates. The below tweets are culled from the Favorites lists of co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is the one who faved the frat-boy-ish Calacanis item.

Ideally, from a business standpoint, Twitter executives would be highlighting innovative uses of the service — from hard news to customer support to more creative forms of tweeting — if only to help spread it to more users.

As Stone told the Wall Street Journal today, "we need to make Twitter the product more relevant to more people." Hopefully they'll highlight some ways to do that tonight at D. Because the founders are not always the best at doing so with their own tools.

A mole forwarded us the excerpt below. It all but bans personal Web posts and status updates of all sorts. First it outlaws discussion of any topic covered by Bloomberg News. The financial wire covers a huge swath of events — "companies, markets, industries, economies and governments," per its own marketing materials, plus "Arts and culture" and food — leaving little else to talk about.

And even if a Bloomberg journalist does find an allowed topic, he would be hard-pressed to link to or even describe any relevant content, since company policy says staff may not "direct Internet traffic to media competitors or discuss them" (emphasis added).

Not that these rules will necessarily matter; we expect managers will be about as adept at enforcing this policy as they are at stopping other technical blunders (which is to day, not very adept at all).

UPDATE: Bloomberg wrote in to defend its policy, saying links on personal websites might be construed as endorsements of unvetted stories (like, say, that erroneous death report some clumsy financial wire recently published). The company would rather all links be posted to something called "BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL(R)". That sounds pretty bloggy and fun!

It seems everyone in town is terrified. Not of the financial crisis, oh no, but of "a far greater danger:" Bloggers, plus some lawyer who likes to telephone the local radio station and explain the Equal-time rule.

"This city is under siege," Mayor Barrie Parsons Tilghman warns around page 9 of her 10-page State of the City address. "When people are afraid to step forward, run for office, speak on relevant issues, write letters to the editor expressing individual opinions, then the future is in jeopardy."

The Associated Press took note, as did the Drudge Report. You can read the whole thing here, although all the bitter blogger bits are on one page, reproduced below. Dig the scare quotes around "bloggers!"

First print journalism, then human relationships, now an entire town in Maryland; what will bloggers destroy next, and when will someone finally stop them?

We can't say we're familiar with Tosh. A comedy-world buddy says he's "alright," has been doing stand-up basically since he was a fetus and is "funnier than Nick Thune," at least. A quick YouTube sampling turned up some pedestrian regional humor (midwesterners are fat and vaguely sad, LOL!); the most popular clip is embedded above.

But even if Tosh is everything Viacom suits say he is ("biting, hilarious and so quick"), it remains to be seen if there's room for a dedicated internet humor show amid the fast-proliferating geek jokes on mainstream programs like the Daily Show, 30 Rock and Jimmy Fallon's nerdy iteration of Late Night.

No need to tune in to find out: if "Tosh.0" is halfway decent, its video will be embedded all over the place online.

For the second time in a week, Smith claimed Gawker and PerezHilton.com were run without "editors, publishers, lawyers," even though this site has all three, the editors being listed right on the front page.

Not that it has any bearing, as Smith claims, on factual accuracy: CNN and Tina Brown's The Daily Beast both have the full complement of structural gatekeepers listed by Smith, and both left Smith's error unchallenged.

We will give the cranky octogenarian credit for learning one trick of the Web trade: Trying to start a dustup with a much larger competitor in an obvious bid for attention. Sometimes it works!

(Video via Huffington Post)

Oddly, that photo caption, to the third shot above, is available only in Google's cache, the post in question having been deleted. Possibly because it contained phone number of Peter's brother, who posted a comment saying "his family is really worried about him."

Knox apparently made it out alive, but isn't saying what happened, exactly.

You've been on Tumblr basically forever, Knox. Literally dozens of bored Brooklynites are dying/mildly interested to know what happened, here. Is liveblogging NFL games a recipe for disaster? Can Giants fans not handle defeat with grace? Painkillerblog the answer, if you would.

UPDATE: Knox weighed in in the comments below, and also updated us via email: "My finger was dislocated because I slipped on the ice coming home. So I went to a hospital instead. Everything is fine now except having to explain myself a hundred times. " Thanks Peter.

However, the topic proves too hard to resist:

Today, on TMZ, my darling daughter Lindsay was asked for a comment in response to me saying, "Samantha is on drugs!" Lindsay’s only response was, “look at him!”

WOW! Linds, how forthright! Let me ask you; was it me who was actually pictured in the train station with a bag full of prescription drugs? Do you see me out partying with Lindsay, my other children or having raging wars with her?

OK, Dad! The rest is a litany of fameballing, self-promotion, and Biblical mumbo-jumbo, best exemplified by this paragraph:

AGAIN, this website is a forum to shed light on things in a positive and truthful way. It is about bringing the world the truth about any situations or stories reported in the media that are worthy of discussing. It is about righting the wrongs and determining facts from fiction.

...Whether you realize it or not, this website is about getting people involved in a positive way, while leading them to the Truth, which in essence, is God. For those of you who choose to denounce or blasphemy the Word or Spirit of God, be very careful, because he sees, knows and judges your heart. (1 Samuel 16:7).

And in his first post, he laid down some ground rules: "First of all, try your best to refrain from cursing, lying or baring false witness. I know this is hard for some of you, but try."

He's right. It is hard for some of us.

[Michael Lohan Online via Just Jared]

"this holiday season, It's all about self-acceptance and in your case the acceptance of your own homosexuality."

Basically—from what we can deduce—she's mad at Rob Jr., son of prominent lawyer Rob Kardashian (who "who represented a cold blooded murderer [O.J. Simpson] and made lots and lots of money," she helpfully adds) allegedly punched her gay employee in the face outside a nightclub because said employee was gay.

She's also all about buying her Christmas presents through homemade-craft site Etsy, as is the trend we noted yesterday.

In conclusion:

Thank god for the Malibu Sherriff dept, Thank god for New York! Thank god for London, because the Hills are dead dead dead honey with homophobes running around these days
ps Rodney King sends his regards!
happy holidays kids and remember
hate crimes and homophobia is NOT HOT!
Kourtney Love Kobain

God help us, every one.