Twitter is "the latest computer craze," according to easily startled Today hostess Meredith Vieira, who didn't get the answer she expected from wacky Stephen Colbert when she asked if he used the microblogging service. Watch!
An airplane flies into two vertical objects: For many ordinary New Yorkers, it's a horrible, still-living memory. For Internet commenters, it's absolutely hilarious.
The Anti-Defamation League, eager as ever to publicize menaces to the Jewish people, fears Bernie Madoff's $50 billion swindle has led to a flood of online Jew-hating. Among Internet commenters. How convenient for the ADL!
The Internet has numbed us all to insults. That's what's so scandalous about the news that J.P. Weichel, a 40-year-old Colorado man, could land in prison for calling his ex-girlfriend a whore.
Lifecasting, a kind of do-it-yourself reality TV broadcast on the Internet, has thousands of practitioners. Until last night, one of them was Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old Florida resident, who used a webcam to broadcast his death, too.Wednesday night, after he posted a suicide note on the Web, he overdosed on pills on…
General Motors has posted its call for an auto-industry bailout directly to the Net, with predictably disastrous results. GM marketers have clearly fallen for the myth of Internet PR — that taking a company's message directly to the people through social media will give it a much friendlier reception than if it is…
Is Halsey Minor the "bad boy of Silicon Valley," as Portfolio recently dubbed him? The moniker may not be geographically precise — the founder of CNET turned venture capitalist has a house in San Francisco, not Woodside or Atherton. But what the magazine really should have called him was the bad boy of the…
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 criticizing the site's commenters. It's a slow news morning here, too, so I'll reblog the best entry, No. 3:
It's a predictable routine: Write about Glam Media, Samir Arora's dangerously bubbly online-advertising startup, and get bombarded by comments from website operators for whom Glam sells ads. The latest victim: Saul Hansell of the New York Times, who dared to point out that most of Glam's traffic comes not from the…
Andrew Baron, the founder of videoblog Rocketboom, has reported that his dad, prominent trial lawyer Fred Baron, is dying of cancer. His one chance, an experimental lifesaving drug, was denied by its manufacturer, Biogen Idec. We won't mention how Fred paid to relocate Rielle Hunter, the mistress of former…
Let's keep this nerdfight short and sweet — no, make that bitter: New York-based blogger/consultant Allen Stern thinks New York-based videogame designer Charles Forman is jejune and uninteresting. Forman thinks Stern is fat. In a predictably deleted comment on Silicon Alley Insider, Forman rails at Stern for …
All those years in the theater on Broadway among catty drama types didn't thicken the skin of New York Times technology writer David Pogue much. Geek Out New York blogger John Teti wrote a clearly satirical piece wondering just how technology-savvy Pogue. His latest column described how you can use Google to search…
Don't believe the hype that Google founder Sergey Brin is seeking to "open source" research on Parkinson's. Should you try to contribute, the very first thing you'll find is that Brin has disabled comments on his blog. "While I would like to receive and post many insightful comments," he writes in a disclaimer above…
A report from The Register claims that five business owners have complained to them that Yelp salespeople offered to "push bad reviews to the bottom" in exchange for an ad buy on the site. The story, based partly on several unnamed sources, leaves me skeptical. None of the sources claimed Yelp actually did move…
Memo to the Web: If you're going to impersonate Google VP Marissa Mayer, please try to spell her name properly. And really, would Mayer be commenting on TechCrunch in the first place? [TechCrunch comments]
Memo to the Web: If you're going to impersonate me, please try to live up to my standards. It helps to use phrases like "You fascinate me" and "That seems easier." [TechCrunch comments]
The commenter who has it out for Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block is emailing us again. The scandalous newsflash he has for us? That Block shaves his head, making him look a bit like the singer Moby. If you ask us, Moby looks like a much less handsome Ryan Block. (Photo by livedigitally)
Valleywag, this time, has gone too far. Or so some people believe. Yesterday, we posted Robert Scoble's cell phone number, which is 425 205 1921, in a picture. One reader was so outraged that he woke one of my reporters from a sound sleep to express his ire. This top-secret information has been been posted on every…
After Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor who blogs as Fake Steve Jobs, visited Microsoft's main Redmond campus to talk about his new book, Options, he sat down for an interview with Microsoft's Channel 10. The best part? Fast forward 8:30 to the point where Lyons says, "I'm very excited about the Zune 80," Microsoft's…
