Canuckistan: blogger's tax haven.

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What will be interesting is seeing, say, Rex Reed come up with new ways of saying "for which I attended a free screening".

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I imagine that these days, all you'd have to do is go up to a publicist and say, "Hi, I write for the Huffington Post -- please feed me."

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Unless this somehow leads to Julia Allison getting lock up in jail. If so, go FTC!!!!!

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Snitching is a dangerous thing to do nowadays. Remember how vicious the Gawker people reacted to snitching in the Kerri Ferrel case? Imagine how it will play out for a college kid who "snitches."

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Why was there no liveblog of the Hans Reiser trial? Why is no attention paid to the utter hilarity of the Ruby on Rails "community"? (Pound for pound, Rails blogs have replaced LKML for the highest density of quotable insanity in the programming world. Even TechCrunch knows this.)

Owen's problem was the he saw himself as an analyst, rather than an anarchist. It was a problem for two reasons. First, the 'insider' approach is at odds with everything Gawker has ever done successfully. But more importantly, Owen doesn't know anything. He's divorced from both the technical realities that frequently influence business decisions in the Valley, and from the madness of the engineering community.

Because that is where the meat falls off the bone: it's not in the comings and goings of a couple of mid-level Valley execs (which are amply covered by about 900 other media outlets), but rather in the engineering teams and the mid-level management. These are the dark places; where a multi-billion dollar industry is built on the backs of talented but basically crazy people:

- Smart engineers who have been Peter Principled into management positions where they are no longer effective

- Open source projects who have "rejected" traditional industry power structures by replacing them with even more byzantine social constructions of their own devising

- Fairly gross, persistently male-dominated communities that don't understand where all the women went

- A narcissistic toy culture which is different in focus, but not degree, from that of the Manhattan elite

There is material enough for a dozen weblogs, if anyone had the gumption (and the sources) to make it happen. So best wishes to Owen, and best of luck to Ryan Tate. The Valley desperately needs a better 'Wag. We deserve the abuse.

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Are we living in the same country? When was the last time you heard of these so-called "antitrust cops" that are out their somewhere riding into battle on their unicorns looking askance at anything?

Oh, wait. The Whole Foods takeover of Wild Oats Markets. Thank god the Feds took a hard line with that one. Excessive consolidation in the hippie/yuppie grocery sector posed a serious threat to our economy.

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