For a startup founder itching to cash out, the recession can be tough: The economy fades hopes for an acquisition or plum funding round. Perhaps this explains some of the testiness around this year's awards from Silicon Alley Insider.

Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board? Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.)…

Peter Kafka is Kara Swisher's latest star hire at AllThingsD. She stole him from Silicon Alley Insider, where he worked with Henry Blodget. At SAI, Kafka always seemed to do fine without invoking the wisdom of the crowd. Why is Kara pushing him to go on and on about nothing? His first post was the standard Web 2.0…

"'Thanks to convoluted laws and corrupt officials, claiming ownership over a piece of property in Bangalore can be as easy as hiring thugs to paint your name on the side of a building.' The chaos makes gangsters who can impose order — like the murderous Muthappa Rai — very wealthy."(Disclosure: Former Valleywag…

"Yahoo will almost certainly fire too few employees when it announces its mass layoffs this week," predicts Henry Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to. Henry's got a bunch of charts you can look at, or you can read his kicker: "What's the smart amount of spending decline to plan for? We think…

Why did disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget post a long email by Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis to Silicon Alley Insider, and then take it down? There's the obvious reason: Calacanis hadn't given permission for it to be republished. But Silicon Alley Insider has reprinted Calacanis's emails before. We think it more has…

Does Henry Blodget, the disgraced former Wall Street stock analyst, have a Forbes fetish? We ask because his latest hire, Caroline Waxler, has the business fortnightly on her resume — as does soon-to-depart Blodget employee Peter Kafka. Blodget, best known for his Silicon Alley Insider site, seems to fancy himself a…

The latest hire in online tech outlets smacks of cannibalism. Silicon Alley Insider, the vanity blog vehicle of former Wall Street stock analyst Henry Blodget, has lost managing editor Peter Kafka to AllThingsD, the vanity blog vehicle of Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Dow Jones makes for a steadier parent than…

Gilt Groupe, the invite-only high-end group-spelled-with-an-e-at-at-the-end e-commerce site you're not supposed to have heard of, got a new CEO today, former Martha Stewart CEO Susan Lyne. Cofounder Alexis Maybank, pictured here, will become chief strategist. Through AlleyCorp, DoubleClick cofounder Kevin Ryan owns…

So far, no one has published a workaround for YouTube's block on Americans trying to reach the site's beijing2008 channel. But lazy reporting and glib posts from reputable sites make it sound like the geeks (i.e. me) have solved the problem already. Wired, Silicon Alley Insider, and Om Malik's NewTeeVee are the…

Silicon Alley Media, disgraced tech-stocks analyst Henry Blodget's recently formed blog collective, has raised a modest $1 million from wealthy investors, Tech Confidential reports. The A round's A list included Tacoda cofounder Dave Morgan and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. With the proceeds,…

After an interview with employee Dan Frommer, Silicon Alley Insider publisher Henry Blodget received a "threat" from an Apple shareholder who didn't like the pair's skepticism about the market for iPhone applications and the stock's performance. But rather than go after Blodget for shorting AAPL, why not mention…

With Silicon Alley Insider suggesting that Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis has a gambling problem, I figured it was time to take the intervention up a notch. Calacanis has endorsed workaholism in the past, leading me to believe that he doesn't take what psychologists have termed "process addiction" particularly…

Is disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget the reincarnation of Howard Hughes? In an inadvertently revealing Silicon Alley Insider post explaining his dislike of Windows Seven's touchscreen features, Blodget's screaming germophobia is on full display.

BrewPR's snacky flack Brooke Hammerling penned a guest column for Silicon Alley Insider, arguing that the Web video industry needs to come up with a strict viewership metric. Though she doesn't mention it in the piece, New York-based online-video startup NextNewNetworks is a Brew client. (It's disclosed, in tiny…

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis made his name running Silicon Alley Reporter back in the 1990s. You'd think Calacanis would be happy to hear that some guy named Gary Sharma has brought the Silicon Alley Report back to the Web. Nope. On his last trip to New York, Calacanis gleefully told a table full of reporters that Dow…

At his Dim Sum 2.0 dinner in New York last night, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis congratulated Silicon Alley Insider blogger Dan Frommer on his boss's fundraising abilities. Calacanis said he'd heard Blodget raised $12 million for the New York tech blog. Frommer asked Calacanis if he meant $3 million to $5 million, as…