Gawker: zdnet

Jason Calacanis, Valleywag's new Apple analyst

Paul Boutin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

"Valleywag’s Jason Calacanis believes that Apple is working on a networked HDTV," writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet. Adrian, if your editor tries to make you go back and erase what you wrote, because his drinking buddies from Columbia Journalism Review think it's fatal to publish a huge factual fuckup in the first three words of an article, call me. I'll come over and slap J. Jonah Jameson with a printout of exactly how many people have already seen it. Tell him, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup." Has-been journalists love a Watergate reference.

On the upside, you've given Owen and me a whole new topic for slow afternoons: People who don't even know they're working for Valleywag. Calacanis was easy. Scoble isn't hard enough. We'll have to figure it out some more.

Jason: Holla back! Aw, come on. We hate it when you don't holla back. (Photo by Peter Kaminski)

Microsoft bought Yahoo, according to new Microsoft book

Owen Thomas — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Remember that brief moment this spring when everyone was saying Microsoft-Yahoo was a sure thing? That was when ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley must have put the finishing touches on her new book, Microsoft 2.0. On page 4, Foley writes: "This is a book on Microsoft's next chapter. It's going to be an unpredictable one, as Microsoft's purchase of Yahoo earlier this year makes evident." Committing the purchase to ink on paper was foolish of Foley, no matter what the odds were on Microsoft buying Yahoo, since even a clean deal would likely have taken a year to close.

The back cover also manages to misspell the URL of Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog. Old Microsoft hands like Foley know to wait until the third version of any Microsoft product, since it takes the software giant that long to get things right. Sounds like readers should do the same for her book.

Closeups of the pages, from a tipster:

Quincy Smith's one big idea

Owen Thomas — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:40:00 EDT

CNET has been eyed by Quincy Smith, CBS's hyperacquisitive online chief, long before he sealed a $1.8 billion deal to buy the company. As a banker at Allen & Co., CNET was his client. "At one point, he wrote this major presentation about how valuable content was," a tipster tells us. "The single example in it was CNET. It was basically his only idea." An unfair dig? Perhaps. There is little like CNET on the market — a pure play on professional online content worth $1.8 billion? It can't be found. But the lack of a direct competitor may have also been CNET's undoing — the mixed blessing that brought it under attack by activist investors and led it to CBS's waiting arms.

Sites like Engadget and Gizmodo (the latter published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media) seemed too small to matter when they launched; by the time CNET got around to trying to compete with the tech blogs, it was too late. In the meantime, having deluded themselves into thinking they had conquered tech publishing, CNET managers pursued off-brand expansions into baby and food sites, areas in which it had no particular experience or other value to add.

CNET was at its sharpest when dueling with rival ZDNet, the online publisher of once-formidable tech publisher Ziff-Davis. Since it merged with ZDNet and became a conglomerate of online brands — hence the "CNET Networks" name — it has devolved into soft, bureaucratic mediocrity, a trend only accelerated by the departure of cofounder Shelby Bonnie in 2006. If buying CNET was Smith's one big idea, we'll gladly lend him another: Shuffle current CNET CEO Neil Ashe out the door as soon as possible.

(Image by Andrew Mager)

"Back in 1991, when I first started as a...

Owen Thomas — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:51:11 EDT

"Back in 1991, when I first started as a tech journalist for PC Week (now eWeek), there was no Web." — ZDNet executive editor David Berlind. Really, David? Because that would be news to Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web two years beforehand. [Berlind's Testbed]

ZDNet advises Yahoo to buy a department of Google

Nick Douglas — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 19:10:06 EDT

Some great reporting comes out of the once-dominant ZDNet news network. I just never happen to see it. Instead I see articles that scream "We don't do research." In the ZDNet article "How will Yahoo address social networking?" writer Larry Dignan suggests several sites that the company could buy, such as Facebook, Friendster ... or Orkut. Of course, there's not much chance Google would sell Orkut, a social network created by the Google employee shown here, to its competitor.

Just shoot me: ZDNet blogger says "Web 3.0" unironically

Nick Douglas — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:00:00 EDT

This just in! One of ZDNet's crazy bloggers has finally gone too far by saying the phrase "Web 3.0" THREE TIMES IN ONE ARTICLE.

Jamcracker unlocks a Web 3.0 role for the channel

What to expect from Web 3.0

Who will rule Web 3.0?

Not only are there three mentions of an Internet "version" that does not actually exist, but each mention sounds like a handcrafted conference panel topic. Someone's gunning hard to be the expert on a movement that will never arrive.

Who owns the on-demand customer? [Software as services blog, ZDNet]

These six companies won't buy YouTube for a billion dollars.

Nick Douglas — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:56:21 EDT

Does tech site ZDNet just exist to give daft writers a place to blog? A half-baked entry from ZDNet blogger Russell Shaw lists six companies he thinks will buy YouTube.

Of course, there are nine reasons YouTube will die, which is three more than Shaw's list. Therefore Shaw loses. (It's science!)

But Shaw's story was voted a top post on the popular news site Digg. Now someone might accidentally believe him. But here's why Shaw's six companies won't buy YouTube.

Adobe: Shaw calls it "a fantastic promotional platform" for Adobe's Flash platform. Yeah, because no one uses Flash right now.
Time Warner: This one would almost make sense, if Time Warner wanted to distribute its multi-million-dollar TV shows and movies as free low-quality video clips.
Sony: Hahahahahahahano. Every YouTube video would come with a DRM wrap and a root kit that secretly lets hackers break into your computer every time you watch a pre-teen dancing to the "Numa Numa" song.
Google: Yeah, it'd be like Google Video, only with...wait...it would be exactly like Google Video.
News Corp: Actually, not a bad idea. But News Corp is still handling its last overpriced acquisition, MySpace, which is still so unstable that it blacked out twice this month and barely worked all last week.
Yahoo: Wait, the Yahoo that just launched Yahoo Video this month? The Yahoo that could also launch a video version of its Flickr service if it wanted? Shaw must mean some other Yahoo, right?

One of these six companies will buy YouTube [ZDNet]
Earlier: Why YouTube is about to die [Valleywag]

Steve Gillmor is dead

Nick Douglas — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:32:03 EDT

While all the happenin', relevant journalists were out at the book party for Wired editor Chris Anderson, ZDNet writer Steve Gillmor was at home shutting down his blog, "InfoRouter" (Alternative title: "An Incoherent Truth").

Yep, before Steve's fellow blogger Dave Winer could deliver on his promise to stop blogging in 2006, Steve left a tiny message on his ZDNet blog announcing it was over. Granted, given Steve's habit of prematurely declaring things deceased (newspapers, links, Microsoft Word), InfoRouter will likely last another hundred years.

Control Alt Delete [Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter]

ZDNet: The Fox News of tech journalism

Nick Douglas — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:20:11 EDT

Once, ZDNet was a respectable outlet for level-headed journalists. Then it gave everyone a blog and every day was Someone-unlocked-the-madhouse Day. Today, for example:

Donna Bogatin thinks Google CEO Eric Schmidt is personally telling his minions, "Write about her, but for god's sake, don't you dare link to her column!" [Digital Micro-Markets blog]
David Berlind discovered the center of the space-time continuum. It's the API for an events database. [Between the Lines blog]
Steve Gillmor's latest article was just too profound to read, so I ran it through Word's Autosummarize tool and got this:
This media showdown is getting really interesting. Meanwhile I keep hitting the spacebar with Marshall whenever Mike leaves town. Face it Nick, you're too smart for your own shtick. * Dave Winer * John Battelle — Pointed prominently at previously described pieces. Om and Mike are carving up the page view widget real estate on their blogs, competing against their deal with Battelle's FMPub.

This summary actually makes more sense than Steve's column. [Steve Gillmor's Inforouter blog]