Tag: Valleywag


  • Fake Steve Jobs to head up Valleywag

    Love it or hate it, but Silicon Valley rag Valleywag is something of an online institution. Come January next year, it has a new captain at the helm, none other than Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons, who had this to say regarding his plans, in an interview with Recode’s Peter Kafka.

    I think, at least for now, it’s going to be a two-person blog [with writer Kevin Montgomery]. I feel like Valleywag has been different things with different writers over the years. Up and down. I think it’s at their best when they get a legitimate scoop, like when someone leaks them documents. I feel like we could do more of that, breaking stories.

    Valleywag was on the map way back when I was the editor of The Blog Herald. A lot of people enjoyed Fake Steve Jobs, Lyons’s claim to fame (nevermind that he was a Forbes journalist), and when that blog was at its best, it was quite entertaining. A Valleywag with tongue in cheek commentary, and breaking some stories, would be swell.


  • Zuckerberg called early Facebook users dumb fucks – so what?

    This isn’t exactly new, but it surfaced again with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitting everything was true and that he was young and stupid once upon a time. Younger rather, the guy’s just 26 years old, so that part of the whole story is a bit moot. Then again, everyone’s getting old and experienced really quick these days.

    So what did Zuck say then? SAI had it back in May, now confirmed true. (more…)


  • Valleywag's off the mark in post about journos becoming coders

    Valleywag’s Ryan Tate is off the mark in his post Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer. That probably doesn’t surprise most of you, but still. The post itself is entertaining enough, including a nice lists of journalists coming from technical backgrounds, but I got stuck on this:

    Your typical professional blogger might juggle tasks requiring functional knowledge of HTML, Photoshop, video recording, video editing, video capture, podcasting, and CSS, all to complete tasks that used to be other people’s problems, if they existed at all: production, design, IT, etc.

    Coding is the logical next step down this road, albeit one that might only appeal to more ambitious or technically-minded journalists, the sort of people who want to launch their own websites, or attach a truly powerful and interactive feature to an existing one.

    While that is true, that some journalists need to know HTML and a bunch of other things to properly function in the online publishing landscape, the leap to coding isn’t the logical next step. Quite the opposite actually, since the CMS’s get better all the time, WYSIWYG is getting ever more competent and the need to actually understand what’s behind your site is shrinking all the time. (more…)