Jack of All Blogs » Snark

Valleywag editor worth $1.50. That’s how Denton makes money.

waldorf — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:12:48 +0000

I can not imagine that it will surprise you when if I told you that I used to be a big and loyal Valleywag reader. The original Nick Douglas and afterwards Nick Denton Valleywag was funny. Until a certain Owen Thomas took over the site and things went downhill. Snark became *yawns* and jokes were only insidery anymore. No full-on attacks.

Nowadays Valleywag is your Twitterwatch maintained by Ryan Tate. Today editor of the former snark blog revealed his post value: $1.50.

At least according to Sponsored Tweets by IZEA. That is true, for only $1.50 you can now also hire a Valleywag editor and make them write for you. 140 characters, disclosure inclusive.

Valleywag Emeritus Nick Douglas is smarter, he makes you write 140 characters all while he cashes in. That is why the original Valleywag was better: smarter and snarkier people ran the site.

Women to manage blog networks FTW!

waldorf — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:36:08 +0000

Regular JOAB contributor Andrew G. Rosen reported over at the Blog Herald the findins of a survey by SAHM and Mommyblog network BlogHer.

The conclusion of said survey is rather simple.

Blogmums to run JOAB!

Wait, let’s try that again.

Blogmums and SAHM to run JOAB FTW!

Much better already.

The reason why we come to this conclusion is because ~~SAHM~~ ~~mommy bloggers~~ women seem to have less problems with accepting free gifts to review, than most bloggically correct Probloggers do.

98 percent of surveyed bloggers believe it is acceptable to receive a free product

I think after the identity crisis I fell in yesterday I will just return as a female Jack and grab all the free shit I can get. If I am really happy and go through a great period I might even review everything. Disclosure though, who cares!

Another one bites the dust. RIP JOAB 1.0

waldorf — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:28:34 +0000

With the announcement that JOAB beloved Jeremy Wright stepped down at B5Media we are sad to report that good ol’fashioned Jack of All Blogs died in the same breath.

Back in the days JOAB was snark blog par excellence, mainly excelling in it’s offensive style. Ran and edited by a snark master who we rather prefer to ignare and totally blank nowadays, JOAB was feared and every problogger or A-lister in the ‘about blogging’ scene became the victim. But times have changed and all these bloggers have become a snorefest. With Jeremy’s change in position the last of the failbloggers has died and taken down Jack of All Blogs at the same time.
Before I dive in to an identity crisis after yesterday’s event, I would love to thank JOAB’s preferred victims.

Scrivs and Mike Rundle.

Jack of All Blogs indirect being a creation of Paul Scrivens and his Fine Fools network we have to thank Scrivs for good fun times and much laughter on New Year’s Day 2007. Never mind that Splashpress acquired the Wisdump less than half a year later.

Foot-in-the-mouth-blogger par excellence, Mike Rundle always was omni-present in JOAB comments, often trying to return how much JOAB would love to be a member of 9rules. Mike we love, you. If not for your witty comments, for your funny banter in the B5Media – 9rules war.

Sadly both Rundle and Scrivs have retired in boredom.

Matt Craven

Being a friend of the original JOAB editor, Matt Craven always was good sport and often first to comment on rumours, snark. Matt is a great personality and was an awesome Blog Herald owner/editor. Sadly he seems to have retired in to WoW. I wonder if he’s looking forward to have Twitter stations in WoW or the next Elder Scrolls.

Jeremy Wright

Main culprit of the death of JOAB1.0, Jeremy Wright was maybe our favourite commenter here at JOAB. Always the first one to hit out at Scrivs and Rundle, stirring the fire in the comments and making sure we had many a great day. Often we had more fun in the commentfire between Rundle/Scrivs, Craven and Wright.
Rumour goes that Wright used to send internal emails about JOAB entries to B5Media contributors and channel editors.

Wright now has become a member of the B5Media board. We think he should become a consultant of Splashpress Media as well… and ghost contributor to JOAB.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt, sadly you have never been enough on the JOAB radar, but we recognize that you have matured admirably over the last years and now even would not want to have you on our snark attack radar anymore. Please create some more controversy as we really do not want to start reading Om Malik’s snorefest.

Franky

Last but not least there’s Franky. Nowadays he is Assistant Editor in Chief at Splashpress Media. Ever since he started writing here at JOAB his aggressiveness has gone downhill as weeks passed. Once shit-stirrer par excellence he then took over Wisdump from his idol Scrivs and since then things have gone downhill to say the least. Rumour goes he even doesn’t believe in snark anymore. We bet he must have a LiveJournal blog now or writes on MySpace. Or maybe he works for LiveUniverse and maintains train-wreck BlogExplosion. Probably the blogger’s union deal has gone to his head.

RIP JOAB1.0

Dear Jack of All Blogs V1, it was an awesome ride and we certainly will miss you. Feelings are split, divided between ‘how can we revive the old snark and offense tradition’ and ‘This is it, I’m having an identity crisis’.

Thank you for all the fun we had… and stop whining now. Arrington and Riley are still posting! Get in there!

Photo credit: Mike Abundo.

If you got no clue and need an excuse, blame Google

waldorf — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:16:11 +0000

Jack of All Blogs favourite Michael Arrington has been at it once more. A supposedly French hacker forwarded several stolen/found Twitter documents to the Techcrunch staff and other online publications. They were obtained by guessing or recovering the password of both a Twitter employee and Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams’s wife. Twitter uses Google Apps for domains and apparently Google has a simple password recovery method.

Although I missed the memo, it is an acceptable journalistic strategy to blame ‘Do no evil Google’ and get away with any moral issues. Moral issues about posting stolen documents and company secrets. Moral issues about posting these documents and at the same time knowing everyone who works at Twitter.

It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question. It’s not our fault that Twitter stored all of these documents and sensitive information in the cloud and had easy-to-guess passwords and recovery questions.

Although Arrington a ruthless, self-centric, machine is, he does not seem to have enough of gut to blame people for being dumb and use simple passwords in the first place.

Web2.0 is a word? LOLWUT!

waldorf — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:43:57 +0000

The English language continues to progress and evolve, but sadly in a not too great way. After the addition of the term Web.2.0 we really have to wonder what will happen to the language once mastered by the great Shakespeare. Maybe I’m just an old and boring sod, but can someone please explain me what numbers do in words? Since when are digits dictionary worthy?

What will next be added to the English dictionary? Will we see a new landrush for words in the dictionary just like we saw for the Facebook username? Will we see people starting cyberwars to have their nickname recognized as an official word? Can you imagine aplusk become a real word?
Or will the new fashion be abbreviated, short term, text speak words? Punk’d?

In the latter case I will gladly make the best web app ever my homepage.