If before we weren’t interested at all by Shiny Media things have changed over the last weeks. Let’s be honest, why would us cowboys and muppets have bothered to follow a bunch of (not so) hot geek chicks and gadget bloggers who brought nothing to the party but occasionally were quoted in teh local UK press? Indeed, I couldn’t think of any reason to read those sites either.

But life changes and Shiny Media went in administration. Less than 2 months after new blogger gigs were available and only weeks after new editors were announced. Ever since then the blogosphere has been following Chris Price and his team. Much has been written since then and the network made a return as Shiny Trends. More →

Ever since the creation of tinternet our society has seen an influx of so-called A-Listers, basically people no-one cares about or would care about, but who managed it to crave out a little corner of fame.
C.K. Sample III is one of those. According to his about page he is Director of Content Marketing for a company and Editor for another company. Previously he enjoyed to crave his fame corner as left, right and 2-ply toilet paper boy for Twitter and BS blowhard Calacanis. Not standing in the shadow of JC and hence spotlights, days for webreties like CKSIII must be hard and any trick will be allowed to show, tell us how important they are. Just like CK’s tweet about having the latest, all over the web reported, gadget since several weeks already. We here at JOAB *yawns*, CK finds it important to share with us in 140 characters or less:

trying to figure out why all the gadget blogs are re-reporting iStubz cables http://bit.ly/rBHQk I’ve had one of these for over a month

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.

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. More →

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.

More →

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.

Here at Jack of All Blogs we already established that Techcrunch is broken but things seem to get worse and worse every day for the once so popular Tech/Web2.0 blog.

For months TC has been adding authors and quantity to it’s arsenal, but sadly no quality. One could argue that former blogging Guru and TC full-time contributor Duncan Riley was not the best author either, but at least he knew how to stir some controversy. Ever since DR left TC has gone downhill.

Last week (community) blog Mashable passed TC to become the new #1 tech blog. But things do not only seem to be bad on the quality front, especially the financial department seems to have suffered.

Since weeks, TC has had several adblocks in its feeds. Ads in feeds are nothing new and several bigger blogs do have several ads in their feed. But today TC updated the feed and now comes with not 1, not 2, not even 3 but 5 (FIVE!) ads in the footer.

A whopping 720px*425px of ad space in your feedreader!

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.

in no particular order…

things i like more in my 30s than i did in my 20s

mushrooms, Sonic Youth, alone time, home improvement shows, cilantro, bottled water, going to work (most days), meditation, the Internet, tofu, the library, bike riding, showers, jeopardy, drinking, gambling, blogging, gardening, dogs, boxing, babies, chewing gum, being cold, hugs

things i like less in my 30s than i did in my 20s

meetings, hair gel, salespeople, liars, awards shows, chinese food, curly hair, weddings, surprises, doctors, the Internet, cherry garcia, tight-fitting clothes, soft mattresses, video games, new york yankees, wheel of fortune, social networking Websites, ramen noodles, Denis Leary, spicy food, crowds, buffets, cats

things i think i will always like

tennis, sex, the sound of rain, bacon, writing, guitar-driven rock, bending paperclips, clean socks, the ocean, Thanksgiving, Silly Putty, Twizzlers

head over to twitter and share the things that you will always like. be sure to include the tag – #thingsiwillalwayslike

I’ll admit it: I’m a fireplace failure.

When I purchased my home, one of the big selling points was a full-size living room fireplace. With the temperature steadily below freezing, ’tis the season to get those logs a burnin’.

It’s a simple concept, no?

Get dry wood; add fire. Heck, even the cavemen could do it, and I’m supposedly more evolved. But I’ve been a bust. Actually, more like a fizzle.

Regardless of the tactic I take or the method I use, nothing I do is able to light a sustaining fire (more than an hour). I’ve tried different woods, various stacking techniques, and lighting it from a dozen different directions.

I am conservative by nature. No stacks of newspaper. No flammable liquids. And no ‘fire starters.’ The only thing I have been able to ignite is a plethora of opinions from family and friends on how to get a fire roaring. Much of this advice is unsolicited. Worse yet, the majority is coming from urban dwellers who have never owned a fireplace in their life.

It might sound overly-cautious, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to risk every single thing I own by being cavalier about a fire. When you strip away everything else, the reality is that you are bringing one of nature’s most destructive forces into your home. I don’t care what you say, it’s risky business.

So now how on Earth do I get this thing lit?