All Things Digital

Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell Valleywag’s always controversial gossip blogger, Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.” Deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate is his replacement.

Here are Thomas’s last words on the controversial gossip site.

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Here’s one certainty in the hubbub that has resulted in the wake of the departure of high-profile exec Ben Ling from Facebook last week: COO Sheryl Sandberg is definitely not responsible for the melting of the polar ice caps.

That’s the joking question–Was global warming Sandberg’s fault too?–that was asked at a staff meeting at the social networking start-up last Friday afternoon, after the news of Ling’s departure, on the heels of some other previous employee exits, suddenly morphed into a series of increasingly vituperative posts on the Valleywag tech gossip site that all centered on what blogger Owen Thomas called Sandberg’s “reign of terror” at Facebook.

The truth of the situation, though, is actually a lot more interesting.

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Last night, dressed in my kindergarten soccer-coach best (sneaks, sweats and athletic socks–glam!), I ventured over to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to attend VentureBeat’s party in honor of the launch of its new digital media blog.
Held at the Ambassador club on Geary Street, it was as if 1999 had never ended, and the [...]

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So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?
Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop [...]

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I could not agree more with both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas, an unlikely and motley trio we three, when I say: Leave Sarah Lacy alone.

OK, the interview she did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW on Sunday was a little silly at times and she probably annoyed people [...]

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What a slimy mess the “Here Comes Another Bubble” is leaving in its wake as it travels all over the Web.
Today, Daryl Lang of PDNPulse, a blog from Photo District News, reported that it contacted more photographers whose pictures were used in the popular Web 2.0-mocking video by the San Francisco-based singing group, the [...]

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The take-down of the popular Web 2.0 music video, “Here Comes Another Bubble,” didn’t last too long. The Richter Scales, a San Francisco singing group that did the piece, have posted a new one–Version 1.1–that it hopes is copyright safe.
They have a full list of credits here and also on the video, and have a [...]

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Let’s be clear on one thing: We won’t be getting any financial information out of the company about Facebook’s performance or the slate of its shareholders until it’s good and ready to hand it over.
That’s because, although it has been widely reported, the hot social network will not fall under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s [...]

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I think we can safely say the magic multimedia strategy once touted back in Web 1.0 as the savior of old media is now almost completely discounted.

So posits Valleywag’s Owen Thomas in an excellent short analysis of the deal for NBC Universal to buy women’s media cable channel and Web site company Oxygen Media for [...]

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Leave it to the freakishly tall Megan McCarthy of Valleywag to impugn our stature at BoomTown.

In her post late last week that I missed (I was traveling and therefore not aware of her cruel, cruel taunts), she pointed with dread to a recent promise I made to try out a new wearable camera I saw [...]

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I had an entertaining lunch with Owen Thomas and Megan McCarthy, both of Valleywag, the Silicon Valley online gossip rag that is part of the Gawker Media blogging empire.
(Megan had asked for some advice about the fine art of covering parties–that is, making an interesting story where there is not one–since I started my career [...]

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Oh dear.
I put up a simple funny illustration that looked at the striking resemblance between Walt and Anton Ego–a character from the current Pixar animated film “Ratatouille”–and my good friend Owen Thomas, the new head wag at Valleywag, tries to spin it into a faux feud I might be having with my most illustrious partner, [...]

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Why have a blog, I say, if you can’t write about people you actually like in it every now and then. And also make grainy videos (see below after the jump).

First, the news that Owen Thomas, who writes the most excellent blog Beta for Business 2.0 magazine’s Web site, where he has worked in a [...]

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