Tuesday, March 04, 2008

In the valley of smut: the new Valleywag story


I feel disappointed by the smutty direction lately taken up by Valleywag. From the time when Nick Douglas started as the first writer for Valleywag (he has left for Gawker), I admired Valleywag's gumption when it provided the anti-dote to the Web 2.0 pied pipers, my name for the likes of Techcrunch and its copycats.

I still remember when Valleywag punched holes in the Second Life story when everyone else considered it be the next Microsoft, sort of.

Now that Uncov.com is no more, we needed Valleywag more than ever to poke more holes in startups' strategies, pick out research analysts posing as Einsteins, and find the real story behind all that navel gazing nonsense that passes as normal in the Valley.

Till date, none of the big web 2.0 blogs has managed to completely upgrade to service reporting. Techcrunch will report any startup news it can get its hands on. ReadWriteWeb will continue its high-theme, analytical approach. Mashable is building upon its lists and Gigaom is somewhere in the middle but no web 2.0 blog has managed to do it all.

We needed Valleywag to present the other side of bland storytelling on all those web 2.0 blogs. Techcrunch, the erstwhile 'pied piper', has managed to do some 'serious' reporting of late.

Things have changed at Valleywag. I think the writers over there are not being able to cope up with blog moghul Nick Denton's “Traffic-at-all-cost” dictat.

Result: smut is all around.
Geeks and their love life - that is all the rage.

To analyze Valleywag's current editorial direction, I put Monday's Valleywag page through a Tag Cloud generator. A brief look at most popular terms:
porn 5 (mentions)
meghan asha 5
meghan 9
Julia allison 9
sex 3
geek love 3
gay porn 2
girlfriend 3
sucks 3
jimmy wales 11
The only useful entry that came nearest:
google health 4
I should not be disappointed. It was Valleywag's destiny.
After all, it is supposed to be the Silicon Valley's favorite gossip rag.

Being the Valley's beacon for truth was never the agenda, huh?

http://valleywag.com/

Labels: , , , , ,

1 Comments:

At 4:16 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Being an online publisher gives you certain license. Valleywag is not the first one to use this license as liberally as possible.

- Valley Dan

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home