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Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton's new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today's San Francisco Examiner helpfully reports that drivers who simply whiz through the FasTrak lanes without a pass aren't being punished, or even identified. "We're basically hoping drivers will be decent human beings," says a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages the seven FasTrak bridges in the Bay Area. (The Golden Gate Bridge is managed separately.) 112,295 drivers -- not sure if that counts repeats -- flew though the gateless toll stations without being caught in November, because their license plates weren't readable. 49,013 more escaped because of equipment malfunctions. The upshot of the Examiner 's report: The MTC isn't about to start cracking down. Go for it, cheapskate. (Photo by the San Francisco Examiner ) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commenter Beng asked the question about CES' two-tier journalist passes that I wondered, too: "What is the difference between the blogger badge and the press badge, and does that mean that even Engadget and Gizmodo get blogger badges?" Gizmodo editor Brian Lam is toting a Press badge, just like Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. Our own Jordan Golson has been tagged a "Blogger." Hey Jordan: Besides a separate lounge with espresso and cookies , what other perks does a Press pass get you that a Blogger badge doesn't? Just login and let Calacanis answer again, that was hilarious. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Senior editor! Natali Del Conte's first posts from CES lack the excitement of the show floor, but they do have, well, Natali. Here's another , and another . Suggestion to NDC: Get out in the crowd and give your viewers a you-are-there feeling. Is Calacanis there? Ask him one question -- doesn't matter what -- and let the camera roll. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Becky Worley, shown here on ABC's GMA , will replace the supercali-telegenic, expialidocious Natali Del Conte as host of PodShow's near-daily TeXtra program. "Blondes are not traditionally asked to explain the use of nano-photolithography in computer processors," writes Worley, whose video resume includes stints at the Travel Channel, ZDTV and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) Tech. Becky, for what it's worth, I'm a balding middle-aged brunette male and no one asks me to explain nano-photolithography, either. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two aspiring moguls are about to be struck rich by the system. But is there something else to life? Speed-the-Plow is set in a Hollywood studio, but it could be a SoMa startup. The American Conservatory Theater's three-person cast of this 90-minute play -- click the Artist Bios tab -- are familiar faces from TV. David Mamet's rapid-fire dialogue is witty, yet lifelike. At the A.C.T. on Geary Street, conveniently next to the Clift or Grand Cafe, through February 23. I recommend the $14 balcony seats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From The Wall Street Journal : "Microsoft said that NBC Universal (NYSE:GE) Inc., Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DCQ) (NYSE:DIS) , Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and Showtime Networks Inc. have agreed to contribute entertainment content to the software maker's Xbox Live and MSN online services. The deals were slated to be announced during a speech by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates on the opening night of the Consumer Electronics Show." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the Wall Street Journal : "Intel says it no longer will support One Laptop Per Child, and has resigned from the board over the nonprofit's demand that it stop selling its Classmate laptop and other laptops in the developing world. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) says it has canceled plans for an Intel-based OLPC laptop." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tom Lantos, who has represented northern San Mateo county and southwest San Francisco in the House of Representatives since 1981 as the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, has esophageal cancer and will step down after completing his 14th term this year. The Examiner has a tidy recap of Lantos's career. As a young man, he twice escaped from Nazi camps. In 2006, the then-77-year-old Congressman was arrested along with other genocide protestors in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington. Wonkette says local politico Jackie Speier is likely to replace him . [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Brian Lam, the go-go-go force behind gadget superblog Gizmodo, explains how paying for traffic backfired until he dropped an iron fist. Brian's formula? Focus on consistent semi-hits, instead of drawing the mob with doofy, off-topic videos. I found most of this week's commentary on the topic to be poorly reasoned and/or self-serving. But I'll let Brian have the last word. At giz, the pay system has had the opposite effect, and we do far less viral work with mainstream appeal. Easy hits cause CPM deflation over time, making your real news posts, the core posts, worth less and less. It also rewards laziness, which I know have to slap down with an iron fist. So the funny random viral videos we loved posting so much before have become a serious problem with making sure pay is fair across the site. It forces you to be very careful, actually. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The New York Times reports that address-book service Plaxo is seeking up to $100 million from buyers. Reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, "Plaxo, which has been overtaken by rivals like LinkedIn and Facebook, has tried to reinvent itself as an aggregate of information from other social networking sites," joining Google's OpenSocial initiative in November. That spiked usage among customers. Selling now may be not desperation, but timeliness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Helicopters. Hot metal print. Faked photos. Police scanners and running engines. Even if you're not a journalism wonk, outgoing Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger's recap of his years in the golden age of newspaper reporting is an engaging read, all 2,963 words of it . If you just want the dirt, I've pullquoted Steiger's dead-bird story, plus the time he asked for a helicopter to do some reporting. Does Pajamas Media have one of those? I remember walking past a photographer's open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He'd perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans' cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Didn't TechCrunch just run some sort of honors event ? They're holding another awards show in two weeks. The contest's Web 2.0 gimmick: The Crunchies' Ajaxified ballot lets everyone vote once a day, every day from sometime before Christmas until the contest closes a week from Saturday -- a sort of Persistent People's Choice Awards. I predict Kevin Rose is going to win this one big-time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After casting my daily vote for The Crunchies awards, I wondered: How does the site stop me from voting more than once a day? Does it just set a cookie, even though that's the first thing any Web 2.0 geek who wants to hack the vote will think of? Can I delete my cookies from vote.crunchies.techcrunch.com and vote again, as many times as I want? Bingo: I can now state with confidence that Digg will sweep this event. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Portfolio.com blogger Felix Salmon normally spends his time dryly bemoaning how much smarter than me he is . But buried at the end of a lengthy piece of guesswork decrying the not-as-smart-as-Felix-ness of Valleywag's new pay scale, the guy does some actual reporting: One thing I've noticed in my years blogging is that your most popular posts are never your best posts, and that it's pretty much impossible to predict which posts are going to catch on and get lots of pageviews. The new Gawker pay scheme, then, might well end up simply rewarding the lucky, rather than the good. Exactly, Felix, exactly! By the way, Felix, here's a trick I use to mask my lower IQ: Take your conclusion and move it from the last sentence to the first, as I've done to you here. It allows people not as sharp-witted as Felix Salmon to understand why they should bother reading the rest of your article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

" I'm going to get thrown under the bus on Valleywag even more in 2008 than in 2007 ," serial self-blogger Robert Scoble claims, because of Gawker's new traffic-based pay plan for Valleywag writers. Um, how to put this gently: No one reads our Scoble posts , as Robert himself has observed from his clickthrough logs. We do them out of love. But based on our most-read posts of 2007 , I'll be throwing some guy named Kevin Rose under the bus every single day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reddit founder and teenage RSS co-developer Aaron Swartz has been posting chapters to a novel in progress. The guy's no Gore Vidal, but with today even slower than Christmas on the Internet, an 11-chapter serial about corrupt startups and an eeeeevil Google may be just what you need to kick back with until Cory Doctorow's next dispatch. (Photo by Jacob Applebaum ) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I don't expect anyone other than Jeff Jarvis to read Gawker's 1,047-word memorandum to employees in its entirety. I've cored out the important part -- the numbers with dollar signs -- below. From now on, you will be paid a set monthly fee. You will be expected to contribute a set number of posts in exchange. On top of that, you will be eligible for a bonus based on the number of pageviews your posts receive each month, even if the story is months or years old. Each site will be assigned a pageview rate. At the end of the month, if the money you earn in pageviews exceeds your monthly base pay, you will be paid the extra money as a bonus. This chart should make it clearer. If your site has a PV rate of $5:$2,000 = 400,000 views:$5,000 = 1m views:$7,000 = 1.4m views Based on this example, if your base pay is $2,000 per month then you would need to get upwards of 400,000 pageviews to begin earning bonus. A total of 500,000 views would earn $500 bonus (or $2,500 total pay). Four sites are already using the new bonus system (Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Defamer). One guest editor on Wonkette landed a huge exclusive and walked away with an extra $3k in his paycheck. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chris Anderson's BookTour is one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that sites. It scratches a specific itch to bring together touring book authors and the people who go to see them. Bespectacled novelist groupies are spared from the non-bookish mob at Upcoming -- and vice versa. A billion-dollar idea? Of course not. But a required, um, bookmark among the New York literati by March? Yeah, I'll bet a buck on that. A side note from BookTour's About page: San Franciscans spend more per capita than residents of any other American city on books and wine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gawker Media dark overlord Nick Denton (pictured) has launched a new pay system for all Gawker Media blogs, after testing it at four of his leading sites. Denton's goal is to discourage "self indulgent" posts and "mind-numbing frequency" in favor of "linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find." Where does a self-indulgent secret memo fit on that axis? I guess we'll find out after the jump.From: Noah RobischonSubject: Editor Newsletter - 2008 Preview EditionDate: December 31, 2007 11:42:12 AM PST In January, as you've no doubt heard, Gawker editorial is introducing a new bonus system. While your base monthly pay remains the same, the chance of a bonus will depend on your individual performance. More specifically: it will depend on the popularity of your posts that month. Below, an explanation of the background to the move; why now; and how the new system works. 1. BACKGROUND It's only on the internet that a writer's contributions can be measured. At newspapers, a reporter's reputation depends on the opinion of their editors, which can be fickle. Some people get on because they play the office politics well. Or simply because they're more aggressive in lobbying for more prominent jobs, or pay increases. Advertising people say that the internet is special, because the audience's engagement is so much more measurable than that of newspaper readers, or television viewers. Which makes it so bizarre that most writers, on the internet as in print, are paid for the sheer brute quantity of their output. Gawker has been equally backward. Sure, we pioneered the pageview bonus system, which rewards all writers for a site's performance. But, let's be honest: those bonuses have been allocated subjectively. And, in the large, writers have been rewarded, at $12 a post, for mind-numbing frequency. When we've paid a higher rate (the $200 "feature" rate) we've often not been rewarding better pieces; merely encouraging the padding of perfectly good, short items. In short, we have repeated the bad habits of traditional media organizations: leaving remuneration to the arbitrary will of upper management; and, by treating words as if they were Soviet steel output targets, encouraging quantity over quality. 2. WHY NOW Early on in the commercial blog era, frequency was the key to the success of a site: Engadget took a lead because it churned out 24 posts a day while Gizmodo, fearful of overwhelming its audience, stuck to a dainty dozen items. We learnt that lesson, and vowed never to be out-produced again. But we now really are reaching the limits of sheer volume. Readers can't take any more. And the proliferation of blogs, and social news services such as Digg, has changed the rules. Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there's now a surfeit. And what's in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find. Gina showed on Lifehacker, with the style of feature she pioneered a couple of years ago, that it was possible to grow a site's audience without endlessly increasing the number of posts. Second, our objective is not merely to provide gratification for a writer, or amusement for their pals, but to appeal to the wider readership of a site, and to new readers who might discover it through Digg or Google or some other link. It's fine to pen the occasional self-indulgent or self-referential item. But we're not going to waste the editorial budget on them, when we're investing so heavily in the sites. We need a more efficient form of bonus compensation -- and one that's fair to the writers who care most about their readers. Third, the market for editorial talent is becoming more competitive. If a writer works like hell, or sparkles, we always run a risk: that somebody outside the organization... [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In case you didn't watch the CNN.com interview Carlson posted with Famesource, the social network buying signups in Bangalore , all you really need to see is the title of the online-only show. And I never thought I'd say it, but: Button up, lady. This is CNN. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wired music writer Eliot Van Buskirk decided to cancel his online subscriptions. His anti-DRM talk made me sleepy, but what woke me up was the ludicrous amount of time Van Buskirk spent on the phone with Napster (NASDAQ:NAPS) and Rhapsody. No doubt many subscribers hang up after half an hour and let the charges accumulate. The real moneymaker for these companies may not be DRM, but CRM. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The libertarians are more powerful than anyone thought: They just flew a dirigible up the East Coast with the slogan "Google Ron Paul" on the side. No one hacked the search results to insert another canididate's message or even some rote Paultard-bashing. Looks like the googlebombing lefties at Daily Kos are lying down on the job -- have you seen who comes up first for " best president ever ?" [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Spanish-language short "Lo que tú Quieras Oír" -- "What You Wanted to Hear" -- has snuck into the No. 3 spot on YouTube's all-time most viewed list, right after "Evolution of Dance" and Avril Lavigne. Unlike most top YouTube clips, its power comes not from visual antics but from spoken words on an answering machine. The few English-language blog posts I could find babbled about the film's Creative Commons license without explaining the plot. Multilingual space princess Xeni Jardin translated it on the fly for me.From: Xeni Jardinhere's a super duper deluxe fixed version. A woman walks in to her apartment, chatting on her cellphone to a friend about a bunch of little mundane things, she's getting ready (OTCBB:GTRY) to prepare dinner for herself and her boyfriend. A child's drawing sits on the table, bearing the title "Sofia," a lady in a red dress. The woman, whose name, we learn, is Sofia, puts her things down, sees something that jars her -- she presses "play" on her answering machine, still chatting with her friend on the cellphone. She realizes the message is from the man she loves, Miguel -- her voice changes, she tells her friend she has to go, will talk later. Sofia replays Miguel's voice message in entirety. It's a breakup voicemail. "Are you there? Please pick up if you are, it's urgent... I don't know how to tell you this. I'm not coming back to the house, not tonight, not any other night... I need some time to think... I've been thinking about us... I have to get out of the house... I don't want to stay anymore... I don't love you..." Sad music floods in. Sofia is heartbroken. We observe time passing, she's more and more depressed, her friend calls again and again but she won't answer the phone, that dinner is now a dinner for one, and it appears to be a particularly sad dead fish. But then -- Sofia takes action. She pops the tape (hahah how old-school) out of the machine (hahahaha ancient) and snips it up and remixes the breakup call. "I need to return..." Miguel now says. "I love you.... I have to return, I love you, I love you..." (Pause) "No," says Sofia, shaking her head and wearing the red dress.. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I should include end-of-year lists. But there are three even more annoying artifacts you'll be stuck with every freaking day of the coming year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The libertarians are coming! But don't let a Republican explain it to you. Instead, crazy fun local lefties the San Francisco Bay Guardian report on the Ron Paul phenomenon. I've culled some easily-absorbed bullet points from the lengthy article.It's rare to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows and beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city's streets.Paul's frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire [remember, this is the Bay Guardian] got his campaign rolling.Paul's libertarian platform is attracting support from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.One unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate's integrity. "My gut tells me Ron Paul is different." "Ron Paul's not trying to sell you on himself; he's just selling you the message of freedom." "He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election."Paul's Dec. 16 fundraising push raised more than $6 million in a 24-hour period, breaking the record for funds raised in one day held by the John Kerry 2004 campaign.Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. The average size of each donation is around $100.There is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articulating the same message -- one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets -- since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas. Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he's more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation. He sees the USA Patriot Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.He is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US's borders.There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country -- 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article -- and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul's perspectives. "We're right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when Dean had already been crowned winner by the media." (Photo by Anarchyware) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What, did you think laid-off newspaper vets would become bloggers? The Bay Guardian lists a half-dozen senior editors, bureau chiefs and reporters who've escaped the crumbling newspaper economy by becoming publicists for Governor Schwarzenegger and various high-powered firms. The Guardian worries these pros will use their inside knowledge of the news biz to deflect bad coverage from their clients. I disagree: Public relations plays an important role in telling stories accurately and providing journalists with timely, helpful and correct information. (How's that for spin control? Send any mid-six-figure job offers to paul@valleywag.com .) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A handy rebuttal to the science-challenged handwringers you're stuck with through New Year's Day. Slate's Green Lantern columnist Brendan Koerner has boiled down the facts on global dimming. It turns out to be global brightening , except in India and China. I pared Koerner's piece even further to one snappy paragraph. A scary 2005 BBC documentary overplayed the doomsday angle. The planet has actually gotten brighter over the past 15 years. The term "global dimming" refers to the reduction of solar radiation hitting the planet's surface, caused by the proliferation of aerosols in the atmosphere. Though industrial soot plays a role, nothing affects sunlight like an erupting volcano. Since 1991, when the eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused the Earth to get much dimmer for about two years, there has been an overall brightening trend. According to NASA worldwide aerosol levels in 2005 were 20 percent off their late 1980s peak. But the amount of sunlight hitting each square yard of Chinese soil has declined by 3.7 watts in the past 50 years; India has experienced a similar decrease. The two nations' surge in aerosol-producing economic activity hasn't been accompanied by regulations to control emissions. Aerosols may actually mask global warming at the planet's surface, but recent research shows the brown cloud over Asia is heating up the lower atmosphere from approximately 6,500 to 16,500 feet. That's bad news for the Himalayan glaciers, which are melting at a rapid clip. (Photo by Steve Locke ) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SiteMeter and Google Analytics agree: Visits and page views to Valleywag were about 50 percent of a normal weekday both yesterday and today, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As the guy at Tully's Coffee (NASDAQ:TULY) said, "Any day that half your clientele shows up at the door is a business day." With half the Net still clicking away (see chart: Most of our traffic comes from people clicking links) it's kind of weird to see the go-go business blogs -- TechCrunch , GigaOm , VentureBeat , Read/Write Web -- shuttered for the day. Couldn't you guys have queued something up? The old-media dinosaurs at the NYT managed to print an issue , even if it's padded with heartwarming holiday filler. I'm starting to think the Objectivists are right: The problem with Christmas is it's not commercialized enough . Whoops, update: Duncan just posted some actual news on TechCrunch, but it's already late Wednesday morning where he is in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Daily Mirror reports on a factory worker from Yorks whose £27,000 Vodafone (NYSE:VOD) bill whups those run up by entrepreneur Joi Ito and Wired editor Chris Anderson . "Ian Simpson, 29, was sent the bill for four weeks' service after wiring his mobile up to a laptop to download TV shows - and only then found out his £41.50-a-month [Vodafone Anytime 800] deal didn't include unlimited web use." (Photo by Daily Mirror) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to a New York Times report , Google has been seeking out and posting comments from people mentioned in stories found on Google News since spring. Yeah, how did I miss this one too? Because there are only 140 comments posted . As the Times reports, even with Googlers emailing the subjects of news stories, people just aren't coming out in force to get their comments in. Are you an aspiring pundit? Here's an easy one for you: Predict that this will explode in 2008. Next year, do the same for 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Who called a freaking holiday right in the middle of the last week of the sales year? Clearly, the in-duh-viduals who run HR aren't on a revenue-based compensation plan. If you're still working the deals and/or deliverables today, know you're not alone: 25,000 readers have hit Valleywag already and it's not even noon in Santa Clara. My wife is cranking out a new solutions guide, Dave Winer is on Twitter, and Gizmodo is posting like mad even though Denton gave them the day off. What are we eating in the Valley today? Everyone else's lunch. Merry Christmas, lusers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) sites are open today. Tully's is hopping. Most of the cafes on Valencia Street are online. But the traitors at Ritual Roasters have locked up and gone home. Same for the Peet's in Pac Heights. Worst offender: Whole Foods is closed, and I'm out of organic nutmeg for the veg-nog. Given the contempt and/or twittering condescension the NPR bluestaters in these places usually express for America's Christian demographic, I doubt they're staying home today because it's the baby Jesus' birthday . Clearly, the secularization of Christmas is worse than anyone thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do you think the Internet runs itself today? Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. Here's to the sysadmins. And while we're at it, the unthanked people at your local electric utility, for whom five-nines uptime isn't just a marketing slogan. Central Maine Power, take a bow! (Photo by Deycom IT Solutions) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Goldmine! SF Station's list of restaurants open today . Besides all of Chinatown, that is. Scroll halfway down the page. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

You're right, this whole Christmas thing is meshuginah. Shlep the rugrats over to Free Family Day today at the Contemporary Jewish Museum at Third and Harrison. If the Objectivists have anything happening today I'll post that, too. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Had enough Yuletide stupidity already? Head out to Fisherman's Wharf, ride the empty cable cars, drop in on an AA meeting , or try any of these other Xmas Day in Frisco suggestions. (Photo by Don Danz ) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I cracked. I read Uncov's post on Pownce. I still don't know what it does. More important is the chart Ted Dziuba posted with it. Pownce, despite being a shitty service, gives us some insight into the Web 2.0 world. I have described this before, but it is best done with imagery:Useless service X is released after 2 months of MySQL/CSS development.Arrington covers it, thousands of users signup. Mike takes his ad revenue.People either stop giving a shit or realize your service does not solve any problems for them.Fail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goyim are finally gone! 60's soul singer Darlene Love stars in this animated Saturday Night Live short on the one day a year the Tribe rules the streets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I normally decline to make predictions, because what really happens is always weirder. But Valleywag's official 2008 list was such a borefest -- I thought I was reading BusinessWeek or Battelle -- that I cracked. Here's my fearless outlook.TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat and Read/Write Web will merge into one giant Voltron-like supersite I don't read. Whoops, already happened.Apple evangelists are right: A second-generation Apple TV will have twice the success the first model did. What's two times zero?Google will have the most amazingly innovative layoff ever. (Illustration by Uncov) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

You know that old story about how the English and German soldiers sang carols to each other from the trenches on Christmas Eve? Then the next day they went back to killing each other? The Valleywag staff dipped into the eggnog and got all feel-nicey about five people we've picked on all year. Each of them, we decided weepily, taught us something about humanity. And that was before the drinking started. Quick, read it before we wake up with a hell-hangover and delete the whole thing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do we get two whole issues off from doing any work?2007: The Year in Review2008: A Look Ahead [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Folks, please stop emailing us that either (A) Valleywag is afraid to run the story that Apple is trying to shut down Fake Steve Jobs , or (B) Fake Steve author Dan Lyons is perpetrating a hoax to -- I love this -- to get onto Techmeme . Let me spell it out for you: LYONS IS KIDDING! He's trying -- and failing -- to illustrate that the legal settlement between Apple and ThinkSecret is a bad thing. Two reasons: (1) It's corporate thuggery from Apple, which once compared itself to friggin' Gandhi in an ad. (2) By shutting down and probably taking a payout, ThinkSecret's publisher has done himself a favor , but set a bad example. How much should Apple pay Valleywag to shut up? Ok, don't answer that, but you get my point. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.">Fake Steve Jobs is Wired's Leander Kahney. Former editor Nick Denton's meticulous analysis of FSJ's prose leads him to believe a fellow ex-Brit is the pseudonymous Steve Jobs blogger. It isn't just wrong, it's patently ridiculous to Kahney's colleagues -- the guy's just not mean enough. Drunk employee crashes 365 Main's colocation site. A tipster uses credible inside knowledge of 365 Main's operations to pass new editor Owen Thomas a timely, credible story that turns out to be completely wrong. The story delivers 145,000 pageviews worth of wrongness. Lesson: Even autistic sysadmins can be full of baloney. Mark Zuckerberg cashes out. A rumor published at midnight on a weekend during the holiday season gets sprayed all over the Net inside of an hour. Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher shows up at my door in person to tell Owen he's a frigtard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

They were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. Whoops. presenting five biggest technology disappointments of the past year. No, not Vista and the Kindle -- you didn't expect anything there.5. Apple TV Cable TV was going to be dead by Christmas. Instead, Forrester Research (NASDAQ:FORR) reversed its bullish forecast, placing Apple TV behind Jam Packs for GarageBand. 4. Googlephone Valleywag editor Owen "Wrongway" Thomas repeatedly insisted all year that there was no Googlephone. He was almost right: Google's only built a phone software platform, one which launched with no killer apps or interface innovations. Don't drop your iPhone just yet. 3. Facebook ads "Once every hundred years, media changes," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared moments before unveiling an overhyped ad system for broadcasting your purchases to your friends' Facebook pages. Even if Zuckerberg proves bizarrely right about media, he picked the wrong day. A hundred years from now, the history books -- or whatever replaces them --will talk about YouTube instead. 2. DRM-free music Cory Doctorow is finally happy, but face it: DRM-restricted music and video files weren't the repression of personal freedom that evangelists like Doctorow made them out to be. They're merely irritating when they don't play. Copyright crusaders are like medical marijuana advocates: You can't argue with them in theory, but in practice you know what they really want is the right to party hearty -- or in this case, to download music not just free of DRM, but free of charge. 1. Tesla Roadster The all-electric sports car really would change the mass public's attitude toward electrics. If only it would hit the road. The company missed its promised ship dates, and genius founder Martin Eberhard has been ousted. To be clear, Tesla's electric motors work just fine. Gossip says that Tesla's electric motor is so strong that it breaks its gearbox. The company has acknowledged that its custom-made two-speed transmissions have proved a problem. Special Achievement Award: Pownce Never confuse celebrity with software. Videogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose announced a new company that would do something radically different. Lead developer Leah Culver topped an online beauty contest, despite posting dubious integer-rounding code to her blog. But to date, I still don't even know what Pownce is -- NO DON'T TELL ME LA LA LA LA NOT LISTENING! Uncov writer Ted Dziuba explains it for me. As for Pownce's cyberlebrity status, Ted adds, "their daily traffic is now less than 2girsl1cup." (Illustration by Uncov. Photo of Google Android by Mobile magazine. Photo of Leah Culver by Brian Solis) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TeXtra episode 110 is the last for Natali Del Conte. Starting in January she'll be doing TV for CNET (NASDAQ:CNET) from New York, wrecking our plans to turn the videogenic journalist into a gossip reporter. Besides showing a nifty Google Maps feature (we didn't know about it, either) Natali throws us a going-away scream in the final credits. Hope they let you do that on Good Morning America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My editor comes from the world of magazines, not tech companies. So he has an odd habit of leaving early before holidays. "Most offices will be closing at 1pm," he announces in our chat room. Or, "Remember our readers are focused on leaving early today." What he really means: Owen Thomas will be leaving early. Seeya, boss! For the rest of us, the SiteMeter is about to cross 100,000 and Ted from Uncov shows no sign of letting up on me via IM. Any real geek knows this is the most wonderful time of the year -- all the lusers are logged out and the network is wide open for business. We'll be rockin' the failboats right into January. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Look for yourself. Apple's world-changing TV console, introduced just a few months ago, is completely absent from the landing page of its holiday gift guide. It didn't even make the photo montage. Apple TV is hiding below the fold on a second-tier "iPod Gifts" page, with lower billing than a set of Bose headphones. I only noticed because I was moving old mail out of my inbox. I found a bunch of messages from fanboys warning me to repent, repent my published disinterest in the device , because quote "cable TV will be dead by Christmas." Just like record companies! [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

You're a spaz with the ribbons and paper. And of course, as an engineer it's all about optimizing for my time , etc. Don't show up with sloppy giftwrap this year. Take your gifts to the nearest poshtastic shopping center and let someone who knows what they're doing handle it. I called ahead for you, and Gridskipper helpfully mapped out the coordinates . [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

"Don't slam the bridge on your way out," chortled this morning's San Francisco Chronicle above a photo of the departing Cosco Busan , which hit the Bay Bridge on its way out from Oakland in November and spilled 58,000 gallons of oily fuel into San Francisco Bay. But as a wannabe engineer, I'm fascinated by the cargo ships that come and go through the Golden Gate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]