With Nick Denton’s backing, 22-year-old Nick Douglas chronicles the not necessarily glamorous lives of Silicon Valley’s prometheans in his Valleywag blog. The LA Times reports (requires registration):
Some techsters hope the site will undercut the image of Silicon Valley as a place filled with pocket protectors and taped-up eyeglasses, where it’s all work and no play for the people creating the next generation of gadgets and Web products.
Alas, Valleywag may do more to reinforce that less-than-charismatic image than to kill it.
Page Six it ain’t. While gossip columns at the New York Post and other papers are filled with celebrity sightings and antics, Valleywag is gossip by a geek, for geeks.
The juiciest scoops include photos of a Yahoo Inc. executive’s Mauritian vacation with his fiancee and a Google founder in his bathrobe, video of Tom Cruise arm-wrestling with Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel during the movie star’s visit to the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters and a news item about an Internet executive being tossed from a bar for bellowing drunkenly in a Scottish accent.
“The idea of Silicon Valley people as celebrities is always going to be tough,” said Kyle Bunch, a blogger and Douglas’ pal. “I almost feel, to some level, like they’re a couple of rock stars short.”