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My friends are on the Internet!

August 1, 2006 on 4:29 pm | In friends, work | 1 Comment

David Morgenstern sent me and Raines this amusing link to a video on ValleyWag. Where should I start with the explanations?

1) David Morgenstern is a dear friend, former coworker, and fellow alumna of BMUG. (Funny aside: www.BMUG.com is now for sale!)

1a) While volunteering at meetings and geek dinners, all BMUGers of a certain age got to know John “Captain Crunch” Draper, the semi-infamous hacker/creepy guy in the background of the above video. That’s why David sent it to me.

1b) It’s odd to note in retrospect that all of us college kids in BMUG (and some high schoolers) knew that Draper liked to get unusually physical with young men. (Nothing serious, but no other old guy was asking for or offering backrubs.) And we just kept a wary eye and snickered about it. I guess communities get used to errant behavior within bounds.

2) ValleyWag (a blog offering up frequent snarky comments on Silicon Valley life and the low-rent celebrity that goes with success in technology) has been really taking the piss out of ZDNet — the Web site that I run at CNET. Most especially the ZDNet Blogs.

2a) ValleyWag has made vicious fun of one of our first bloggers, Steve Gillmor, who recently resigned (in his blog!) from blogging on ZDNet.

3) In a followup to his resignation post, Gillmor explained his recent history of hopping from firm to firm in tech media, all as explanation for his latest hop. In the post, he takes a swipe at his former editors at eWeek:

“As with InfoWorld, I was fired for cause, in this case cause I just didn’t give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about.”

3a) That “online pinhead” was David Morgenstern.

3b) Matthew Rothenberg, another dear friend and former editor-in-chief of eWeek, takes a velvet-gloved swipe right back at Gillmor in the comments section of the ZDNet blog.

 Who can keep up?