Techcrunch author MG Siegler reminded the hole world and every TC reader of what we all already knew here at JOAB: nobody cares about A-Listers. Sadly his reminder to Jason Calacanis is an epic post, that long it might have been written by JCal himself. Luckily we only need to quote MG (with minor editing) to resume his entry, and the influence of A-Listers on the real world market:

While Calacanis may have spent $20,000 on Apple products over the years, everyone else has spent billions upon billions more.

If before we weren’t interested at all by Shiny Media things have changed over the last weeks. Let’s be honest, why would us cowboys and muppets have bothered to follow a bunch of (not so) hot geek chicks and gadget bloggers who brought nothing to the party but occasionally were quoted in teh local UK press? Indeed, I couldn’t think of any reason to read those sites either.

But life changes and Shiny Media went in administration. Less than 2 months after new blogger gigs were available and only weeks after new editors were announced. Ever since then the blogosphere has been following Chris Price and his team. Much has been written since then and the network made a return as Shiny Trends. More →

Ever since the creation of tinternet our society has seen an influx of so-called A-Listers, basically people no-one cares about or would care about, but who managed it to crave out a little corner of fame.

C.K. Sample III is one of those. According to his about page he is Director of Content Marketing for a company and Editor for another company. Previously he enjoyed to crave his fame corner as left, right and 2-ply toilet paper boy for Twitter and BS blowhard Calacanis. Not standing in the shadow of JC and hence spotlights, days for webreties like CKSIII must be hard and any trick will be allowed to show, tell us how important they are. Just like CK’s tweet about having the latest, all over the web reported, gadget since several weeks already. We here at JOAB yawns, CK finds it important to share with us in 140 characters or less:

trying to figure out why all the gadget blogs are re-reporting iStubz cables http://bit.ly/rBHQk I’ve had one of these for over a month

In a rare update our former BFF Scoble has updated his blog to let you know that You are SO unfollowed. Together with another 107k tweeps.

We almost felt sad about this, but then we remembered that we unfollowed Scoble years ago already and our twitter life improved suddenly.

I can not imagine that it will surprise you when if I told you that I used to be a big and loyal Valleywag reader. The original Nick Douglas and afterwards Nick Denton Valleywag was funny. Until a certain Owen Thomas took over the site and things went downhill. Snark became yawns and jokes were only insidery anymore. No full-on attacks.

Nowadays Valleywag is your Twitterwatch maintained by Ryan Tate. Today editor of the former snark blog revealed his post value: $1.50.

At least according to Sponsored Tweets by IZEA. That is true, for only $1.50 you can now also hire a Valleywag editor and make them write for you. 140 characters, disclosure inclusive.

Valleywag Emeritus Nick Douglas is smarter, he makes you write 140 characters all while he cashes in. That is why the original Valleywag was better: smarter and snarkier people ran the site.

We are no big fans of oversharing here at JOAB. Somehow we wish to know when things did actually go wrong with the internet. Admitted, blogs and Myspace made the internet a playground for anyone and one can only think back of the good old days in nostalgia.

Thinking I sorta liked it when you had to learn perl, apache, and html(link) to smear the web with dumbassery. It was a modest barrier to entry.
Merlin Mann on twitter

Nowadays with the iPhone and Apple’s, often wrong policy on blocking or removing applications from the AppStore, things have reached a new level. Here’s a little PSA for all you oversharers: I do not care how much you like or dislike your phone, I do not care how much you love your mobile provider, just get a new phone and new contract. STFU!

Or move to LiveJournal if you want to be all emo about your phone

And to make things better, now even our bestest friend, Michael Arrington, feels the need to announce that he’s changing phone! Cry me a frakkin’ river.

Regular JOAB contributor Andrew G. Rosen reported over at the Blog Herald the findins of a survey by SAHM and Mommyblog network BlogHer.

The conclusion of said survey is rather simple.

Blogmums to run JOAB!

Wait, let’s try that again. More →

With the announcement that JOAB beloved Jeremy Wright stepped down at B5Media we are sad to report that good ol’fashioned Jack of All Blogs died in the same breath.

Back in the days JOAB was snark blog par excellence, mainly excelling in it’s offensive style. Ran and edited by a snark master who we rather prefer to ignare and totally blank nowadays, JOAB was feared and every problogger or A-lister in the ‘about blogging’ scene became the victim. But times have changed and all these bloggers have become a snorefest. With Jeremy’s change in position the last of the failbloggers has died and taken down Jack of All Blogs at the same time.
Before I dive in to an identity crisis after yesterday’s event, I would love to thank JOAB’s preferred victims.

More →

The thing with blogging is that people tend to overshare. Even in today’s people tend to share way too much online, on their blog.

For probloggers there’s another issue: disclosure. Here at JOAB we obviously couldn’t give a rat’s a$$ about disclosure. Proud we are about it as well, because imagine how silly things are if you become one of those people who really tell everything they are not supposed to even share with their friends, unless they really want to. Today I stumbled on one of these examples. TUAW’s Robert Palmer has since a long time been running a series about His Dad, the switcher and recently bought his dad’s switch mini Mac. Now he hooked it up to a new TV and tis is where the all telling comes in:

Arrington’s at it again. Once more he has taken one of the more dangerous and opinionated bloggers of the market and hired over at Techcrunch. After Duncan Riley (who started at TC on May 2nd 2007, shortly after failed attempt to hire Uncov author Ted Dzubia, this time it’s Paul Carr who will join TC with a weekly column.

This is a well known and often applied strategy within blog networks and even some of the people at our network, Splashpress Media, were hired in the same vain. Our own Franky, now Assistant Editor for Splashpress, started here at JOAB after a bashing of JOAB.

The reason why many site and network owners look in to hiring their biggest opponents is simple: silence your rival and let them show what they can do. Let them prove how good they are, while bringing the money in for you.

But is Paul Carr really a danger? No he isn’t, he is a columnist. But that is the reason why Arrington hired him. Carr is not afraid to leave snide comments in his column, ridiculizing A-Listers. And we all know how fragile Arrington’s ego is. Carr should have worked for Denton and spearheaded a reborn Valleywag.
Maybe we should start a tipjar and bring Carr to JOAB: Bringing lots to the conversation, nothing to work.