Well the party is officially on, bitches — just check out the photo above, taken outside Yelp headquarters a few minutes ago. You thought Groupon, Pandora and Zynga were overpriced? You thought Facebook was too cocky when they talked about a $100 billion valuation? Well listen up. Yelp just went public and its shares are selling at 20x the company’s 2011 revenues.

Sure, there are some naysayers, like wet blanket Henry Blodget of Business Insider, who thinks this is nuts, or a sign of the apocalypse, or something. Henry, you just don’t get it, do you? You’re still stuck in the 90s. But the world has changed. The old metrics don’t apply anymore. We’re not talking about car companies or tire companies or food companies. We’re not talking about companies that actually make things. These are social Web sites. This isn’t about making a profit. This is about changing the world! Can you even remember what the world was like in the days before Yelp, when you had to find a new restaurant purely by chance, without being able to consult a Web site where young people with no real expertise or context could review an ethnic cuisine that they’ve just tasted for the first time? And you’re down on Yelp because — sniff — you don’t like the look of the financials? You’re missing the forest for the trees, dude. Seriously.

Henry, the other tech blogs will be telling you this soon enough, but let me go first and just say that you are a stupid, corrupt, moronic moron, a dumb lazy hack who is too lazy to do his homework and sounds like every other member of the mainstream media establishment that you so obviously want to be part of. You think it’s nuts that Yelp did only $80 million in revenue last year and they lost money on that and now they’re now valued at $1.5 billion? You think that’s expensive? Because I think that if anything, that price is way too cheap! But go ahead and make your big predictions. You and all your rich stupid cronies on Wall Street will be crying in your beer when the valuation hits $15 billion by the end of this year. Mark my words, dipshit.

Also: even if the stock is not cheap, we should all be happy for Yelp because Yelp is awesome and I know some people who work there and they are totally hardworking and high-integrity people who are 110% committed to changing the world, and frankly we’re all part of the tech community and it’s our job to cheer this shit on, and if you can’t be happy with Yelp’s success than you are a hateful hater who hates tech and you really have no business writing about it, you big old East Coast party pooper. Plus, remember: you’re a venture-funded company too, so if Yelp can pave the way for your overpriced exit, all the better, amiright?

Now I am going to put on my party hat and blast some Prince. Then I will go find a snowy parking lot and do some donuts in my car while firing a pistol out my window like Yosemite Sam! Happy Friday, fools. Go Yelp!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnuijDieOvY

For some reason I can’t find an embeddable version of this video where idiots in a focus group give their suggestions for how to improve “The Wizard of Oz.” But you can watch it here on Gawker. The really funny thing is that these comments aren’t so far-fetched. I spent 18 months working on a TV show in Hollywood and got comments like this all the time. Worse yet, these “notes” weren’t coming from focus group members. They were coming from network executives. We had to pretend to listen to them. Sometimes we even had to take a stab at accommodating them. I was told that this is par for the course in the TV business. Good times! I look back on the whole experience like a bad dream.

Yesterday I wrote an article about Robert Scoble trying to follow in the footsteps of Michael Arrington and go from blogging to angel investing. Scoble is crying foul and calling this a “drive-by shooting.” He’s ranting about the horrible old “mainstream media,” of which I am a member, and he now refers to me as a “journalist,” in quotes, which I’m guessing is meant to be derogatory. He’s also rushing around, blasting out sound and fury everywhere, posting stuff on his blog, on other blogs, on Google+. He’s an impressive one-man band, and it’s a clever strategy: you fill the air with smoke and noise and loads of anti-aircraft flak, and maybe you can distract people, or make this into a story about me rather than a story about him.

First off, this is not some fight between me and Scoble. I like Scoble, and if he can find a way to get rich off his blog, good for him. The great opportunity of blogging has always been that, for the lucky few, a big payday awaits. Furthermore, while Scoble may be one of the world’s most relentless and shameless self-promoters, he is also, by all accounts, a genuinely nice guy.

Nor is this some argument between mainstream journalists and independent bloggers, at least not on my part. I’ve been on both sides, and I don’t think one is better than the other.

The story that I find interesting and worth reporting is that some popular tech bloggers are finding new ways to make money, and these ways usually involve becoming entwined with the same venture capitalists whose portfolio companies they write about, which raises some interesting issues.

Now on to the matter of hand, which is what, if anything, Scoble has been up to.

Last week I was talking to a top partner at a venture capital firm. We were talking about other things, but in the course of the conversation this partner mentioned that last year his firm got a call from a guy at another VC firm asking if they’d like to invest in a Scoble project.

My guy says: “I didn’t talk to Scoble directly, but rather someone who said they talked to Scoble and they were seriously considering investing, and wanted to know if we were too. We weren’t.”

My source is a credible guy, well-known and with a good reputation. I don’t think he would just make this stuff up.

I also spoke to a principal at his firm who was on the same call. The principal backs up the account and says it wasn’t clear whether Scoble was trying to raise money for an angel fund, like Arrington did with CrunchFund, or raise money for a blog, as Sarah Lacy did with PandoDaily, or some hybrid of the two.

“But the idea was he was going to raise some money and spin out of Rackspace. He’d carry the Scoble brand forward out of Rackspace,” the principal says. “We backed away because it didn’t feel right. This idea of venture capitalists putting money into journalists, it just feels like there’s a line being crossed.”

So let’s assume this VC firm really did get a call asking if they wanted to invest in a Scoble project. Is it possible (or likely) that someone was going around soliciting money on Scoble’s behalf without Scoble’s knowledge or consent?

This, apparently, is what Scoble would have us believe.

But the principal who received the pitch says, “There was way too much detail for Scoble not to know about it. There were terms. I don’t see how he could have not known. My guess is he either put it on hold after the shit hit the fan on Arrington’s CrunchFund project, or he couldn’t raise the money, or maybe he just changed his mind.”

But wait, there’s more.

In addition to whatever happened last year, just last month Scoble participated in talks at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, with people who are trying to organize a global angel group.

The group is led by Rich Stromback, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur from Michigan. The working name is Piano Bar Partners. (There’s a famous piano bar at Davos where people schmooze.)

I talked to Rich Stromback yesterday and again today. He confirmed that Scoble expressed interest in joining the group, and says he’d love to have Scoble on board.

“There is kind of a trend where Michael Arrington and other people who cover the industry and are knowledgeable about the space, it’s almost a natural progression that they would go into angel investing,” Stromback says. “I would imagine that ever since Arrington did CrunchFund a lot of tech bloggers in the space have been looking at doing the same thing.”

Stromback says tech bloggers like Scoble see a lot of of early-stage companies and have a grasp of the industry. He says Scoble could add value to the Piano Bar angel group because he has a wide network of contacts, sees a lot of early stage companies — “deal flow,” it’s called — and some of the big name investors who are interested in joining Piano Bar would trust Scoble to help them evaluate new tech companies. “There’s a lot of knowledge there” he said, meaning in Scoble’s head.

Stromback says Piano Bar Partners is still in the very early stages and “there’s nothing formal at this point.” But he expects it will come together, and says some big names are involved.

After talking to Stromback, I got a call from someone who saw Scoble meeting with Stromback and a bunch of VCs at Davos. They were huddled together in a meeting room, engaged in what looked like a serious conversation. “Scoble was taking notes, and he was not doing so as a reporter,” my source says, adding that later he talked to some of the people in the room and learned about the plans for Piano Bar Partners. He specifically asked about Scoble, and was told that Scoble had been included as a potential member.

This apparently is what Scoble was referring to when I asked him (via email) about angel investing and he replied this way: “Hah. There is some bar talk about this but nothing official yet. I am interested but not anywhere close and certainly I wouldn’t be managing it.”

When I asked Scoble who would manage the fund, he responded, “I have no idea. It never got to that point. I doubt I would be more than a pretty face on any such fund.”

Call me crazy, but I read those email messages to mean that Scoble had talked to people about doing this, is interested in doing this, and while there’s “nothing official yet,” he has already envisioned a role for himself as a “pretty face” on a fund.

Scoble, however, characterizes his comments as a denial. Which is weird, because it seems to me that a denial would be something like, “No, I never met with anyone to talk about joining an angel group,” or “Yes, I got an offer to join an angel group, but I turned it down.”

But Scoble didn’t say that. Nor did he say, at Davos, what a journalist from the New York Times or any other publication would have to say when offered a chance to get involved with an investment group while continuing to write about tech companies: “Thanks, I’m flattered, but I can’t do that.”

And that’s fine. Scoble is an independent blogger and he’s not bound by the rules that apply to newspaper reporters. As I wrote in my post yesterday, Godspeed to you, Robert Scoble. You’ve built an audience with your blog, you’ve built a wide network among Valley entrepreneurs, so why not go make money with that?

But at the same time, why not cop to it? Why pretend that last summer people weren’t getting hit up for money for a Scoble project that apparently sputtered out? Why downplay the fact that last month you were hooking up at Davos with guys who are trying to start an angel group?

Why go blustering and huffing and puffing and making loads of noise and hurling accusations and playing the victim? Why cry foul and paint me as a liar or a drive-by shooter for reporting what I’ve heard — which turns out, in fact, to be true?

People did get those phone calls last summer. You did sit in those meetings at Davos.

Maybe you haven’t succeeded at cashing in, but can’t say you haven’t tried.

So calm down, Robert Scoble. Take a deep breath.

Whatever you end up doing, whether it’s angel investing, or raising venture money to start a blog, or staying at Rackspace, or just erecting huge billboards with pictures of yourself all over Silicon Valley and then driving around looking at them, with Rocky Barbanica videotaping — whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be great at it, and you’ll deserve every bit of your success. I wish you the best. Seriously.

Yeah. Good grief. Fucking Scoble. I just posted an article about it here on the Daily Beast.

Prompted in part by the back-and-forth that started with the “Hit men” article on this blog last week, Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times asks, “Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective?” You can maybe guess the answer but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Hiltzik talked to Michael Arrington and Sarah Lacy and got their perspective, which is that this is the new normal, at least in Silicon Valley.

Hiltzik’s money quote comes in the last paragraph:

It would be unfair to suggest that tech bloggers aren’t earnest about trying to produce good reporting on Silicon Valley. They haven’t exactly sold their souls by taking money from the people they cover. But what they have sold was worth a lot more than the money they got for it.

It’s a great article but it makes one mistake, which is to think that these guys are journalists, and that they care about things that journalists care about. They’re not, and they don’t.

That’s the headline my latest article for the Daily Beast about the alarming rise in mobile malware, particularly on the Android platform. This is based on a new study by Juniper Networks, which sells anti-malware software. You can find the article here.

You wheel it around on a cart, and when you get home you can use it as a TV. Not really. But they are supposedly working on a 10.1-inch Galaxy Note phone. Which is almost as nuts, when you think about it.

In the wake of the Path privacy fiasco, and after receiving a letter from meddlesome Congress dorks, an Apple spokesman tells John Paczhczhzkowski of AllThingsD that any iOS apps that are uploading user address book information are in violation of Apple guidelines and that from now on any app that wants to use your contact info will have to ask for explicit permission. Perfect response! Even better than the one from Path.

It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don’t seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous. And then you start thinking maybe you could find a way to cash in on this gold rush. But how do you make gobs of money when your only marketable skill involves writing blog posts?

This is the conundrum, but lately I’ve been thinking of a business plan that sounds like it could work. First you establish yourself as an “influencer” by posting a lot of noisy stuff on a blog and building an audience. Then you need to “monetize” your influence. You tell all the VCs in the Valley that you are starting an “angel fund,” and you ask each one to give you, say, $500,000. They go along because (a) $500,000 is pocket change to these guys — so small, in fact, that they don’t care if they lose every penny of it; and (b) you’re an influential hack and they don’t want to piss you off; and (c) they figure you can maybe write nice things about their portfolio companies, which would be especially useful if/when one of their portfolio companies gets caught up in some scandal; and (d) if any independent journalists write something critical about one of the VC’s portfolio companies, you can can use your influential personal blog to savagely attack those journalists and try to discredit them.

So you raise $10 million or $20 million, and now you’re an “angel investor.” Step two is you go around to startups and tell them you’d really like to invest in their companies. Not big investments — maybe $100,000. They don’t need your money; they can raise money from anyone, and usually you’re one of 10 or 20 small investors in a round. But the value you add is that you’re an “influencer” and can be helpful when it comes to getting good press or offsetting bad press. (See paragraph above.)

You might think of this as a new kind of PR, only you’re way meaner and more effective than a PR flack, and instead of getting paid in billable hours, you’re taking payment in angel-round equity, which in a few years should be worth 10-100x whatever those billable hours would have been worth.

In fact this is a new version of an old racket that used to be practiced in the tech space by guys who called themselves “independent analysts.” Their deal, back in the day, was this: “Pay seven figures a year to buy a corporate subscription to my newsletter and I’ll say nice things about your company, and when the press needs a quote, I’ll be there to puff you up. Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.” Most big companies paid up and considered it a cost of doing business.

Well, this is the model I was thinking about, but it turns out someone beat me to it — it’s called CrunchFund, and in the past few days we’ve seen the machine in action, and it is indeed a beautiful thing.

This started when Nick Bilton of the New York Times posted an item criticizing Path, which had been caught up in a firestorm when it emerged that Path had been uploading entire address books from people’s iPhones. Bilton made the legitimate point that it’s now become a routine for Valley companies to do something sleazy, get caught, then quickly apologize and get hailed as heroes by the Valley for the quality of their apology. (It’s all about being able to fake the sincerity, as George Burns once said.) Bilton’s point was that Path didn’t just grab those address books by accident. They did it on purpose. It probably took weeks of programming. To just say, “Whoops! Sorry!” seems a bit disingenuous.

Anyway — Path comes under fire, and guess who rides to the rescue? Michael Arrington, who runs CrunchFund, an investor in Path, launches a blistering critique of Bilton himself, comparing him to a pit bull who attacks a dog that is already lying on its back, defenseless, saying that Bilton’s column was “a safe way to do business, but not very noble.”

Almost before you could stop throwing up in your mouth at the idea of Michael Arrington accusing a Times journalist of being less than noble, Arrington’s partner at CrunchFund, MG Siegler, weighed in with his own attack in which he basically said Bilton is a nice guy who was either too lazy or too busy to do a good job. From this Siegler leaps off into a long diatribe about how most tech reporting is utter bullshit written by idiots who are all in a hurry to chase page views.

So: Path comes under fire, and straight away, the paid hit men – Arrington and his sidekick, Matty the Angry Chihuahua — spring into action to smear Bilton and try to discredit him.

I’ll give them this much. They’re good at what they do. Siegler especially is a nasty little ankle-biter who has developed some level of expertise in launching ad hominem attacks. He did one on me a while back. Then he did one on Josh Topolsky at The Verge.

Now it’s Nick Bilton’s turn.

Thing is, just last October Arrington was praising Bilton as a superhero tech journalist and “our number one desired hire” when Arrington was at TechCrunch. Even funnier is that in that post Arrington was “reporting” that Bilton had been offered “$1.5 million+” to leave the New York Times and join CBS/CNET. Thing is, that wasn’t true. And, Arrington had been told, explicitly, by people at CBS/CNET that his numbers were incorrect. But he went ahead and ran the story anyway, knowing his numbers were wrong.

Now Arrington and Siegler have appointed themselves the watchdogs of tech journalism, eager to point out the irresponsible and inaccurate reporting that they see all around them. This might ring a little less hollow if they hadn’t been such egregious violators themselves, and if they weren’t writing this stuff to protect the people they’re in bed with financially.

Siegler also went after Ryan Tate of Gawker, who had criticized Path’s CEO, Dave Morin, for saying, a while back, that Path didn’t collect personal data from users.

Siegler says Morin was telling the truth — because Path didn’t start collecting data until after Morin had issued that denial. In other words, when Morin said Path didn’t collect data he didn’t mean they would never do it, just that they weren’t doing it right then.

Nice, right?

But of course Ryan Tate is the bad guy here. He’s the nasty, unethical, irresponsible sleazebag in this situation — not the CEO who said he didn’t collect data right before he started doing exactly that.

From this Siegler transitions into a rambling hand-wringing essay about how tech journalism has become so sloppy and terrible because you have all these bloggers who don’t really know anything and they’re just trying to generate page views by writing something that isn’t necessarily true but will get people to click.

What makes this so hilarious is that Siegler is by far the biggest click-whore in all of tech blogging, a guy whose only real skill, in fact, is the kind of page-view-chasing he now derides.

If nothing else, he is entertaining, though it’s often inadvertent. Last year he took time out of his busy schedule to explain to younger bloggers how he he had accomplished his meteoric rise to the top of the blogging world and become the greatest blogger of all time and then had become bored with blogging and had set out to find new challenges. This was done without a hint of irony or, apparently, even a shred of self-awareness, which made it all the more fun. The real secret to Siegler’s traffic, however, is that he is pals with Gabe Rivera, who routinely drives traffic to Siegler by giving his pieces top billing on Techmeme. (That’s right, kids. Techmeme is rigged.)

Siegler is constantly mocked by readers who regard him as a laughable troll — a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He is a self-styled “big thinker” who compares Google to movie villains (Le Chiffre, Voldemort, Harvey Dent) and who, in all of his manic blogging, has left a string of cock-ups and false “scoops” behind him.

Last year he generated lots of traffic for TechCrunch with a “scoop” about the Amazon Kindle Fire. He said he’d actually used one — but then he got almost every fact wrong, including the name of the product. Later, he defended himself by saying that, yes, his original post got the facts wrong, but in a later “update” (that’s blogger-speak for “correction”) he fixed all that. So there.

Then there’s the post in December where MG got into his Angry Chihuahua mood again and thought he’d uncovered some kind of huge conspiracy when he accused Google’s Android chief, Andy Rubin, of deleting a tweet. A few days later Siegler had to recant (sans apology, of course) when it turned out that, um, nope, Rubin hadn’t done that. Of course there’s a simple way to avoid bonehead moves like this — you do the reporting before you publish the accusation, not after.

Then there’s the case where Matty got all upset and threw a tantrum like some kind of junior high school kid because Google+ wouldn’t let him use a profile photo in which he’s giving the finger. His stock in trade is the rant where he declares that “XYZ is dead!” (this week it’s tech journalism) or “If you think XYZ, you’re a fucking idiot!”

Now he thinks it’s wrong to go chasing clicks and page views with sensationalized garbage. How odd and inspiring it is that Siegler’s profound change of heart should happen after Path, a company in which CrunchFund has invested, is getting criticized.

Arrington and Siegler can try to play journalism police all they want, but the fact is they have turned themselves into hacks for hire and as such have lost all credibility. They’re not the only ones working this racket. Now we have PandoDaily, a new tech blog crated by their TechCrunch pal Sarah Lacy and funded by CrunchFund and a bunch of other VCs and angels whose companies PandoDaily aims to cover.

PandoDaily is working the same deal as CrunchFund. You invest in our site, and now we’re business partners, so at the very least you’ll have a friendly media outlet whose “influence” you can call upon.

These folks will say they never promised any special treatment to the VCs when they went around with their hands out asking for money. Maybe that’s true. But I have talked to people on the other side of those transactions and this is definitely what the VCs were thinking when they were writing the checks.

The line from one VC firm that invested in CrunchFund was this: “A few hundred thousand is a rounding error for us. We don’t care if we never see the money again. It’s so small it doesn’t even affect our results and isn’t even considered material enough to be reported to our limited partners. And it couldn’t hurt to have Mike as a friend.”

Separately another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech blogs that were proposing a business model he described as “hush money.” Potential investors were being offered “most favored nation” status for themselves and their portfolio companies if they put money into the site.

This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.

The most delicious part of Siegler’s rant on the tech media is the final paragraph:

The only thing I can offer is the advice to take everything you read in the technology press with a grain of salt. Perhaps several. The likelihood that at least part of it is nonsense is very strong. And stronger by the day.

For once, I could not agree more.

So I have a story in this week’s Newsweek about Workday, a cool software company in California that might do an IPO later this year. For some reason when the story ran online on the Daily Beast this morning, the photo of the company’s two CEOs had the wrong caption — and identified these two guys as effing goddamned diamond thieves! I was not even aware of this until the PR rep for Workday called to inquire. I contacted the Beast copy desk and they’ve fixed it. But the original was so priceless that I had to save a screen shot. (See below.) I do hope the guys at Workday have a sense of humor. If so, they’ll have this pinned up around the office today. If not, um, sorry.