The body of James Kim, a senior CNet editor who left to find help two days ago after he and his family had been stranded in the Oregon wilderness for more than a week has been found today with the help of helicopters. Mr. Kim’s family was rescued with little wear or tear two days ago, and CNet has further details of the Kim family ordeal, but suffice it to say, its a sheer tragedy.

Sadly, it seems like when news like this breaks over the blogosphere, there don’t seem to be any happy endings; Rob Scoble and Shel Israel wrote about a similar tragedy in their book, Naked Conversations, about an individual lost to the wilderness, which found its way to the blogosphere and through it, the mainstream media.

I didn’t know James Kim, but he seemed like a great guy, and the-every-geek who made good on a major tech network. There are other things floating around the blogosphere this afternoon, but today, my prayers are with him and his family.

UPDATE 1 @ 0032h: For some evidence on this topic check this particular Digg that wasn’t deleted, but was buried. In the comments there is chatter about the Digg submission that was obliterated, an admission from the Digger who’s account was deleted and his reasons for posting the results of a phishing attack

So, let’s tally the frontpage gaffe’s for Digg these past few weeks. First, there was the fake PS3 story about over 650 000 PS3 units that had to be recalled; next, there was the the spammer who profited big time from getting his post from a splog onto the front page (weight loss tips from a dental site? come ON).

Well, all that was minor beans compared to this.

Thanks to some quick detective work over at Zdnitchit, there was another front page funtime story last night around 11pm; because the submitter and the post have been obliterated (not buried), we’ll have to take his word on things — but for the amount of detail he’s coming up, it sounds too amazing to believe its made up.

What happened?

The cliffnotes version is that a phisher’s attacks on 6000 MySpace accounts — email accounts, passwords and all — was published as a post on some blog; that blog was posted to Digg, exposing it to hundreds, perhaps thousands of visitors before it was taken down (and had over 200 votes, apparently)

Some people, before it was obliterated, decided to test the account names and passwords by actually going into myspace and fooling around with those accounts.

It worked.

One commenter (before the whole thing was allegedly blown up) also mentioned that many people use the same passwords for all kinds of things — including PayPal accounts … which you log in with your email address.

For a privacy disaster that makes the AOL Data Valdez scandal a few months ago look like a piss in the pond, I hope three examples in as many weeks is enough “proof” that Digg needs to button down on its front page news.

In a quickly shifting series of personnel moves, (read: a bloodbath of firings), Jason Calacanis, it seems like, has quit AOL – perhaps in protest of one of his closest mentors getting the axe (which, it seems, was quite dull — and required a few hacks).

Which means, he’s left Netscape — one of the oldest web properties on the net, transforming it from aging news behemoth, into new age social bookmarking bonanza. Some say it’ll never be as good as Digg, since it is poaching top Diggers, and uses a heavy ediorial hand; others claim its more like the “big leagues”, since its “navigators” actually get paid. In fact, this news rumour news falls on the relatively new news that whole batch of navigators recently got hired.

My “inside sources” (since I”m not a navigator myself), claim that he’s not answering any calls from the internal list host and publicly he’s not denying it. So what are we left with? The probable leaving of Mr. Calacanis from the ship he has piloted from the beginning.

While the wild speculation can begin about who is going to be taking the helm of Netscape (will it be an existing Navigator?!), if Netscape continues in the form its in, you can bet it has lost a personality that keeps Netscape in the news, and people interested in the company.

The alternative, of course, is that AOL, Netscape’s parent company, shutters Netscape as it is — since it doesn’t have the same evangelists within the company. No more paid navigators, no more social bookmarking, no more “mature” rival to Digg and Reddit. After all, since its on an advertising model, a short term executive might look at the 4 month old experiment and say “yikes, the traffic has actually continued to drop!”

Keep your eyes peeled and ears to the ground folks, — methinks that these “personnel” changes bode ill for many other people at AOL … and might we see Netscape heading right to the shoals shortly after J-cal leaves it rudderless?

There’s a writeup in Businessweek about how Jeff Bezos has a “risky bet” going on with Amazon — how they’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D that has yet to pay off, while the “core” business seems to be flagging with questionable marketing strategies (no advertising, free shipping).

What’s really, really fascinating — and important — is what that R&D is going into.

While the rest of the blogosphere, startups, and their hommies rap on about the explosion of web services — some of which may or may not exist, and some may or may not make money, even now — Mr. Bezos has quietly gone about creating a “WebOS”.

That’s right. He’s taken the nuts and bolts behind Amazon’s engine, and has created systems that are easily packaged and used by engineers and programmers to make web applications.

Building scalable and efficient code is hard; Amazon is going to make it easy – while making a buck in the process.

If you’ve ignored this ol’ web1.0 warhorse (I’m guilty, too!), get ready, because I predict its about to leap right into the web2.0 fray in the most amazing way.

(more…)