By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Jim Finn, the former head of comms at Oracle was in town recently, he's now with IBM. We caught up downtown over dim sum and I got to hear about his new gig. BTW, if Jim ever gets to write a book about his experiences in Silicon Valley, go buy it.

Jim started off at IBM and is happy to be back on the East Coast fulltime and not having to make the punishing weekend commute to be with his family.

Interestingly, Jim and Andy Lark, the former head of comms at Sun Microsystems were recently seen breakfasting together. Both started at Sun and Oracle within weeks of each other, and both announced their departures within weeks of each other. (BTW, Andy has promised me the scoop on his new venture.)

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Micro media mogul Nick Denton (Gawker Media) swung into SF Thursday, and our sleepy fishing village roused itself and a decent crew assembled at the smoky Place Pigalle in Hayes Valley to catch up with the great man.

My good buddies David Galbraith (wists.com) and Om Malik (GigaOm.com) were there, as were a bunch of other local geeks and entrepreneurs. Nick asked me who would be a good gossip columnist for Silicon Valley, I said Chris Nolan, (ChrisNolan.com — politics from left to right) but she won't do it because she prefers writing about politics. I told Nick I had SiliconValleyGawker.com all ready to go for him.

Gossip doesn't interest me much because it's easy to do. I do write some "gossipy" entries but there are some larger, more seminal types of media ventures to be done first, IMHO.

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I bumped into Gaurav Dhillon one of my favorite valley CEOs. Gaurav left Informatica about a year ago and I lost track of him so it was wonderful to reconnect. Gaurav is now living in San Francisco and said he spent much of the past year traveling in Africa and other exotic locales. Now, he says he is ready to get back into the game.

He recently moved into offices on Market St. and is looking at ideas in media. Barely 40 years old, Gaurav says, "I figure I've got at least one more great company in me." He built up Informatica from garage startup to public company and led Informatica through the toughest part of the toughest downturn the valley has ever seen. And he's coming back for more.

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My good buddy Alicia (Lish) Nieva-Woodgate is leaving Mediabolic and is the new head of communications at Opsware, the Marc Andreessen-founded company (used to be known as LoudCloud.)

Opsware has been building up quite a bit of momentum over the past year or so. And its message of IT automation services is a lot easier to tell now that we are all comfortable with such concepts. I remember when LoudCloud launched, it was a difficult story to communicate, even its PR company could not explain what it did.

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James Hong, one of the founders of Hot or Not, the simple, highly popular people rating site, tells me that he has left the company and his co-founder, Jim Young is CEO and running things. http://www.hotornot.com/pages/about.html

Even though the founders of Hot or Not are famous for raking in millions in revenues and working just one day per week, he says running the business was stressful. "If there was the slightest dip in traffic, I'd want to know why," he says.

When did you leave, I asked? "About five months ago, but we don't have any place to announce it." Hey, it's news if you didn't know about it!

James is sporting an athletic build, obviously time well spent in the gym. He says otherwise, "I'm just buying clothes now that fit me." A summer in hot hot New York City beckons.

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Hacks are flocking to blogging as the print business model continues to crumble ... the latest is San Jose Mercury tech journalist Dean Takahashi, ex-Wall Street Journal, ex-Red Herring. Dean is writing about video gaming with colleague Mike "Nooch" Antonucci. Check out http://deanandnooch.blogspot.com

(BTW, Dean, Blogspot took forever to load the page, it is always really slow — let us host it for you for free. Ping me...)

Also, I have to mention my buddy Tom Abate and his blog, mini media. Tom is well known to many as the tech columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and then biotech columnist. He's still at the Chronicle and very much interested in the emerging media technologies, as are we. Here is his blog: http://minimediaguy.blogspot.com/

(Same thing Tom, I can't get blogspot to load the page, let us host you for free. Ping me...)

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Speaking of hacks, the brain drain at Cnet News.com continues. The latest to leave is Rick Shim, the personal technologies editor. It's his last day today and he heads off to a market research firm.

That's about eight veteran hacks to leave within the past couple or three months. Ouch, that makes life tough for those remaining. It means more work and replacements are tough to get and slow to build their productivity.

Also, Jim Kerstetter from Business Week is now at ZDnet.

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Novell is looking for a new PR agency and the short list seems to be down to Text 100, Horn Group, and at least one other agency. Interestingly, Novell has specified that the agency must have some experience with the use of blogging and blogging technologies.

I think this will become an increasingly common requirement requested by other large tech companies and many agencies will have trouble meeting this requirement.

[warning: blatant pitch ahead!] I smell a potential opportunity for our consulting services group...newrulesmedia consulting—Nick Aster and the team are aggregating a tremendous amount of experience with the use of media technologies.

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Ted Rheingold, the founder of Dogster and Catster, tells me they signed their first sponsor recently and he says working with a sponsor is so much better than working with advertisers. "I am fed up of looking through the server logs and arguing with advertisers over how many hits we served compared with their numbers."

The last time I mentioned Dogster was in the context of searching for aberrant behaviors, or the the madness of crowds. I was trying to determine what is the size of an online population that starts to exhibit spontaneous aberrant social behaviors, which cannot be predicted. Dalton Caldwell, chief technology officer at personal network software company Imeem, said he thought it might be about 10,000 users because that's when he noticed Dogster users started posting in the voice of their dog.

Ted said that my posting was picked up very widely, but, he said that the number is wrong. "That started much earlier, by the time we had 500 users, people started doing that."

Happy Friday!