Cheerio, Ms. Myers. (Facebook)

Courtney Boyd Myers, once named the "blogger everyone knows" in the New York tech scene by Betabeat, is moving on and across the pond to take a job as General Assembly's Director of Audience Development for the new London and Berlin campuses.

Ms. Myers, who happens to be a bikeriding, globetrotting yogi, joined The Next Web a year and a half ago. She's written features about startups, the culture of innovation and the intersection of technology and education, including Are New Technologies Making us Happier?, Why Online Education is Ready for Disruption, Now and How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education. 

The New York tech scene will lose a vocal advocate. Ms. Myers is spotted everywhere from parties to demo days, and has spent many days behind her MacBook on the couches of General Assembly. She also appeared in the campy lip-synching video made for the tech-leaning charity event Raise Cache that Forbes called the "unofficial music video of New York tech."

"I feel very much a part of the spirit of NYC's startup scene," Ms. Myers wrote in an email. "It's been a wild two years of growth and now it seems our friends in Silicon Valley can no longer ignore us. I feel like New York has come into its own and is able to soar just as I'm leaving to nurture another ecosystem that's still in its early growing stages."

General Assembly made a strong impression on Ms. Myers when she first wrote about it for TNW. "I immediately saw the impact that a global network of campuses for individuals seeking education and opportunity in technology, business, and design could have on future innovation," she said. "Few places blend public and private partnerships, community, and education so seamlessly."

This image is often relevant. (level343.com)

A source has informed Reuters that The Next Web's scoop was on the money: Google's Dropbox competitor, Google Drive, is about to happen. Reuters reports Google may announce the new service as early as Tuesday. There will be a 5 gigabyte free version with paid versions ranging up to 100 gigs. As The Next Web noted in its post about the service, the free space reportedly allotted by Google Drive beats Dropbox's 2 free gigabytes.

Reuters also reported on one of the rumored new service's more interesting possible features:

Google Drive will work with sophisticated image search technology to let consumers sift through a wide variety of document types, which could include the likes of Adobe PDF files and photographs, the source said.

Google, as per usual, wouldn't comment regarding the rumor.

Rachel "Haywire" Marone (Screengrab from video about XFF)

Crowdfunding super site Kickstarter has benefited from an excess of good will across the web. They may take a bit of a bruising then from allegations they banned transmedia artist Rachel Marone for--as The Next Web aptly puts it--"all the wrong reasons." In a blog post published Saturday, Ms. Marone quoted an email from Kickstarter rep "Daniella" regarding the ban:

Throughout the duration of your project, Extreme Futurists, there was an incredible amount of comment spam that several members of Kickstarter staff removed on your behalf. It has come to our attention that this comment spam has persisted at an alarming rate, and that you have engaged in conversation with the spammer. There are now over 300 spam comments that include your own engagement on your project.

This kind of activity is not allowed on Kickstarter; it violates our community guidelines. For this reason, we are removing this project from the site as well as suspending your ability to create projects.

Ms. Marone noted that the cyberstalker in question has been after her for a decade and linked to a previous blog post in which she asked if there was a solution to cyberstalking.

Rachel Marone's manager attempted to run interference with Kickstarter's "Daniella" to no avail.

As The Next Web's Robin Wauters points out, Ms. Marone has waited a full year before coming forward with her story--"Extreme Futurists" was posted on Kickstarter in April, 2011. Ms. Marone's rationale for the delay makes some sense, though:

Thanks to everyone who is being supportive right now. I thought I would be harassed for speaking out against such a hip company.

— Rachel Marone (@rachel_marone) April 14, 2012

Kickstarter gave The Next Web a new statement regarding comment spam that appears to walk back their previous hard line expressed to Ms. Marone, saying in part:

Abuse is never tolerated on Kickstarter. Kickstarter's moderators review any comment flagged by project creators and take whatever action is necessary, including banning or suspending an abusive user’s account. In the past year we've also made adjustments to the site’s functionality to limit trolls, restricting the ability to comment on a project to only its backers.

We work very hard to look out for our project creators and our community, and part of that means taking abusive behavior very seriously. Our response in this particular situation implied the opposite. We take full responsibility for that and apologize.

Regardless of the issues with Kickstarter, the show went on. Rachel Marone speaks at the opening in December, 2011, in the video below.

Extreme Futurist Fest Opening from Extreme Futurist Fest on Vimeo.

A gentleman from the Brogramming Facebook page

Until recently, tech was an industry primarily inhabited and represented by ponytailed geek guys. Though the sandals may still abound, the image of the modern nerd is far from nerdy: tech is cool, and not just because the products these geeks develop are so inextricably tied to our every day lives.

Effervescent wunderkinds and Ivy League golden boys are forgoing finance to wade into the tech pool with the geeks, slapping their names on any startup harnessing the Social Graph API and slipping into the most visible roles in business development, marketing and product. Hey, nerd. Move over.

“The combination of easy money and the glamour of appearing in magazines and on television as an 'entrepreneur' has driven some of our best and brightest to dedicate themselves to social start-ups,” writes Allen Gannett of The Next Web. The pursuit of fame and fortune is crippling the tech industry’s ability to do what it does best, he says, namely innovate to make the world a better place.

Mr. Gannett rather confusingly dubs this phenomenon "social media brain drain" which makes it sound like Goldman is losing valedictorians to tech startups (which would be a good thing?), as "brain drain" usually refers to the diversion of talent from a desirable venue into an undesirable one (as when smart people from India go to school in the U.S. but then return home because of strict immigration rules, etc.). But in this case the solution is much simpler than rejiggering visa requirements.

Maybe we just need to make tech uncool again.

Entrepreneurs have made the transition to demi-gods in our status-obsessed society. The rise of brogrammers perfectly illustrates this shift in attitude concerning the quintessential tech worker. The brogramming community on Facebook—“We rage on the codebase, rage in the gym, and rage at the club"—has over 20,000 members. Napster co-founder Sean Parker may be the original tech bad boy, with tales of lavish drug-fueled parties and the Page Six nickname “NYC’s Billionaire Playboy.” Kim Dotcom (nee Schmitz), founder of the recently-shuttered Megaupload and for a time the world champion of Modern Warfare 3, amused the web with photos of himself lounging in bubble baths and pictures of his giant giraffe statues that surfaced following his arrest. For the ultimate celebrinerd, look no further than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose every move—both online and off—is documented with paparazzi precision, and in one case, actual paparazzi.

Despite all the jokes about jobs where people are paid to tweet, social media is not an inherently vapid or soulless industry. Peel away the buzzwords, the BS, and Gary Vaynerchuk's mind-numbing "Next Wave" video series for The Daily, and the industry thrives as a digital bastion for modern connectivity, one that we’re growing closer to quantifying and understanding.

By eschewing the quest for the limelight and focusing on making products that matter, we can begin to steer the industry back where it belongs: with the ponytailed sandal wearers, the keen-eyed innovators, the brainy do-gooders who never once have uttered the word “synergy.” You know. Real nerds.

The Next Web spotted this tweet from the Google team: "The iOS app we launched today contained a bug with notifications. We have pulled the app to fix the problem. Sorry we messed up."

Does Apple let crappy Google apps slide through their typically stringent review process just to embarrass their Mountain View rivals?