Owen Thomas, the Business 2.0 editor whom we've lured to run Valleywag, is all smiles. But don't be deceived. This Silicon Valley gossip rag, after he takes over in July as managing editor, will remain as obnoxious as ever. You see, Thomas isn't just a veteran of business journalism, with excellent sources in the tech industry (most of which he will burn). The superficially jolly writer was, in an earlier life, one of the contributors to Suck, the legendary site that pioneered web snark. Here's coverage on All Things Digital and Gigaom -- Valleywag snags an editor from Business 2.0. After the jump, for the Valleywag-watchers, the highlights of my own seven months on Valleywag. And, this being a critical site, some lowlights.

In an online chat with the San Francisco Chronicle's Al Saracevic, Mr. Denton wrote that while he thinks it is appropriate for Valleywag to take on big players in the technology and venture-capital businesses - even when it comes to salacious rumors of sexual affairs - the plan now is to "pick less on civilians" and cover the business of the Valley a bit more seriously. (Apparently moving forward with this plan, Valleywag ran an extremely gossipy and speculative item on Tuesday that suggested, among other things, that Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp is interested in buying the Web site Facebook.)

"It would have been nice to get the Google-YouTube deal," Mr. Denton told MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco, as he explained the site’s new direction.

In an e-mail to Gawker Media staff obtained by DealBook, Mr. Steele cited Mr. Douglas's "repeated misunderstanding of the purpose of our sites." Mr. Denton, who had taken over as interim editor of the site, wants "to bring in someone as fearless as Nick Douglas, but with more authority," he wrote.

We haven't gotten a serious legal threat so far. Well, a couple of minor ones, but we're still waiting for a good solid cease-and-desist and a good lawsuit. We're really trying to get News Corp. to sue us. They tried to stop the publication of some article [ed: originally intended for publication by someone else] calling MySpace a spam factory. And the author was revealing some of the background behind the company - that it wasn't really started by these two guys in their basement. And, since News Corp went to such lengths to stop the original publisher from publishing the article, we were hoping that if I actually published it on Valleywag, we could finally get sued. (Sighs) It didn't happen yet. I'm really disappointed about that.

It's all a little confusing because, in his audio interview with RU Sirius, Destiny and myself, Mr. Douglas indicated that he was working on new projects, though he declined to say what they were. But since the announcement of his departure from Valleywag, we didn't really believe the speculations that he'd been fired. And never in a million years would we have thought he was, at least in part, fired because of what he said to us.

For what it's worth, consider this a public apology to Nick Douglas. But, maybe it's not something Nick regrets.

Based on the content of the above email, I'd say Gawker made a mistake. A big mistake.