MediaFile

Hack days are de rigueur among Web companies — a standard way to foster innovation and to burnish a company’s street cred among techies. So videos of Yahoo’s recent hack day in Taiwan that surfaced on the Internet should have been good PR.

The problem: The coders at the Yahoo event appeared less interested in creating the next killer app than in enjoying the lap dances being generously doled out by the scantily-clad dancers in attendance.

Yahoo apologized for the event in a blog post Monday evening, calling the incident “regrettable” and promising that it would not happen again.

“Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose,” wrote Chris Yeh, head of Yahoo Developer Network in the post.

A Yahoo spokeswoman emailed a statement that repeated some of the comments on the blog apology and said that Yahoo would implement controls to eliminate inappropriate elements at future Hack Day and Yahoo sponsored events.

“Even Reuters’ Ralph Jennings — of whom I’ve been extremely critical for getting the story very wrong when it comes to Taiwan — tells us that ‘half a million’ attended the protest,” a blogger wrote in October after seeing the Reuters’s write-up of an opposition-led demonstration in Taipei against President Ma Ying-jeou.

China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan. Ma, Taiwan’s president, likes China. The opposition and the blogger don’t like either.

I poured a beer to celebrate because I had it right, up from a score of “lies” that the same blogger gave me on a story earlier that year.