Blogger Buzz reports the release of CNBC’s Morning Blog, which only gives me an error message.
The top blogged news stories, says BlogPulse, are all the things you don’t discuss with strangers: politics, religion, and squid. My neighbor once ruined a perfectly good “getting to know you” dinner by condemning intersquid marriage.
Adrants: “Hmm, blogging as a perverted sex fetish. Not exactly what the blog elite and the blogebrity had in mind.” Have you read Gawker?
Reader’s Digest alerts us to the Hot New Fad. Apparently, you can make money with computers, by eBaying shoes (through your “e-enterprise”), selling your friends to a marketing agency, and…oh shit…blogging:
What did you do today? That’s a blog. What do you think about today’s headlines? That’s a blog too. “It’s like your own printing press, without having to worry about paper, ink or postage,” says [Instapundit's Backstabbing, Digest-sourcing Glenn] Reynolds.
You realize what this means? People. Who like Reader’s Digest. And have just discovered a supplement for the pension. Are going to start blogging.
Gawker Media seeks a sysadmin:
Linux Network/Systems Administrator — TCP/IP, DNS, IP tables, 2.6.x, SMTP, Apache, PHP, Tomcat, Java, PERL, *sh shell scripting, NFS, RPM… Did your head just about explode with glee reading this? Are five 9s not an objective but a baseline? You might be just the person we are looking for. We’re looking for someone on a contract basis with flexibility though this fall to work on our technology team. This could lead to a larger role in the future. You will be working in New York City. Please send a brief description of yourself with relevant work experience and links to material(s) to techjobs at gawker dot com.
9rules ponders the deadliness of dignity; Paul Scrivens promises to jump ship if 9rules ever loses its fun. In another post, Scrivens considers the advantage of Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc.: They started with heavy funds. Scrivens decries the bland networks cropping up that offer him nothing new.
About Weblogs seeks a skier-snowboarder to take over for Melissa, resigning from Skiing and Snowboarding Mom.
Engadget will move to NYC. The new office will include a podcast studio. Engadget will also launch Engadget Labs, offering full product reviews. [via BH]
Webby Media again clarifies writer requirements: All content becomes WM’s property. Writers should make at least 50 posts a month. All revenue still goes to the writers.
Instablogs (which, oddly, has no permalinks to posts, and only feeds comments to RSS) releases a second cartoon. This one features Nandini Maheshwari joining Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, and someone (can anyone ID him?) on a sidewalk, where a sponsor picks whom to pay.
They also list topics for seven of the 50 blogs they’ll launch on October 5: Luxury lifestyle, personal finance, astronomy, children of third world, obesity, beach life, and housekeeping. You can feel the topics slide from “marketable” to “pardon?” Depending on how open they get with their numbers, this could be a fascinating experiment in the profitability and popularity of blog topics not traditionally associated with commercial blogging.
I also learned a new insult: “brickbats”. Such are the benefits of a blog network published from India.
Nora Ephron gets relativistic:
Calacanis is very impressive and confident, reeling off endless thrilling acronyms and technical terms that are Greek to me. He says that what blogs are really good at is getting to the truth. He says that if Jayson Blair’s fraudulent articles had appeared on the Internet instead of in the New York Times, he would have been nailed immediately. I guess this is the case, although I can’t help but think Calacanis is missing the delicious point about truth and blogs. It’s not that the blogosphere doesn’t care about the truth, but that truth is a very limited. overrated concept, and nowhere is this more clear than on the Internet. It’s true, for example, that there was a panel discussion about blogs this morning at Conde Nast moderated by Ken Auletta, and it’s also true that certain things were said at it, much of them not picked up by my tape recorder. But what actually happened this morning? Nothing? Anything? Something? Everything?
WHEN WILL THIS MAD EXISTENCE EVER END? We get a solid thesis here:
As for Ken Lerer, he said that the Internet and the explosion of blogs isn’t really new, it’s just the next new thing to evolve, sort of like what happened two hundred years ago when people first started writing broadsides and pamphlets. I completely disagree with this … I happen to think the Internet is a cosmic, seismic, amazing change, unlike anything that’s gone before.
Personally, I see Lerer’s point, but would deconstruct this mofo thus: Blogging — and the Internet as a whole — is just one of several seismic qualitative changes in the history of information. (And it’s the first place I can write “mofo” and “deconstruct” within 50 words and actually gain respect.)
Ephron giggles at Jason Calacanis:
Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs, dressed perfectly in a pair of ripped jeans (I am not one of you) and a blazer (on the other hand, I am one of you).
She gets his name right four times, misspells it twice.
Calacanis gets the hots for Nora Ephron:
Norah seems to be a huge flirt… during the talk I was sure she was making goo-goo eyes at me while playing with her glasses and hair—dropping in a raised eyebrow or sultry smile at just the right time. What a let down to read in her column/blog post that she was probably flirting with Ana Marie Cox! Can’t say I blame her… Ana’s “I’m just blogger in my pajammas drinking all day long while poking fun at the world” is much more appealing then my “hungry media mogul from the streets of Brooklyn” vibe.
He misspells her name five times.
Then he reveals just what scary, scary hands we’re in:
Ken Auletta did a great job, including asking me who was going to buy Weblogs, Inc. I decided I would pull a Bob Dylan and make the Q&A as absurd as possible. So, when he asked who we were selling to I rambled off every major player in the space quickly, paused as he looked to me to see if I was serious, and I dropped it: “in that order.” Of course, some folks picked that up thinking it was serious… hahahaha. I love this game.
And so goes the race to become the craziest blog publisher. (Kyle, I hear, eats Cuban babies. Totally for serious.)
Bucky Turco: Sex with Jessica Coen. Do it for the kids.
Some day, Neil Gaiman will stop blogging, and I will start crying into a torn copy of Anansi Boys.
VH1 pulls in Trent from Pink is the New Blog for their show “Best Week Ever.” Meanwhile, Jarvis is “with big guys from VH1 and you’re jealous.”
Aw dude, it’s Defamer, not Gawker, who calls Owen Wilson the butterscotch stallion.
Queerty interviews Apartment Therapy blog co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan.
Rocketboom thanks Jeff Jarvis for covering them in the Guardian.
Watch your gaze, Philip Torrone.
A history of medical blogs. [via Scripting News]
Krucoff cologne: Less sexy than Jeff Jarvis bodywash.
This Is What We Do Now lists the all-stars of snark. We’re not even alluded to. On the up side, we still have souls.
B5media clarifies how to apply to write.
Welcome Instablogs, “a news organization based on blogging.” Only one post up so far, but the writers jumped into the comment thread. The network launches October 5. [via b5media]
Fine Fools opens forums. Read the announcement, get an account.
In his NYO interview, Nick Denton listed quirks of several unnamed Gawker writers. Elizabeth Spiers wears the retro duds. So who got high on the job? I’m guessing Brian Crecente. Standard Deviance lays out its guesses.
From FishBowlNY, a paraphrased transcript of New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s interview with Ana Marie Cox, Jason Calacanis, and HuffPo’s Kenneth Lerer:
Auletta: How do you make money on blogs?
Lerer: Advertising. I think we’ll do exceptionally well. I wasn’t sure in the beginning. Now, I’m quite sure.
Calacanis: [Referring to TimesSelect] Put more news behind the firewall. That just means more clicks to me! Where’s Martin [Nisenholtz]? Put more stuff there! You won’t get indexed by google. I think [the Times] is putting things behind the fire wall as a hedge against a fall in advertising.
Wonkette: I get a pay check.
So Calacanis is as loud in person as in text.
Calacanis: Yahoo! Now, they’re the big threat. They have the distribution, the advertising relationships online. They will be the arbitrage between Google ad sense and …[we missed this last part. sorry.]
AOL. AOL will be part of Google or Microsoft in the future.
Auletta: Speaking of AOL, have you been considering selling out to them?
Calacanis [not missing a beat]: News Corp. Microsoft. Google. Then AOL. That order. Wanna talk after this? [guffaws] … I wouldn’t want to sell to someone who’d want to filter bloggers though. It would take a very big, a very big visionary company, with lots of cash [audience laughs] to buy us.
Lerer was insightful; I need to keep track of this guy:
Lerer: [Speaking about how the blog is not a disintermediating medium]. I don’t see it as so new. Just an evolution. No different what’s happening now than what happened 200 years ago [with the printing press, we presume, he means].
The conversation turned to the future of the blog model.
Lerer: The format of blogs is unappetizing to me. It is difficult to get through them. They will morph into something else… will evolve into a group blog with many opinions.
Cox treats it like a black box:
Auletta to Anna: How do you see the future of blogs?
Wonkette: The business model of blogs is uncertain. I know I get a check every month… I pay my ISP…
Calacanis: I’ll pay for your ISP. [Then, he mumbled something about how well all of his bloggers are treated and how they get 50% of something or other].
Audience member: Why don’t you take him up on his offer?
Calacanis: She doesn’t like me.
Wonkette: That’s what I was about to say.
Oh snap. This time I have to side with Calacanis, who explains that he poached Denton’s Gizmodo writer last year.
Read the whole transcript. It’s gold. Calacanis is, as always, the bluntest man in the room.
Jeff Jarvis posts a shelf full of blooks.
Hellz yes: Cory Doctorow podcasts! Listen to audio serialization of his fiction.
The campaign volunteer ghostwriting Fernando Ferrer’s mayoral campaign blog ought to fact-check the boss’s education.
NYC publicist Kelly Kreth gets dooced [via pink J:
"I never mentioned the company or anyone I worked with by name," she asserted. "But [my assistant] found an entry dated Jan. 11 where I talk about how I feel [a superior] is shrill and loud and classless.”
That, says Kreth, led the superior to accuse her of making a threatening phone call to her around the same time.
“Besides getting fired, I had to go in for police questioning,” she said.
Dave Pell releases Rollyo, a mini-search tool, wherein users make shareable lists of sites for personalized searches.
Jossip too quickly dismisses the New York Observer’s “Off the Record” feature on Nick Denton.
Tom Scocca’s story confirms Denton’s love for the LCD-and-keyboard mask:
Mr. Denton prefers to be an electronic presence himself. Asked, via instant message, to meet up and discuss Gawker Media, Mr. Denton gave phone numbers for staffers instead, then offered to conduct his share of the conversation via IM.
“IM is so much more me,” Mr. Denton wrote.
“You know,” he added, “I haven’t met a couple of our writers.” …
“Nick is a semi-detached character in a lot of ways,” [Denton's former boss at the Financial Times John] Gapper said.
He was a dedicated reporter—”not a great writer as a stylist, I would say; he’s very good at working contacts and very good at extracting information out of people.”
The story, besides pointing out his biggest body part (hey now), points out his biggest talent:
The comments group, Mr. Denton wrote in an instant message, is “like the effort to create a New York nightlife institution. Invite in too many people, and the cool kids will move on. You want them to bring their friends, but not too many of them.”
Nick Denton was building a media elite for the electronic age, as he has for two decades. For, one way or another, he’s been engineering social circles since he was at Oxford in the 1980’s. “He likes to be the center of the carousel,” said Financial Times business columnist John Gapper, Mr. Denton’s former boss at that newspaper and his co-author on a book about the collapse of Barings Bank. “Somebody said, at university what Nick was very good at was [running] a club.”
Later, in London in the 90’s, Mr. Denton created a networking group for tech-industry members called First Tuesdays—which he and his co-founders sold for a reported $50 million in 2000.
By page 3, the article expands its focus to Gawker Media, noting its regularity of content flow (”replacing amateur bloggers’ intermittent, as-the-mood-strikes postings”) and its “unified and stripped-down industrial approach.”
Finally, a shout-out to his fans:
“I’ve stopped reading blogs,” Mr. Denton said. He’d stopped what now? “I’ve stopped reading all the blogs about blogs,” he qualified. “It just annoys me too much, so I don’t read it.”
Damn it.
Just in case there was any confusion, the N.Y. Observer’s Tom Scocca offers his own confirmation today that Nick Denton has a ginormous melon:
…also note that Mr. Denton’s face though not lopsided, is mounted on a gigantic head, a head worthy of Linus Van Pelt or Antoine Walker.
Sure, the man has a large head. But in the Antoine Walker/cartoon character league? You be the judge:
* - Yes, we know there is no specific mention of Stay-Puft in Scocca’s Observer piece–but when we did a Yahoo! image search for Antoine Walker, Stay-Puft came up first. So consider it editorial insight from our image search overlords.
Omar Al-Hajjar launches blog network Webby Media, one of the new “friendly, philosophical, thin lines on whitespace” networks popping up this season. Their mantra: Content worth reading. Their 5-year goal: several hundred writers. Their current pay split: 100% blog revenue to the writer. You can apply to write for Webby Media.
I asked Omar for a few more details:
How does Webby Media plan to maintain itself without taking a cut of member blogs’ income?
Right now our focus is purely on growth: growing content, buzz, blogger profiles, and reputation. We think the best way to make a splash is to lead blog networks (well, the ones that do revenue splits) by offering 100%. I’m not concerned with profitability of the company right now; it’s too early in the industry to chase profits right now. Growth is just so much more important right now.
Just a note, you use the term ‘member blogs’. We’re not a club network (in the 9rules way) with members. We’re a publishing company that hires writers.
Are member bloggers responsible for text content only? What opportunities can bloggers further pursue within Webby Media?
Bloggers are responsible for producing content: text, podcasts, interviews, etc. 50 posts a month.
Bloggers for our network can solely concentrate on content while someone else (us) does all the optimization, ad sales, web hosting, traffic, blogging backend, etc. So the opportunity exists for bloggers to focus on content and down the road show how they’ve written on a high-quality blog.
We sort of want bloggers to say: “Oh yeah, I blog on Webby Media” and have it mean something in the publishing world. That’s the big picture.
A final note: all of this is brand new. The business model hasn’t been written yet. Everyone is experimenting: WIN is paying a flat monthly fee, b5 is paying a revenue split, 9rules is being ultra-exclusive in their selection, and we’re paying 100%, and I’m sure there are more networks all over the place. It’s an exciting space to be in right now!
Ex-FEMA-director Brown blames his resignation on the blog HorsesAss.org.
Podcasting’s got its first conference, which, of course, is getting casted.
Chris Pirillo is probably the first person to ask if Shakespeare would approve of animated GIFs.
Dan Gillmor notes two conflicts resolved too late: Google v. CNET and Bush v. energy conservation.
ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse explains how Paul Scrivens can still profit after giving all contextual ad income to his Fine Fools bloggers. He lists Scriven’s possible money-makers as front-page ads; ads on Scrivens’ posts; affiliate and other sales; revenue 90 days after a writer leaves Fine Fools; site sales; and traffic to any other Scrivens sites linked from FF blogs. An intelligent comment thread follows, including several blog network owners, but not Scrivens.
Joho gives not only a link to a WSJ piece on Chinese blog censorship (a chilling hope to “make online news more reliable by phasing out small and unauthorized cyber-news publishers” — i.e., to kill citizen dissent), but also the Oh dear Lord my eyes! of the day.
More details on the Chinese blog-crushing at Blog Herald: 11 subjects forbidden to Chinese bloggers. Note that these rules may be more widely interpreted than in free nations — China has outlawed several religions, for example. Regulation might make these awards dull.
We all need to hold an intervention for Joi Ito’s World of Warcraft addiction. Let’s meet at Joi’s house at 9. Even…even if he wrote an insightful analysis of the interface, the rare ninja/pirate transmogrifier, and the difficulty of cross-level group questing.
Lifehacker’s handing out comment invitations in return for story ideas. If the WSJ did this they could avoid that paidContent fiasco.
B5media owner Jeremy Wright interviews Jayvee Fernandez, author of b5media’s Cellphone9. (Incidentally, the more elegant a blog’s CSS is, the more likely its URL contains digits.)
Wright plans to interview one of his bloggers every week, making them b5media’s “heroes.” This first interview covers Fernandez’s blogging work and other life equally, boding well for the network’s healthy self-promotion. A classy move, with sweetness and light:
What is the most remarkable thing you’ve done?
Does joining b5 count? 
Well outside the line of technology, my proudest achievement was with my first job with development work. I formed a team that helped 200+ farmers rebuild their worker cooperative through livelihood training and an atmosphere of trust. By degree, I hold an MA in Education so teaching and interacting with people were always my comfort zone.
I don’t know what I’m doing behind the computer. Heh.
Blogger bests Flickr in Media Kickball (which is normal kickball with a guy taking photos).
Beauty of the day: hand sports (like pen twirling. Pervert).
Former Nick Denton venture Moreover finalizes its sale to a Silicon Valley company, reports Paid Content.
Good Charlotte’s blog gets hacked, or Benji just screws up his archives.
Blog music aggregator Hype Machine sports a functional redesign, explained at Blog Soup.
Paul Scrivens releases the Fine Fools writing standards.
PubSub releases the PubSub 1000, updated daily. Lists sites linked from blogs rather than blogs themselves.
Feliz Cumpleaños to A-lister and Blogebrity cover boy Jason Kottke, who celebrates his 32nd birthday today by playing hooky from his regular blogging schedule.
In case you were wondering, we here at Blogebrity HQ will be celebrating by consuming 32 fluorescent yellow-green mystery shots, then posting remaindered links until we pass out.
