We find it endlessly amusing that mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except this one), puts an equal amount of passion into "Starbucks Gossip," his other blog that is, for some reason, the preeminent inside news site for the coffee chain. And he's not too happy about the company's corporatized attempt to move in on his territory with its new, half-bright "MyStarbucksIdea.com" site. Romenesko is throwing down in public!

Middling designer Kenneth Cole is upset that tawdry media outlets these days spend all their time covering sensational stories, rather than important things like, you know, his blog, for which he is plastering ads all over NYC. It's not that his underlying point is wrong—the media does specialize in "fueling the paranoia." The problem is the cognitive dissonance involved in being lectured by Kenneth Cole in a blog post titled, "Is Responsible Journalism an Oxymoron?" I'll tell you what's an oxymoron: "Kenneth Cole... good." Yea, score one for the media!

The latest flaming bomb from Mac blogger John Gruber: "How Leander Kahney Got Everything Wrong by Being a Fucking Jackass." Kahney's sin? Writing Wired's latest cover story, ""How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong." Kahney's thesis: Apple succeeds despite violating Google's "don't be evil" rules of business. Gruber's response? Name-calling, starting in the headline. Gruber attacks with stabbing frenzy:

When SUP bought LiveJournal from SixApart, I'm sure the Russian company understood the financial details and the technological nuances, but I'm not sure it understood that the customer base is about one thing and one thing only — drama. At least, that's the impression I get from Anton Nosik in a recent interview with Izbrannoe, commenting on the March 12 move by the company to no longer offer free accounts (translated by russianswinga):

Streetwise agitator Bucky Turco is leaving his post as blogger in chief for Complex, the Marc Ecko glossy urban shopping rag which had only one really interesting feature: its blog. Bucky says he's bringing back Animal New York, his dormant passion. Beware. [Bucky Turco]

My inbox is full of people asking who Mike Cherico is. The short version: He's a "dudeblogger" who was fired from Glamour magazine for bragging about womanizing. (Wasn't that what he was hired to do?) But what really entertains me is what happened after self-important PR guy Scott Swords spammed every blogger on the planet with an unsolicited press release decrying Cherico's evil ways. One of the recipients: Former Yahoo columnist Penelope Trunk, who cut the barely literate Swords to ribbons. The release, and Trunk's email exchange, after the jump.

What is Michael Arrington smoking? His self-indulgent fantasy: All the bloggers should band together into a "dream team," owning equity in the joint venture. "Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business," he writes. That existing blog he has in mind is obviously TechCrunch, though he never comes out and says it. What pushed him into this delusion? A rumor that Silicon Alley Insider is raising a $3 million to $5 million round and that PaidContent is also seeking more financing, a charge founder Rafat Ali doesn't exactly deny. Arrington doesn't want his competitors to raise money, because that will screw his ambitions for a big blog rollup.

A blogger (inherently untrustworthy) alleges that he saw Richard Martin, the crazy old sign-posting, doggie horse-riding super of Bay Ridge, littering in the subway! Which would be ironic, considering Martin rants at his own tenants for their littering sins. Even worse, the witness says he saw Martin littering right in front of an MTA worker who was sweeping up trash. Hard to believe such a man would do something so callous and unfeeling. To be fair, this really could have been any old guy in a Korean War Veterans' hat. We must protect this mean old coot's reputation! [lines in the street]

So the blog by Spitzer's call girl is obvs fake, because all she writes about is blogs. I wish it were harder to tell, or at least had clever jokes, because then she could join this list of the ten best ever parody blogs.

Even though no one should ever buy a blog, David Hauslaib is selling Jossip and his three other blogs, says the New York Post. There's a rumor Condé Nast thought about buying, though a source from the publisher's parent company says hell no. And of course Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, it just poaches their editors.

How to get bloggers to blog about you or your project? Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing tells us how, in seventeen easy steps. He's been tracking what makes a website "blogger-unfriendly," ranging from "have a link," to "PDFs suck" to more stuff we already know! For blog-beginners in the nascent phases of internet domination, it may be helpful. [Information Week]

When Glamour fired their so-called "Edgy English Teacher" dudeblogger Mike yesterday, Radar Online's resident man-about-town (and former Gawker intern) Neel Shah got on the case, as he is known to do! Mike was fired by basically provoking commenter revolt after he got a little too open and honest about his womanizing on his "Man Needs Date" Glamourblog. What did these two heartbreakers discuss? (Fuckin' women!)

60 Minutes and former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl's breathless recounting of the "cat burglar" who broke into her apartment and stole her jewels, on the new menopausal Wowowow site, reads like a hardboiled detective drama. "'We know him,' said Detective Kenney. 'He's a serial. This is his pattern, his MO.'" It's a bit unnerving, and perhaps unbecoming, to see her going on at length about rather quotidian personal dramas; the web is an undignified place for old-media icons. But at least Stahl has a little perspective: "What I am thankful for is that our housekeeper wasn't harmed..." The NYPD actually made her a WANTED poster, so you'll want to click for that and the rest of the drama.

Dallas Mavericks owner and well-known billionaire blogger Mark Cuban has banned bloggers from the team's locker room. Hypocritical? Cuban says there is simply not enough room, explaining "I am of the opinion that a blogger for one of the local newspapers is no better or worse than the blogger from the local high school, from the local huge Mavs fan, from an out of town blogger." Right-o! For a rich, supposedly savvy blogger guy, Cuban obviously doesn't know what the fuck is going on in the media these days. One newspaper editor challenged him by saying that blogging is part of newspaper beat reporter's job now, and Cuban responded like so:

When we first saw this graph of the recording history of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", we thought, a) god almighty everyone needs to stop covering "Hallelujah", and b) everyone really needs to stop graphing songs. It was all worth it though for this Kottke guest-blogger post, which perfectly encapsulates the blinkered triumphalism of the boutique bloggers. You see, a half-dozen random bloggers were all pretty sure that their posts on this graph launched Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" cover to number one on iTunes—until their one friend who watches TV pointed out that an American Idol contestant sang it last week. [Kottke]

What's going on in our nation's capital? I'll tell you what: Bloggers! Four young, liberal bloggers occupy a single row house in DC, meaning that a major paper is contractually obliged to cover the phenomenon as a trend. A slow-moving, couch-based trend. We learn that the roommates in "the Flophouse" send IMs to each other when they're all at home; that they write about stuff that goes on the house on their blogs; and that "These bloggers are the cool kids who know they're smart, like some Seth Rogen character with a Ph.D. from Harvard's Kennedy School." Sure! This antisocial scene reminds me of nothing so much as the current incarnation of THIS:

Or will be soon. Her post ("I may have overreacted") is boring so here's a funnier fake version by the blog that's been analyzing every post of hers for the past few weeks.

Yes, there was one in the headline! Good job. Clichés are so tempting to bloggers because we have so much great stuff to write and we want to get it out right away. And using words like "internets" makes us feel like part of a superior in-crowd, even if that's a crowd that includes Adam Sandler. Gawker banned the worst phrases over a year ago, but since then we've found much more. This time we're also adding good clichés, like "sad."

Portfolio, which Condé Nast started because there were no other credulous business magazines, has a story on why media companies should buy blogs, which is of course entirely wrong. Here's why Gawker Media, TechCrunch, Boing Boing and every other blog making over a million dollars should never be for sale.

Vanessa Grigoriadis already disclosed her bipolar condition in a New York magazine cover story on the mental illness. So the personal revelations in a new documentary film project aren't exactly news. But the deceptively cute profile writer-whose personal charm masks an incisive and ferocious journalist-does come out with an intriguing line. "As someone who is over-dramatic, and over-sensitive, and moody and attention-seeking, and interested in other people's approval. All of those things add up to not being bipolar but just who I am." No wonder, when Grigoriadis explored the angst of the creative underclass in last autumn's profile of Gawker, she captured the culture of web writing so well. I hadn't realized that the symptoms of bipolar condition so closely mapped to the personality of the archetypal self-obsessed blogger. After the jump, the clip: the money quote comes at 4:58.