LiveJournal, only months after Six Apart sold the blogging site to Russian Web firm Sup, has resumed its tradition of corporate drama. Jason Shellen, the company's VP of product management, just announced he'd left the company. I asked him if this had anything to do with the ruckus over LiveJournal's elimination of unpaid, advertising-free accounts. "No," said Shellen, who worked at Blogger and then Google after the search giant bought the blog startup. "In social media, you have to have a thick skin." What did Shellen in was the 10-hour time difference between Moscow, where Sup is headquartered, and LiveJournal's San Francisco office.

The economics of the online sex trade are tipped in favor of the literate. Cynics may say that promoting her business post-by-post just makes for a brilliant sort of "women in tech!" resume builder. But blogging-for-work also benefits busy or cautious clients like you, who may have learned to seduce a woman over Usenet — or, you know, AIM — instead of drinks.

"And you make money for that?" is the first question I get when I tell my extended family about my life as a professional sweatpants-wearer. I'm not too good on the numbers, but some bloggers do get paid and apparently quite well. I think it has something to do with page views? This amazing AP clip about bloggers who are "happy to serve as ultra low cost freelancers" can teach you about how the internet thing sustains itself. Click through and judge this dumbed down explanation of Web 2.0 economics!

Cisco intellectual property lawyer Rick Frenkel is a case study in how not to mix your personal blog with your day job. Frenkel wrote the anonymous Patent Troll Tracker blog about "those thought to opportunistically act against alleged patent infringements," reports Forbes. Eventually, Frenkel blogged about a case in which Cisco was the defendant. Guess what happened?

I recently reported on blogging secrets of the stars. But as a Valley worker, you may end up blogging on your company's site, not your own. Corporate blogging is very different from personal blogging, regardless of what The 250 will tell you for a small fee. So I created this stack of product-managerese slides on how to write a company blog worth reading.

New Jersey attorney general Anne Milgram served gossip site JuicyCampus and its founder Matt Ivester with a subpoena today. "There's an unbelievable amount of offensive material posted [on the site] and absolutely no enforcement," Milgram told the AP. Worse for JuicyCampus, Milgram served its ad network, Adbrite, too. The contract is already in the shredder.

Michael Arrington spends 1,517 words talking about blogs taking venture funding and his grand scheme to form a big, A-List blog network to take on CNET. Most of you are too busy raising money for your blogs to read all that. Here's our 100-word version — and a suggested name for the blog network he wants to launch.

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.

PopTech, the only tech conference whose door I deign to darken, is looking for a part-time blogger to do about 15 hours a week of paid work for this year's event. Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe and former Pepsi/Apple chief John Sculley created the annual gathering, timed to October's peak autumn leaf season in Maine. It's like TED without the over-the-top zillionaire celebritard factor. It's not like SXSW at all. It'll make your mind hurt — in that good way.

CBS-owned television stations plan to offer bloggers an ad-supported news widget and a share of the revenue. [AP]

"The 250" (pronounced "two-fifty") is the derogatory term used in real-life conversations — never online! — to describe the self-promoting cloud of Web 2.0 popular kids who seem to be constantly typing but rarely building value. In short, The 250 only matter to The 250. I've collected and anonymized some real-life sentences from the field to help you use The 250 authentically.

Not every conversation happens online. A phrase you won't find on Twitter or Technorati is The 250 — pronounced "two-fifty" — a cruelly sarcastic euphemism used in real-life conversations for the small, cliquey group of self-appointed Web 2.0 insiders who seem to spend their days blogging and Twittering about one another. The gist is that The 250 are the 250 people who matter to The 250. None of the other 6 billion people on Earth care which of The 250 are dating each other or got onto a panel at South By Southwest. I'm loathe to name names other than Valleywag editor Owen Thomas, whose site the other 249 check obsessively for mentions of themselves.

Blog network Jossip may be up for sale. Which would make an excellent story for Jossip. [News.com]

Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's blog-tools startup, is readying an upgrade to its WordPress software this week. Anil Dash of Six Apart took the occasion to let WordPress users know they can upgrade to his company's Movable Type instead. It's a move straight out of Oracle's handbook. But Mullenweg freaked out, calling the post "desperate and dirty." Dash responded by charging Mullenweg with "slander." Some are under the delusion that this nerdfight is about software. It's not. It's about money.

After Marissa Mayer announced Google Health on Google's blog, Capital Valley blogger Andrew Feinberg linked to the post in a reponse titled "Google Health is Frightening." Per usual, a link to Feinberg's post appeared in the trackbacks under Mayer's post. For a time. But soon Feinberg noticed his trackback disappeared. In fact, all the trackback links were gone. Feinberg told a CNET reporter, who in turn asked Google PR what happened. Soon the links were back. Now Feinberg wonders if Mayer nixed the trackbacks due to his critical commentary. We're skeptical. The more likely culprit? A link to Cade Metz's story in The Register headlined "'Googirl' unloads on Google Health: A seminal moment." Just like Feinberg's story, Metz's story links to Google's post. But unlike Feinberg's, it's still not to be found in the trackbacks.

We tried to translate a tip, above, about some comment purportedly deleted by Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block, but we failed. Maybe it's revealing enough as is — about the would-be Engadget commenter, not Block. Click to expand the email.

The 2001 crash got one of my colleagues to cross the line. She had been bossing men around for next to nothing as a startup VP, so why not get paid more directly for it? She set up a basic website — thank you, Webmonkey — and listed it in three escort directories she found in the local alt.weekly papers. Eros Guide brings her well-off local clients, and richer-than-average visitors from out of town. But she learned an even better trick for landing the big fish.

For the liberal-arts majors who still dominate the ranks of reporters, simple multiplication is a daunting task. Which is likely why Radar and Silicon Alley Insider have contributed 419 words about the firing of Gawker reporter Maggie Shnayerson, yet failed to answer the essential question: How much was she making? The answer is simple, based on publicly available information:

Great. Some guy writes a blog post about how TechCrunch is "the opposite of building a community," whatever that means, and it gets Michael Arrington all pissed off. Now he's threatening to quit. But not for good. For bad. For twice as bad. "On the issue of community," Arrington responded, "the problem isn't that our community is growing."

CNN fired American Morning producer Chez Pazienza yesterday for blogging on the side. The network says Pazienza was canned for not having his blog posts vetted by higher ups. He disagrees. "It's not that I've been writing," Pazienza told thePoMoblog. "It's WHAT I've been writing." On his blog, Pazienza writes that he "fell into TV news 16 years ago and been stuck there ever since (proving that the business really is a bottomless pit)." Thump!