"You have the glow of a man who just got funding," I told VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall on Friday. How could he afford to pay newly hired blogger Dean Takahashi a rumored six-figure salary? With other people's money, of course.

Give Michael Arrington credit: He tried to hire his worst best critic, Uncov editor Ted Dziuba, who spent several months shadowing TechCrunch posts with scathing, technically astute slams of Web 2.0 startups and their products. Arrington's offer sounds pretty sweet: "write a weekly or monthly column for us. we'll call it a counter balance to our hype. No rules or restrictions on what you write," was Arrington's email, according to Dziuba. But from what I know of Ted, he has two reasons not to take the offer.

VentureBeat owner Matt Marshall confirmed to me that he matched respected veteran Valley biz reporter Dean Takahashi's salary to lure Takahashi away from the San Jose Mercury News. How much is that? Unknown, Captain, but in the 1990s, Takahashi's rumored $125,000 annual pay at the original Red Herring had local journalists frothing over their beers. Wait'll they find out what the guys in IT make.

Dean Takahashi, a veteran tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, has quit the newspaper to join VentureBeat. [GameSpot]

Last week gadget-toting geeks discovered they were the target of newfound security screening rage when TSA employees at San Francisco International invoked a new policy requiring all electronic devices, not just laptops, be removed from bags and placed in trays. It turns out the electronics hassle was unauthorized, perpetrated by local officials. Here's what's still making us feel insecure: The TSA has a blog, and says the episode helped "validate our forum." (Photo by Tim Moore)

Proving that he is little more than the East Coast's answer to Robert Scoble, Jakob Lodwick quit blogging yesterday. The fired Connected Ventures cofounder blogged his departure from blogging on his blog. "With over 1,700 posts," he writes, "I've seen my identity shift into a weird sort of public figure, which is rewarding. But I admitted to myself tonight that it's become stressful, and I need to take a break and reevaluate my relationship with the Web." According to Compete.com, Lodwick leaves 50,000 loyal readers behind. They'll miss him. So will we. Until he inevitably unquits, that is.

Five years ago, daddy-blogger Dave Winer bet NYT president Martin Nisenholtz that by 2007, blogs would be more relevant sources than the Times in Google search results for the year's top news stories. (Obligatory brag: The bet was my idea.) The Long Now Foundation has handed down its final decision on the bet. The Times came out ahead on the mortgage crisis. Blogs won on the other four topics — the Iraq war, Virgina Tech's shootings, oil prices, and Chinese exports. But you need to know that the Long Now panel blamed the bet's terms for its lopsided outcome:

BEA has told its employees not to blog about the software maker's impending merger with Oracle. For the record, we stand with BEA management on this one. BEA employees, why go through the trouble of blogging when you can just send us tips and let us take care of it for you? [Docu-Drama]

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington tried and failed to score a ride from Davos back to California on the Google plane. No surprise, since the plane — owned by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, not the company they run — only seats 25 people.

"This will be an experiment to see if we can hire even more journalists," writes hyperblogger Robert Scoble, explaining why he's agreed to let new employer Fast Company run ads on his site. "I expect that as we hire more people the content here and on FastCompany.tv (opening March 3) will improve." Worst-case scenario: Even more of FastCo's pseudo-iconoclastic blabbing for mid-level managers. Best possible outcome: Scoble hires people even crazier than he is.

Mark Cuban was happy to sit with Deadspin blogger Will Leitch for an interview to go into GQ. (Deadspin, a sports blog, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher.) But then Cuban saw Leitch's subsequent post on Valleywag. "While I respect the magazine," Cuban writes on his blog, "I am not a fan of the site [Leitch] works for, or of its affiliated site that the blog ran on. I would not have done the interview had I known he would blog about it for this site." Which is too bad, really. We're normally fans of the outspoken, outrageous entrepreneur-blogger. Except when he engages in phony self-righteousness. "Is this ethical?" he asks.

So we dinged Yahoo for not updating 8 of their 26 official blogs in the last month. Apparently word got around. In the image to the left, find the reply from Yahoo's Digital Home Blog. Click to expand it. It's either as fine a demonstration of snark you'll find or a snapshot of a very sad reality. Either way, the message is clear: At Yahoo, somebody forced somebody to start these pointless blogs and nobody likes writing them. So leave us alone. (Snark only goes so far: The blog post, ostensibly about the launch of Flickr photos on Apple TV, does not mention that the demo of this feature during Steve Jobs's Macworld keynote completely failed.) Here's a note, more to the point, from the Yahoo! Research Berkeley bloggers.

Automattic, the maker of WordPress blog-publishing software, has raised $29.5 million from the New York Times Co. and existing ventures.Not all of the money went straight into the company's coffers, however: Some insiders with vested options sold shares in the round. This is perhaps the most notable example of a new trend: Startup employees profiting from their stakes before a sale or IPO. Reports, however, miss the most tantalizing details: Anyone know who cashed out — founder Matt Mullenweg? CEO Toni Schneider? — how much they sold, and if they're buying any new cars?

Blogger obsession No. 1 meets blogger obsession No. 2 in this 1,185 word daydream by relatively unknown blogger John Ellis that's climbed onto Techmeme. If the market cap of the New York Times Co. falls below $2 billion, he says, "The company that has the most to gain from buying the New York Times is Google." Ellis envisions "a fascinating and challenging project: the reinvention of a great newspaper across multiple platforms and within a variety of applications" that will "attract people of great talent." Gee, who would that be. Not that it's a bad idea — it's just that by wishing for the Gray Lady to be taken over by media-savvy, deep-pocketed management eager to try new ideas, Ellis makes a great case for Rupert Murdoch.

Scoops are important to journalists. But do readers care? Some writers persist in thinking so. I can't remember ever seeing such backbiting over a humdrum funding announcement: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD scooped everyone last Friday with a rumor that Slide, Max Levchin's Web widget maker, was raising a big funding round. Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek had more details of the $50 million round in an already-written column published to the Web after Swisher's post. Brad Stone of the New York Times weighed in that afternoon. And that's when the knives came out.

Folks, it's my fault. I broke Uncov, the hysterically funny anti-TechCrunch which so ably dissects why startups fail. It all started with an innocent idea for a stunt: Send Ted Dziuba, Uncov's lead writer, to the Crunchies, to see what he made of the TechCrunch-sponsored startup awards show. "It will be a nonstop festival of fail," I promised him. Dziuba, after a bit of fussing, agreed. The result is classic Uncov: Dziuba chronicles the presenters' ineptitude and fittingly doesn't write about a single "winner" — predictably, he found them unworthy of mention. But I didn't expect this: "One more thing. This is the last Uncov. Ever. I have been getting tired of it, and this has been manifesting itself in my writing. After seeing the spectacle at the Crunchies, I think it's finally time to quit." Ted, you're just going to quit like that? Fail.

At CES 2008, respectable press and barely-tolerated bloggers were separated into groups with different badges but mostly similar levels of access. At Macworld 2008, there was, theoretically, only one badge for all types of press. In reality? Some hacks were more equal than others.

Self-styled serious bloggers are tripping over each other to distance themselves from Gizmodo's childishly funny prank at CES, in which Gawker Media class clown Richard Blakeley turned off entire banks of TV displays with a remote control. The critics advocate for more maturity and morality, in posts titled "douche" and "crap." The bloggers' real concern is that they'll lose their recently acquired just-like-old-media access to PR dog-and-pony shows and the snack room at CES. It used to be bloggers bragged about not needing those things, and not being corrupted by them. The guy at TechCrunch's gadget blog weighs in: "Will Denton's kids grow up? Absolutely." Then he posts a photo of a douche box. When I grow up, I want to be just like him.

What's the difference between a blogger and a journalist? Nothing, says CNET's Rafe Needleman. But he's concerned that Gizmodo's sophomoric prank, using a TV remote control to turn off video screens at the CES 2008 gadgetfest, will get bloggers disinvited to the event next year. After all, CES only grudgingly started accrediting bloggers to the show. The only problem with Needleman's thesis?

Blogging can be tiring, especially when you blog blog blog almost nonstop like Gizmodo's Brian Lam. When you're reporting from a show like CES where there is so much stuff to cover, you have to grab a few minutes to rest whenever you can. Don't worry, Brian. It'll all be over soon. Lam told us he used to tease Walt Mossberg about his age but stopped when he realized that the 60-year-old Wall Street Journal columnist has more energy than he does. (Photo by Curtis Walker)