Self-proclaimed "queen of all media" Perez Hilton no longer reigns on YouTube. Girlfriend managed to get not one but two accounts banned from the Google-owned video site after he "posted a very critical video about their practices." Naturally, Hilton reacted with calm and reason unconstrained diva fury. Here's Hilton's rant:
PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak's blog proudly displays an image labeled as "used without permission." Is Dvorak bragging about the copyright violation? Nope. He's just pulled a boneheaded move known in the blogging world as "hotlinking," and the altered image shows that he got caught at it.
Dead startups, lying CEOs, and disgruntled, unpaid employees seem to follow Michael Arrington wherever he goes. He doesn't cause them, but he sure seems to attract them. First there was Edgeio. Now, the latest is online-storage company OmniDrive, a startup which the conflicts-embracing TechCrunch editor invested last year. Nik Cubrilovic, OmniDrive's founder and CEO, disputes the assertion that it may be time to put the company on deathwatch. Former employees disagree, pointing out that it's in a crowded market of bigger players, is beset by technical problems, and rumored to have lost its CTO. What's the real story?
Ten years ago, on December 17, 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "web log" for a webpage where an author "logs" the other webpages they find interesting. Since then, blogging has become serious business for some and a place for nonsensical blabber for others. Though Dave Winer frequently claims that he was the first to launch a weblog at Scripting News, it was really just an online archive of columns rejected by HotWired. Jorn Barger had the first true weblog worthy of the name at Robot Wisdom.
European TechCrunch competitor BlogNation imploded two weeks ago. Yesterday, its founder Sam Sethi wrote a long post to explain how it was all Michael Arrington's fault. Today, Arrington responded. Both are blowhards who love nothing more than to spew verbiage at each other. Logorrhea as a lethal weapon. How to get your dose of schadenfreude without getting bored to death? By reading these 100-word versions of each missive.
"The world has changed," Martha Stewart reports. Younger people, she explains, access information via blogs and the Internet. And also "even through their cell phones." What's it mean for America's homemaker? The end of her latest tree-killer product, Blueprint magazine.
In January, professional job hunter Robert Scoble will leave PodTech, the Web-video network he made semi-famous, then thoroughly infamous, a tipster tells us. Where's he headed? TechCrunch says Fast Company, which makes sense, since he already writes a column for the magazine. But Scoble denies the rumor. Sort of.
San Francisco Examiner blogger Sharon Gray was caught by San Francisco Weekly gumshoe Matt Smith cutting and pasting entire paragraphs from other websites without attribution. "They're blogs. They don't get edited," Examiner executive editor Jim Pimentel responded. "We don't give any direction to people on what to write in their blogs. And that's standard operating procedure." Gray's blog, which she told Smith she'd hoped to use to promote books she planned to write, has since disappeared. Smith says Gray wasn't so much a plagiarist as she was unclear on the concept. If only she'd learned to reuse press releases instead.
The Drudge Report is the homepage for many news junkies — myself included. That's likely because Matt Drudge has never really jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon — no comments, no voting on stories, no submitting stories (except through the anonymous tips box) for peer review, no videos, no lolcats. The site has pretty much been the same since it launched in the late '90s — until today!
Blognation, the mostly Euro-focused competitor to TechCrunch, founded by former TechCrunch blogger Sam Sethi, is imploding — according to TechCrunch. Michael Arrington must find this all delicious: Oliver Starr, a blogger who left Arrington's MobileCrunch site and later landed at BlogNation, is now writing about Sethi's troubles.
Using advanced statistical methodology, egoblogger Robert Scoble has once again proven that no one reads Valleywag. Granted, it takes the pressure off. El Scobleator reports that Fake Steve Jobs's audience "clicks at 20x the rate that Valleywag's does." You could read this as a backhanded refutation of our crossover into the 100,000-plus pageviews per day club. Fake Steve draws 30,000 to 40,000 dailies, according to FSJ blogger Dan Lyons. Scoble could be saying that our 100K stats page is a lie. We prefer to take him at face value: It's not enough that we report about him. Robert Scoble needs you to click through to his site, time and time again, with all the love in your heart.
You'll recall a certain conference about blogging that went mostly unattended and unmentioned. Well, Read/WriteWeb's Alex Iskold actually went, and came back with a gem of a navelgazing thumbsucker, too. I'm not sure how using Google Trends, which tracks the frequency of searches on terms, gets you anything meaningful about "blogging" versus "newspapers," but I'm sure I don't care. This one's for the dead-tree lovers among us, baby.
"After the public lynching over the weekend where I was attacked for not attending a conference that I never agreed to attend," blogs TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington, "I've canceled all upcoming speaking engagements." But he's still going to Davos in January. Do the math: Arrington isn't going to make any public presos at Davos — he's just part of the audience. They'll let him blog it. So don't get all huffypants about how Mike's going and you're not.
(Photo by Dan Farber/ZDNet)
GigaOm head Om Malik and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington were supposed to lead a talk on the "Cult of Blogging" today at some blog conference in Las Vegas. Neither showed. Om, apparently called in sick, while Arrington, according to Leo Laporte, "forgot" about his commitment. The replacement? A chat with Justine Ezarik, who hosts a lifecasting videoblog under the name iJustine. For attendees who were disappointed by the switch, we offer one consolation: The comely video blogger is far, far easier on the eyes than Arrington or Malik. Hail the new cult leader! (Photo by b_d_solis)
IAC and the Huffington Post brought fake news site 23/6 out of beta today. It only took them two years to come up with this? The site features political satire and targets people in the news with articles, videos and photos. If this sounds familiar, it's possibly because HBO and AOL already tried the same concept out with This Just In, to which the Wall Street Journal compares 23/6. The Journal does not note that This Just In shuttered in September. Another reason for pessimism? The site hasn't sold out its inventory for launch. It's currently running ads for BustedTees, another IAC company. Seriously, what kind of crappy blog displays ads from its parent company's network?
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington notes the launch of European blog netowrk MyKinda with a swipe at MyKinda's competitor BlogNation. He published emails sent by BlogNation founder Sam Sethi, a former TechCrunch writer, to Blognation's employees and potential venture capitalists. Why? Well, there's bad blood here. And we're not talking about Sethi's feud with Arrington, either.
This week, a bunch of bloggers are gathered somewhere to blog about blogs, blogging and bloggers. We forget the location — Vegas? or is it Beijing? — but topics will include blogs and politics, blogs and business, blogs and the media, and how to make some dough at this blog thing. Unless Dave Winer shows up and pisses everyone off by telling the truth again, we'll skip it.
