Venture capitalist Andrew Parker has invested in Tumblr. But he must be using the only install of the blog platform that bans images, video embeds, and sentence fragments. In justifying Union Square Ventures' investment in Tumblr, Parker says:

This weekend's San Francisco Chronicle article on how blogging is a viable business has curious timing. It's either a year too late, or years too early. Hard to tell. Like past blogging-for-bucks articles the writer has clearly read, it focuses mainly on TechCrunch, though Valleywag parent Gawker Media, Daily Kos, and PopSugar make appearances. The takeaway: blog kingpin Michael Arrington and his TechCrunch mini-empire make more money than you.

Fishbowl watch: Simon Dumenco at AdAge slams Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post a second time for not paying their bloggers. But for most of Huffington Post's celebrity contributors, a blogger's paycheck wouldn't be worth the time it would take to cash it. HuffPo seems to be doing all right, which means the real compensation for a post there is the kind of in-crowd recognition that can't be bought.

Blogging in Italy may soon fall under government regulations. Italian prime minister Romano Prodi is considering a law that would force all bloggers and website owners to register with the Communications Authority and pay a tax, regardless of whether their blogs are a business. We like this idea, except we think the registry should be private and run by Google. [Boing Boing]

Attention, PR professionals: Want to get to the top of Techmeme? We gave you the four-word version of videoblogger Robert Scoble's whiteboard frenzy: Take Scoble to dinner. Don't believe us? Here's a more watchable 80-second snippet of Scoble's video, which I'm posting despite this protest from Valleywag special correspondent Paul Boutin: "No one watches bloggers on video. Unless they're in their underwear." The clip is even funnier if you imagine the monster plant from Little Shop of Horrors singing "Feed Me" as you watch.

Attention tech PR people: Here's the conclusion of reluctant Valleywag content provider Robert Scoble's two-part, 37-minute whiteboard orgy on how to get your next press release to the top of Techmeme, the most important site on the Internet. Ready? Here it is: Take Scoble to dinner. Boom, top of Techmeme. It's that simple. You know why this is funny? Because I'll bet it works.

Microblogging software startup Tumblr raised $750,000 in a first round that included Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick. He's not just a user, he's an investor! 21-year old Tumblr founder David Karp says Vimeo and Tumblr are planning further integration soon. Tumblr has no revenue yet, but has picked up 100,000 users since launching 7 months ago. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Want to get Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, for a mere $40? CrunchGear, the gadget blog owned by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, has a simple strategy: Lie about being a student. Given what CrunchGear pays its writers, it's doubtless the only way they can afford to get a copy.

Bloggers are almost real, real journalists now. The House just passed the Free Flow of Information Act, which would give bloggers license to print leaks under protection of Federal shield laws currently applied only to journalists, (as if they aren't already). However, it still has to clear the president's desk, and the White House is wary it would lead to rampant dissemination of government secrets. The blog lobby should convince Dubya this is a pro-business measure. Doesn't he realize how badly those guys need pageviews? [Ars Technica]

Ten of PC Magazine's 100 favorite blogs are Gawker Media sites. Backscratching is right out as an explanation. As far as we know, the magazine's South San Francisco Midtown-based staffers have never even met Gawker dark lord Nick Denton, nor anyone from Consumerist, Deadspin, Defamer, Gawker, Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Wonkette or Valleywag. Just as surprising: None of the usual tech A-listers — Winer, Scoble, Calacanis — made the cut, except for media pundit Jeff Jarvis. Gawker staffers aren't that stoked about it. We're far more caught up in this week's cover story about the company in New York magazine, an elite Manhattan publication largely unheard of here in the Valley. You'll never make it through New York's 6,000-word opus, so here's the takeaway: Our core value is outsider rage, but "Gawker blogs maintain standards of stratospherically higher writing quality than other Websites." Also, we reportedly have really great sex and drugs.

For the record, j'adore le Peter Kafka, managing editor of Silicon Alley Insider, the New York-based tech blog from disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget. But seriously, girlfriend needs to loosen up. First of all, last time I was in town, the former Forbes writer totally ditched a little cocktail hour I threw in an East Village bar. Now, he freely admits to missing out the drunken, gossip-laden "debauchery" at a party thrown by TiVo and RealNetworks. I wasn't even there, and I got a story out of the party. I hear Blodget is a taskmaster. Hank, baby, for your readers' sakes: Let this guy roll into the office a little later. (Photo of Kafka by Glen Davis)

Silicon Alley Insider ventures into the vaguely icky territory of sponsored-post advertising. It's one thing to thank one's sponsors by name, as is Valleywag's practice. Quite another to pen a gushing blog infomercial, in this case for a service called Vintage Filings, that looks like regular content. Surely Henry Blodget doesn't need the money badly enough to risk adding "disgraced tech blogger" to his list of unseemly epithets. [Innonate]

Robert Scoble lobbed this softball in a post about blog traffic numbers: "If I wanted a big audience I'd go write a Paris Hilton blog or something like that." Bobby, I don't read your blog, but I'd sure as heck read Perez Scoble. That's hot. (Photoillustration by Tim Faulkner; photo by Eric Skiff)

We hear that writers for CrunchGear, the gadgets blog run by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, have had their pay cut by more than half, from $25 a post to $12 $3,000 a month to $1,500. One wonders: Has Arrington simply found that he can get away with paying bloggers less? Or, in cutting his writers' wages, is he tacitly admitting that his efforts to expand his empire — from the niche of covering Web startups to the more popular subjects of cell phones and digital cameras — haven't been successful? Update: We also hear a writer was fired from MobileCrunch, told that the wireless-focused site was on the verge of getting shut down. And now we've heard from CrunchGear and MobileCrunch editor John Biggs. His comments, after the jump.

Finally, Google has done it: They've made a fundamental change to their search results that could drive me, and a host of other bloggers, to rival search engines. If you blog, you know the routine: Looking for a relevant link, I type a few keywords into Google, and copy and paste the link into a post. More often than not, it's a link to a page I've already visited, so there's no need to click through to the page. Except that now, Google is forcing me to click through; instead of displaying a copy-and-paste friendly link, Google's using awkward redirects that look like this:

Portfolio, a bit late, takes note of the great blog rollup, where the selling of blog advertising increasingly becomes the province of big media companies. But blogger Felix Salmon's ignorance of the online-advertising landscape shows. Reuters, far from being the pacesetter as Salmon suggests, is behind the competition. "But it's clear that sooner or later, Big Media's online salesforces are going to be selling ad inventory on third-party blogs," he writes. Really? You don't say?

TiVo has cancelled a Pay Per Post advertising campaign promoting its new TiVo HD digital video recorder. One wonders: Was it because of concerns expressed here and elsewhere? Or was it because Pay Per Post, a startup which pays bloggers to tout customers' wares in posts and videos, isn't actually that effective? Regardless, TiVo's effort appears to be an experiment gone wrong. Even though TiVo embraced a spirit of disclosure — each paid video was supposed to include a five-second "bumper" segment explaining that it was a paid post promoting TiVo's "Hook Up with TiVo" campaign — the mere fact of working with Pay Per Post may have ruined TiVo's good intentions.

Did Boing Boing, Digg and Engadget bloggers get paid to appear in Virgin America's ads? Who cares! Bloggers don't believe in the complicated conflict-of-interest rules of traditional news reporters, any more than rappers care about classic rock's stance against "selling out." Virgin, Microsoft and other household names don't need to pay famous-for-the-Internet people to appear in their marketing campaigns. Bloggers do it for the far more valuable quid pro quo of being associated with a bigger brand. Be honest: You would, too.

I noted yesterday how stock analyst turned blogger Henry Blodget was deftly yanking the chains of tech bloggers everywhere by merely asking, playfully, whether TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. Asking, mind you — he never once, in his original post, suggested he actually thought it was worth that much. In a followup post that's sure to engender more misplaced outrage, Blodget dives deeper into the numbers and suggests that yes, maybe some day in the future — by no means today — TechCrunch could, conceivably be worth $100 million. Conceivably. In the future. Then again, he's functioning under the delusion that the TechCrunch40 conference was a "major hit" instead of a rolling disaster, so who knows? On that line, at least, one hopes he was kidding, yet again. (Photo by Getty Images)

Henry Blodget is having raucous fun. On his blog, Silicon Alley Insider, the "disgraced stock analyst" — a seemingly requisite epithet whenever Blodget is mentioned — is driving people crazy. How? By, say, actually running the numbers on how Google might one day be worth $2,000. Or riffing off a ludicrously sketchy thumbsucker about what blogs are worth, in which he questions whether TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. Even the tech blog's editor, Michael Arrington, linked to it, laughing all the while. Unfortunately, no one let Light Reading's Scott Raynovich in on the joke. Raynovich stoutly debunks the notion that TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. An effort, of course, which I'd applaud, if I thought anyone, Blodget included, believed the notion in the first place. (Photo by Getty Images)