To the frustration of his less-savvy and overserious critics, Internet entrepreneur and professional gadfly Jason Calacanis has mastered the API for online tech-news tracker Techmeme. [Calacanis.com]

Advertisers are realizing that the blogs written by pro athletes are an attractive advertising platform — at any rate, as far as blogs go. They have a built-in audience of rabid and loyal fans. Many of the most popular athletes tend to be outspoken and controversial, drawing in a wider audience. Mere talk of on-field or locker-room disputes can generate buzz. Likewise, non-sports talk builds interest. The downside: Advertisers are leery of controversial athletes being associated with their brands. But everyone knows the mainstream media ignores blogs, so they're safe, right? Best of all, while bloggers in the self-righteous tech world are vilified for pitching products, fans expect pro athletes to be walking billboards. The occasional awkwardly inserted product pitch may rub a few readers the wrong way, but it doesn't lead to an angry horde with pitchforks and torches.

Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo pride themselves on getting photos of new cell phones and MP3 players before anyone else — even the lightning-fast wire services. And to protect their scoops, they've taken to watermarking their photos. A wise practice. Reuters has apparently run, uncredited, a composite image, above, incorporating three watermarked photos from a post that ran last week on Engadget detailing Verizon Wireless's new holiday line. Product photos are generally seen as fair game by gadget bloggers, of course — but for Reuters to carry Engadget's watermark but not acknowledge the blog in any fashion seems not just ungracious but clueless. (Photos by Engadget, not Reuters)

"There is nothing more frustrating than writing a perfect sentence and not being able to publish it. That's why I love having this blog. Otherwise, it's just me and the cat having a laugh at how witty I could have been. And it's creepy when the cat laughs because I can never be sure we're laughing at the same thing." — Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams on dirty words in comic strips. [The Dilbert Blog]

Is any blogger still satisfied with merely blogging? The quirky alternative website Boing Boing, which claims 7.5 million monthly viewers, will debut a daily online video show Wednesday. After closet negotiations with national networks, the Boing Boingers decided to go it alone and own the show themselves. But this is no basement operation. BBtv's Hollywood agent is George Ruiz at clout-wielding ICM, who also handles Christopher Walken, Jennifer Connelly and Richard Dreyfus. Robolicious blogger Xeni Jardin (left), whose TV credits include appearances on Dennis Miller and most of the big nightly newsies, will host. She'll coanchor with fellow BB editor Mark Frauenfelder, best known for his TV appearance in an Apple ad.

One could say many things about blog-tracker Technorati and its founder, David Sifry, but the worst charge, I think, to make, is that he helped popularize a delusion particularly congenial to the self-involved world of the Valley: That links to your website somehow matter more than traffic. A newly hired CEO may fix the business, but he's unlikely to repair the damage that idea has wrought. Now, Techmeme has launched a similar tracking service, the Techmeme Leaderboard, that will surely make things worse.

The blogosphere was thrown into chaos when its search king, Technorati's David Sifry, abdicated his throne in August. The search for a new CEO went on for months. Who, after all, wanted to venture into a market increasingly dominated by Google, whose Blog Search was making Technorati increasingly irrelevant? But Technorati's board, at last, has found their patsy.Richard Jalichandra, a former business development guru at IGN Entertainment and Fox Interactive Media, whom insiders believe had a hand in the merger been game sites IGN and GameSpy, the acquisition of film site Rotten Tomatoes, and the company's acquisition by News Corp. for $650 million. Or not.

At PaidContent, Rafat Ali picked up this interesting fact from a perfunctory USA Today profile of Arianna Huffington: Her company, The Huffington Post, has raised another $5 million in financing. With blogging companies in vogue with big media, though, that strikes me as small change. Huffington doesn't even pay most of her celebrity bloggers, so it's not clear what she would need the money for. But one wonders why she didn't take more money off the table. Could it be that, despite all the buzz, the Post's blog-for-free business model isn't all that hot?

What happens when blogs fail? At AOL's Weblogs Inc., three cancelled health blogs have disappeared entirely — not even on Weblogs' list of retired blogs. [TechCrunch]

No, make that just plain writing for dollars. Fake Steve Jobs has a day job? Why, yes. Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor who pens the faux-Apple CEO blog, has chucked his pajamas, donned a suit and tie, and filed a story for the magazine's website. How does he find the time, with all that blogging? The subject: SCO, the software company which filed for bankruptcy as a series of its anti-Linux lawsuits fell apart. [Forbes]

TechCrunch and Business 2.0 never managed to merge, but editor Michael Arrington has snapped up former B2 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld. (This explains why Schonfeld recently revived his dormant blog to cover the TechCrunch40 conference.) Opinionated, arrogant, and whip-smart, Schonfeld is the perfect match for Arrington. We're looking forward to the fireworks at TechCrunch edit meetings — to which Schonfeld will be dialing in remotely from Brooklyn. [Bits]

Gawker has been referring to The New York Times as just a fancy blog for some time. But now the Times is really living up to the moniker. The newspaper has begun promoting its Bits technology blog with brief blurbs in the printed version. It's hardly original — the San Francisco Chronicle has been doing exactly that for a while now. But it means that blunt, off-the-cuff, first-person blog highlights are now appearing alongside the stodgy, rule-ridden prose of the eminent paper's traditional news articles.

Do you blog? Want to go to the CTIA wireless trade show in San Francisco? All you have to do is accept a blind invitation to a media briefing, and the mystery company will foot your hotel bills. Classy. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Bruce Judson, the Internet pioneer, is taking a turn at pretending to be a Web 2.0 expert, blogging on Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider. Yes, the very same Bruce Judson, Time Warner Internet vet turned hawker of free crap we wrote about a week ago, who's pawning his reputation as a marketer and business leader from the first Web boom to pitch his new venture, Free for Today. Why, oh, why, is Blodget handing Judson a megaphone? The fallen star's ruminations on Web 2.0 are obvious and boring, and a thinly veiled pitch for his free-crap website. Ah, yes, this is the real Web 2.0: Garnering attention through self-promotion, no matter how spurious your ideas or transparent your motives. Maybe Judson gets it after all.

Thomas Crampton, a former International Herald Tribune reporter turned extremely amateur videoblogger, cornered spunky Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow to discuss how to be a better blogger at a conference in China. Doctorow's advice was rather straightforward: Write headlines as if you work for a newswire so search engines can figure out what you're writing about. (We wish he had offered Crampton advice on shooting video interviews instead — or rather, how to pick up a laptop and type notes for a written blog entry, so search engines can figure out what your interviewee is talking about.) But Doctorow couldn't resist a competitive swipe at Gizmodo, the gadgets blog Boing Boing is now taking on.

Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, the owner of this site and my worthy predecessor as its editor, has weighed in triumphantly on the battle of the gadget blogs, declaring his Gizmodo site the winner in its heated competition with Engadget, the rival site started by founding Gizmodo editor Peter Rojas and now owned by AOL. The last time I covered this fight, I was working at Business 2.0, and an ostensibly neutral party. And so I got a fusillade from all sides. Scarred from that experience, and hardly neutral now, I'm not going to comment, save to observe that in the days to come, you're sure to hear an elaborate, exhausting point-counterpoint from Gizmodo and Engadget about international licensees, traffic-counting methodologies, and so on and so forth. Trust me, you won't want to hear it. And anyway, I'm more interested in my boss's obvious, embarrassing gaffe.

Robert Scoble, ostensible PodTech videoblogger, is at it again: Armed with magic marker and whiteboard, he plots the "blog of the future" — on video, alas, not in an actual blog post. His dream features for the uberblog boil down to two categories: First, visual elements and themes readily available today, no time machine required, but Scoble, not "a pretty expert HTMLer," can only draw imaginary boxes to represent them. Second, a utopian merger of Facebook, blogs, and desktop apps that we've already heard about before from Scoble. Along the way, Scoble uses a few books from his desk and swooshing sound effects to simulate Apple's popular Cover Flow media-browsing technology. And from this, we learn that PodTech hasn't gotten him an eraser for his beloved whiteboard. We were spared the hour Scoble could spend "just talking about comments" — thank you. Oh, and his readers are still complaining about his use of video and Kyte.tv. The full, and fully unwatchable, video after the jump.

LimeWire, the file-sharing software maker that's attempting to go legit, is starting a "Better Know A Blogger" series on its corporate blog. The first victim is Anthony Volodkin, founder of the music blog aggregator The Hype Machine. Never mind that the Hype Machine was cool, like, a year ago. Volodkin briefly discusses his inspiration for the site, which gathers up links to currently popular MP3 files on music blogs, as well as plans to roll out some social media features. Heads up: volodkin is the guy with the long hair in the Firefox shirt. his interviewer fails at introductions 101.

Does the world need yet another gadget blog? Probably not, but if we must endure one, it might as well be from Boing Boing, the venerable protoblog and "directory of wonderful things." While Boing Boing has featured a plethora of oddball gadgets over the years, its editors' tastes run to the esoteric. Boing Boing Gadgets, run by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson, promises to mix the offbeat with the mainstream. (Gizmodo, like Valleywag, is owned by Gawker Media.) Just one question: Does this bode an unseating for Dethroner, Johnson's own "lifestyle" blog?

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's breathless writeups of Web 2.0 startups practically parody themselves. As does the incessant expansion of his "Crunch"-branded empire. But his overripe prose has met a near-perfect sendup in CrunchFood, a faux dot-comestibles blog written by a fake Michael Arrington. (Imagine that: a poser poseur.) CNNMoney's Jim Ledbetter writes, "Whoever is writing it has a seasoned grasp of Arrington's astonishing mixture of depth, conflicts of interest, timeliness, and hint of arrogance." A post about lemons and limes includes an obligatory disclosure about the fake Arrington's citrus-grove ownership. Whoever's behind it has a keen sense of irony. CNET, the tech publisher and particular Arrington bugaboo, has recently diversified into food writing. Given Arrington's knack for slavish imitation, could a real CrunchFood be so far off?