Here's a hefty guilt trip for Twitter's overtaxed engineers to bear: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has blamed a recent outage for making him feel bad. He writes: "I'm in a particularly bad mood because I have food poisoning (thanks very much Grand Hyatt Seattle) and Twittering it was going to make me feel marginally better because a bunch of people would say something nice in a reply. But they take even that away from me." It's official: Arrington is self-medicating with Web 2.0. Folks, should we stage an intervention? (Photoillustration by Jackson West, from an original by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

"If all those geniuses working in Silicon Valley could come up with a way to screen for those vile comments," as Arianna Huffingon mused on KQED's Forum, would her Huffington Post blog empire be empowered to delete meanness from the blogosphere? Sounds like a challenge. Maybe Google can inspire its engineers by changing its slogan to "Don't be vile."

Fast Company videoblatherer Robert Scoble doesn't mind if you talk trash about him. But is it too much to ask that mainstream media outlets get his name right? Slate, owned by the Washington Post, calls him "Peter Scoble." Agence France Presse renamed him "Andrew." Why is "Robert" so hard to type? I don't know — I managed to screw up Scoble's first name once while blogging for Business 2.0. But it is telling on one point: Scoble may be a household name in the office parks of Silicon Valley, but everywhere else, he's a Joe Everyman whose name isn't even worth getting right. Let's just start calling him "Scooby," as his Fast Company colleagues do.

Engadget editor Ryan Block, noting that Motorola is struggling to find a leader for its cell-phone business, volunteers for the job. [Engadget]

Video-sharing site Stickam — owned and operated by a Japanese porn company — wants to pay some guy named Leo Laporte $100,000 to stream his podcast called This Week in Tech, or TWiT, exclusively for one year. Confused? So are we. And when we did the math, our bewilderment grew.

Today is Duncan Riley's last day of full-time writing for Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, we learned from Techmeme. Riley will move to his own publication, the Inquisitr. "My sincere hope is to have the opportunity to buy that blog some day and bring him right back into the fold," Arrington writes in his farewell.

I've long been fascinated with the ubiquitous gladhandery of Pete Cashmore, the 22-year-old founder of Mashable. And I've been meaning to ask Cashmore what, exactly, he does. Al Gore's cable channel, Current, has saved me the awkward moment. As a video clip shows, Cashmore talks on his cell phone, takes cabs, and meets with Internet luminaries. He claims that this process helps Mashable "get the news." For example? He interviewed Bebo founder Michael Birch days before the company's $850 million sale to AOL. Did his facetime land him the scoop? No. For that matter, Cashmore really hasn't written anything for Mashable in ages. Understandably. Appearing to be a blogger is a full-time job. The full clip:

Robert Scoble, the man who makes boring videos about tech companies, but only the ones you don't care about, convinced Fast Company to redesign his blog, and it's now practically tasteful. But the giant ad from longtime sponsor Seagate prompted TechCrunch's Michael Arrington to throw Scoble's argument against ads on blogs back at him. [Scobleizer]

Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million.

Seattle-based Pet Holdings, the company that runs the photo-blog I Can Has Cheezburger, posted a job listing on Monday. Company founder Ben Huh told the Syndey Morning Herald he has since received over 250 applications. Like the thought of a hungry cat watching me while I sleep, this terrifies me. Not only will Huh's new hire have to go through 7,000 captioned and 2,000 uncaptioned photos of felines each day, this person will be forced to check the grammar and spelling of that cruel and unusual punishment of the English language known as LOLspeak. No can has dignity!

• 0:40: WordPress.com has 140 million unique visitors a month, generating 600 million to 700 million pageviews.

While exploiting tragic deaths and blogger heatlh problems for a trend piece in the New York Times is bad, trying to gin up new customers by jumping on the bandwagon is yet worse, but that's just what MessageDance is doing with their latest email direct marketing campaign: "Power blogging minus the heart attack!" Especially since it seems to imply that making it easier to post updates anywhere and anytime will somehow relieve the pressure to constantly stay on top of the news.

What's wrong with Anil Dash? As of today, the New York blogger, Six Apart's vice president of evangelism, has been at the San Francisco-based blog-software company for five years. Dash, the company's first employee, is one of its largest individual shareholders, but he's mostly vested by now. Why stick around? In Silicon Valley, the custom is to job-hop, to continuously optimize one's career for maximum gains. In staying loyal to Six Apart cofounders Ben and Mena Trott, Dash is betraying one of the industry's unspoken rules. No wonder so many of the ruthless careerists who populate tech companies find him grating. The concept that one might be vested in something other than stock options is alien to them.

As a part of a new "blogging services" strategy, blog software firm Six Apart has acquired social media applications builder Apperceptive and launched a new ad network. SAI questions whether the world needs another ad network. It doesn't. But we also wonder about Six Apart's timing. Why not launch the ad network during Ad:tech a week earlier? The Moscone Center crowd might have liked to lay some bets on some SXSW-style kickball action organized by publicly snarky, privately earnest Six Apart marketing guru Anil Dash. All we got were booth babes in fishnets.

Blogger Louis Gray spends another 1,185 words on the subject, but the headline says it all — and describes him, too. [Louisgray.com]

Perhaps you thought the New York Times made too much of stressful working conditions for bloggers in its infamous "Blog Till They Drop" article. But that's only because you haven't seen this video tour of a blogger sweatshop from activist group Barely Political. Watch it now people. My boss will surely cane me for posting, but it must be seen!

BayWords is the new blog host from those lovable Swedish outlaws at The Pirate Bay. The blogging platform is built atop open-source WordPress code. Which is a little ironic, since TorrentFreak reports that the project was started after a WordPress.com user who linked to copyrighted material lost his account. As for the new site, almost anything goes. "As long as you don't break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it," says The Pirate Bay's Peter "Brokep" Sunde. Looks I'll be spending the weekend reading up on Sweden's legal code.

Is Nick Denton going soft? Even his cutbacks are sentimental these days. In the old days, Denton, the publisher of Valleywag and 14 other Gawker Media blogs, would simply shutter blogs. These days, he worries first about finding them nice homes. Such is the velvet-glove treatment he's giving Gridskipper, Wonkette, and Idolator, his blogs about, respectively, travel, politics, and music. The three blogs amount to less than 3 percent of Gawker Media's traffic, he says. Fine, so why keep them around in any form? Silicon Alley Insider has the details on their new owners. More evidence of Denton's increasing namby-pambosity: Instead of threatening to fire leakers, he's encouraging us to post the internal memo announcing the move. Darling bossman, that's no fun. But also no reason to keep the memo from you, dear readers: