Because you're nosy about it, here's graphical proof that on the Internet, Apple is a much bigger topic than anything else we post about. Yet the video of Gizmodo's cruel CES prank drew 10 times more clicks than our biggest MacBook Air post. Hollywood still crushes all. On Gawker, Nick Denton's mirror post of Tom Cruise's Scientology promo video is closing on 1.5 million views — comparable traffic to all of Valleywag so far this month. It struck me this morning that if I wanted to maximize my Gawker Media traffic bonus pay, I'd stop writing and instead follow Tom Cruise around with a camera. Oh wait, that's what the big pubs actually do. It all makes sense now.

Richard Blakeley, the Gawker Media cameraman whose antics for Gizmodo drew widespread attention, is selling his press badge — the last one he'll ever get, he says — for $100 on Craigslist. Why is it a collector's item? Because CES has banned him from attending future events after he filmed himself using a remote control to turn off TV screens on the show floor. (Gizmodo, like Valleywag, is owned by Gawker Media, and Blakeley does video work for both sites.)

Star Wonkette commenter FlakJack listed additional punishments the Consumer Electronics Show people should mete out to Gizmodo's TV-remote prankster. Edited version:

Richard Blakeley, the scamp behind Gizmodo's TV-turnoff stunt at CES, has been banned from attending the show. Here's the CEA's official response to the Gizmodo TV-B-Gone prank:

Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton's new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it.

Fleshbot, a NSFW site published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media, feels left out. Digg's terms of service do not allow pornographic content, so Fleshbot doesn't benefit from the flood of traffic prominent placement on Digg allows. Boo frickin' hoo, I say.

Nick Denton likes his blogs a bit dark. But his readers seem to disagree. io9, Gawker Media's sci-fi blog, has been its most successful launch to date, with 750,000 pageviews, followed closely by Jezebel. Shiny, happy futurism and go-girl feminism sell better than bleak wit and sardonic jabs at the powers that be.

I'll admit it, I'm jealous: While Valleywag remains stuck with a logo that looks like an IBM monitor from 1982, io9, Gawker Media's newly launched sci-fi site, has gotten a wickedly cool illustration. The future is coming, and it is diabetically adorable. I quizzed site editor Annalee Newitz on the origins of the logo.

Valleywag dwells on sex, greed, and hypocrisy. That leaves little room for the merely quirky, edgy, and unprofitable. For that, we present to you io9, a new sci-fi blog published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media. All of our colleagues are dutifully saying nice things. There will be none of that from Valleywag, thank you very much. Don't get us wrong: We are grateful for the existence of io9, run by surly media nerd Annalee Newitz ("sparkly-crap mobile circuit-board garbage gizmo mass-produced by machines").

At last, I've received a real-life, actual Beacon message — the controversial Facebook ad format that reports on your friends' activities elsewhere on the Web. The news flash? My boss, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, is going to see Will Smith thriller I Am Legend. This ruins my arthouse-film image of him. Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg!

Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.

This just in from Forbes: Apparently Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, Gawker, Gizmodo, and other fine blogs, has changed its name to "Denton Media." Except not. But you know what I really find annoying? This article was written by someone I personally taught how to factcheck. [Forbes]

The New York Times reports that Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my boss, will take over as editor of Gawker.com, his flagship and our sister site, on January 2. My first reaction to the news: Well, good. This should keep him busy.

When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage, and came to similar conclusions: Although nothing legally wrong occurred, IU officials' failure to disclose their ChaCha ties was suspicious. However, since then the newspaper has provided the issue little attention. Why?

These days, a startup raising $1.5 million hardly seems noteworthy, so I was inclined to dismiss the news that Curbed Network, a New York-based blog franchise, had brought in that modest amount. This despite the fact that Lockhart Steele, Curbed's cofounder, is a friend and helped recruit me to Valleywag when he worked at Gawker Media, and Nick Denton, Valleywag's owner, is one of the investors in this round. No, I was more intrigued by the name of another investor: Zach Nelson, the Larry Ellison protégé who's CEO of NetSuite, the Web-based software company which has filed to go public. How could these two have possibly connected? A quick reading of the social graph revealed only one candidate: Brooke Hammerling, the hyperconnected founder of Brew PR and Valleywag's original Snacky Flack. The coast-swapping Hammerling says her career as a yentapreneur began when she invited Steele, a baseball fan, to an Oakland A's event hosted by Nelson. Hope you got a cut, Brooke.

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.

From the mailbag: "In the off-chance she hasn't told you herself, New York magazine is doing a full-length (3000+ words) think piece on the splendor that is Julia Allison [with writer Stephen Rodrick]. It's completely unrelated to Vanessa Grigoriadis's Gawker feature, which is being considered for, but is unlikely to get, the next cover." *Shudder*

Justin Kan, the original lifecaster behind Justin.tv, hyped his company on the prospects of seeing him naked or, better yet, in flagranti delicto. But if that was the draw of the site for you, forget it. Over the weekend, Justin.tv banned a would-be lifecaster after a single day of risqué broadcasting, and has since revised its community guidelines. Kan knew that appealing to the sensational side of lifecasting would draw interest, but now that the startup is attracting investors, sensationalism also brings potential controversy. And nothing chases away money like controversy. But what about the adherents to lifecasting? Won't they, too, be chased away if "lifecasting" is redefined as only including the parts of your life that would make it past network-TV censors?