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Update: That advertorial Bloodcopy post below is now clearly and accurately labeled as sponsored. Phew.

Something else you might have missed if you, like a normal person, enjoyed the Memorial Day holiday without following online media industry news: Gawker found itself in the middle of an advertising-blurring-with-editorial controversy after our sales department and HBO pretended that an advertorial blog was a Gawker editorial property.

A programming note: No, we're not going all Condé Nast with summer Fridays (memo for next week: is Condé still getting summer Fridays?) but because of the holiday, we're cutting today short. Foster and T.A.N. will be around this weekend and then the site's going dark on Monday. Happy weekend.

Dear Ryan:

As I head to NBC to run its Bay Area site, I'm leaving you one Silicon Valley gossip blog, used but in good condition. A few thoughts on how to keep it that way.

After terrorizing tech managers, Owen Thomas has decided to join 'em. Emerging from the shadows to replace him as the Valleywag is Ryan Tate, who's already relishing the idea of life in the sunshine.

On this rainy Saturday, we're going to try out something new in Gawker weekend programming: for the next couple hours, Patrice Evans, a/k/a The Assimilated Negro (or T.A.N. for short), will be your guest host.

Compete.com released their monthly unique visitor numbers today and Gawker had another strong month, staying ahead of old-line (and much larger) outfits like ABCNews.com and NYMag.com.

You may have started the day thinking you were reading any old gossip rag, but the people have clicked and Gawker is your best group blog of the 2009 Weblog Awards.

Like a waffling yard sale lady who, push come to shove, simply couldn't part with her prized collection of People "Sexiest Man Alives," Nick Denton has succumbed to a crippling case of seller's remorse.

Oh, look. Time has one of those annoying click-here-25-times-to-see-the-best-of-something lists and evidently they don't like us very much. What did we do to fall out of the newsweekly's favor?

Attention screen-addled young (or old, whatever) folk: Gawker Media is looking for a television-obsessed intern to watch TV a few days a week, in search of newsworthy clips for social commentary. There are two qualifications:

You know what we need more of around here? Change. Though it's purely coincidental to our recent redesign, we got the go-ahead today from Facebook to flip the Facebook Connect switch.

Valleywag, along with other blogs published by Gawker Media, has adopted a new, condensed format, making the page faster to load and headlines easier to scan.

We've come a long way from our days as a one-person blogging operation and this redesign reflects our evolution into a news operation that now posts some 50 stories a day.

Alert style

You may have noticed a lot more of Owen Thomas on the site today. That's because we are pleased to officially welcome him into the Gawker fold. He'll continue to write under the Valleywag banner as well as supply a West Coast perspective as Gawker continues to take on a more national flavor. There was much hand-wringing after the announcement that Valleywag would be merging into Gawker — much of it a testament to how much of a must-read Valleywag had become in Silicon Valley — but the good news is that he'll still be keeping a close eye on tech gossip and news, except now for a larger audience and with the chance to spread his wings a bit to cover other topics. Of course, given the times and our overlord/benefactor Nick Denton's cost-cutting mode, as we expand, we also have to shrink. As others have already noted, the talented Sheila McClear will be departing the site at the end of the year, when her writing will be missed.

I love Owen, but he has trouble writing in English during a crisis. So here's the basics on what's happening at Valleywag:

Valleywag offers email subscriptions. If you're an RSS obsessive, updating feeds every 15 seconds, this option's not for you. The email goes out once a week, with rare exceptions for big, breaking stories. But if you're the type who likes to make sure you haven't missed anything big, we recommend subscribing to Valleywag's email newsletter.

It may shock some of our most fervid readers, but there are other websites on the Internet. Valleywag's editors even read some of them. We're experimenting with a new feature: A "Recommended Stories" post, culled from some of the sites which frequent our RSS feed, will appear daily at 9 a.m. The post will have links to the original stories, and also an excerpt page on which you can discuss it with other Valleywag readers. We'll also feature some stories from around the Web on our homepage, throughout the day. Some stories require a debunking or explication from Valleywag; others are worthy of a simple link. Please let us know what you think of it; suggestions for sites we should watch