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tumblr

Would you pay $999 for a customized Tumblr? Trustafarian bloggers will!

A couple weeks ago, when we showed you how to redesign your Tumblr for free, we mentioned that a company called Tumblize plan to charge $499 for the very same service. We were wrong. Andrew Wilkinson's Tumblize, launched today, will design you a customized Tumblr for "just $999." Startled by that kind of nonironic usage of the word just? Don't be. If Tumblr's blogging hordes have taught us anything, it's that earnest is the new ironic. Besides, Tumblize already has customers offering testimonials. Simon Frankson extols:
Tumblize actualized my crazy vision in ways I didn't think the internet even allowed for. They're poet/designers making haiku websites out of dreams.
Below, view a screenshot of Frankson's Tumblr and $3,996 more worth of goods. More »

12:40 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
3,314 views, 16 comments

Latest by Motherfirefly: But I love Simon Frankson. more »

jackpot

John Battelle takes $22 million in fuck-you money

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. More »

Feature

1:00 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Owen Thomas
3,001 views, 4 comments

Latest by moore850: Word on the street is, he'll lose most of that in one incredibly bad hand of poker at a suitcase gambling stand by Capitola beach. more »

automattic

Matt Mullenweg charms pants off Kara Swisher, copies my hairdo


AllThingsD's Kara Swisher admits her bias in interviewing Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg: Not only does her site use his blogging software, but she admits to having a "personal mancrush" on the programmer. He is perhaps the first straight guy to receive such treatment from Swisher, who is, provably, a mean lesbian. I think it's the hair: Mullenweg stole the retro-fauxhawk look from yours truly, I believe. Swisher does ask Mullenweg, "How do you make money at this?" But she's too crushed out to point out that Mullenweg already has made money, at least for himself, by selling a chunk of his company to investors. A digest of the interview: More »

12:20 PM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By Owen Thomas
645 views, 6 comments

Latest by Ian Bell: Good interview, Matt seems to really have his head on his shoulders. I think with numbers that big, they can obviously take their time figuring out the steps to monetization (if they haven't already), and make sure they do it more »

security

Google's Blogger flooded by spammers

Over the last few months, wily spammers may have figured out how to crack the security feature known as "captchas." With an army of compromised Windows PCs known as botnets, they've been using their new power to flood Google's Blogger with spam. Why Blogger? More »

11:20 AM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By Jackson West
965 views, 4 comments

blogging kills

MessageDance trying to cash in on "blogging kills" scare

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.

5:20 PM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Jackson West
187 views, 5 comments

Latest by Rachel Marsden: Why is it seen as a bad thing when bloggers die from blogging? It's merely Darwinism at its finest. more »

bloggers

Local woman dumps newfangled RSS feeds to type in website addresses the old-fashioned way

An online publishing veteran who goes by the name of Halsted has stopped drinking from the RSS firehose. She says she's not missing her feed reader's unread items folder:
Nothing has changed. I spend my time writing, reading, and puzzle-solving instead, and my stress levels are markedly down. Now I am absolutely convinced that I need to ditch my RSS reader permanently, and only read a handful of feeds on a start page like iGoogle or Netvibes.
As a journalist, it's my duty to call three friends for quotes to support my article about the "Slow Web" movement now. I expect some blogger will get a book deal for the inevitable manifesto. (Photo by Jef Poskanzer)

3:40 PM on Mon Apr 21 2008
By Jackson West
455 views, 5 comments

Latest by Runeshai: I did that a few months ago. It's a much simpler way to keep up on things I want to keep up on, just with a more relaxed way of going about it. Plus, it's available anywhere when more »

great moments in pr

Microsoft pretends Vista sales video is a gag, and CNET editor buys it

With the leak of an internal sales video, Microsoft is having its ironic cake and pretending not to eat it too. Its marketing team produced an awful spoof of Bruce Springsteen singing about Vista. One should note: Companies do this routinely to motivate their salespeople, but the innocents in engineering normally aren't exposed to the cheerleading routines. Microsoft's spin on the video: It's a gag! We're being sly! And incredibly, CNET editor Charles Cooper bought their line, quoting an anonymous flack: "They thought folks internally would get a kick out of not taking themselves so seriously all the time." More »

8:45 AM on Thu Apr 17 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,143 views, 14 comments

Latest by 0-o-0: The CNET editor was duped. Inside line: Windows Client Communications PR team is trying frantically to spin their own offspringsteen as bastard child. Originally conceived as a"fresh, hip and funny" viral video, this sales video gone wrong has turned more »

"Blog Till They Drop" author no stranger to technophobia "Nat Idle, a medical student turned journalist, sits in a San Francisco cafe when a woman puts a folded note on his table. Nat picks up the note, walks to the door to follow her, opens the note and reads: Get out of the Cafe, NOW! The cafe explodes." So begins Hooked by the Timesman who warns blogging can kill. [Matt Richtel]

7 comments

nerdfight

Rafat Ali's blogging hopes and dreams: to be as boring and profitable as Reed Elsevier

It takes a brave man to get in the middle of TechCrunch's bloggin' VC Michael Arrington and PaidContent founding editor Rafat Ali as they duke it out over the future of their micromedia empires. Timesman Saul Hansell is nothing but brave. In a Bits blog post, he quotes Rafat Ali's new hired hand Nathan Richardson saying that PaidContent differentiates itself from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and our own Valleywag because it "has not gone down the road of following personal foibles." Then, towards the end of the piece, Ali himself suggeests that Arrington is thinking too small by gunning for CNET:
The big market for us is the trade media. Companies like Reed Elsevier, Nielsen, Incisive and Informa play in this market, not these blogs.
But are these publishers so evenhanded? Trade publications have a history of being self-interested boosters for the markets they cover. More »

3:40 PM on Fri Mar 28 2008
By Jackson West
416 views, 4 comments

Latest by Abhi2point0: Also, they're the only guys with presence in India ... probably the hottest (tech & media) startup country after the US and Israel.. contentsutra(dot)(com) is way better than any trade mag covering digital media in the subcontinent and does pretty good more »

fresh start

Sony loses $50 per laptop thanks to those meddling bloggers

Tech bloggers are all worked up again. They're pissed that favorite whipping-boy Sony is charging $50 to not include "bundles" of trial software with new PC's. Engadget's Paul Miller writes:
Or here's an idea, Sony: stop trying to milk profits and start giving consumers laptops that actually work out of the box.
Sony is just trying to take care of their shareholders by keeping margins up — just like any other manufacturer. The company thought it could get away with charging $50 to replace lost revenue from paid placement of trial software without anyone noticing the absurdity of the situation. After the uproar, Sony changed its tune and will now offer its "Fresh Start" option for free. We suspect the other computer makers will follow suit shortly. Sony, next time just keep your mouth shut and we'll all get rich, ok?

2:20 PM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Jordan Golson
536 views, 14 comments

Latest by digimint: dell does the same thing. a year ago i sent back 2 computers to them because it had trial ware on it and they promised it wouldn't. hey i'm ok if they ship the computer with software on cd rom's, more »

nerdfight

Daring Fireball blogger's Wired takedown fizzles

The latest flaming bomb from Mac blogger John Gruber: "How Leander Kahney Got Everything Wrong by Being a Fucking Jackass." Kahney's sin? Writing Wired's latest cover story, ""How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong." Kahney's thesis: Apple succeeds despite violating Google's "don't be evil" rules of business. Gruber's response? Name-calling, starting in the headline. Gruber attacks with stabbing frenzy:
The whole contrast-with-Google angle makes no sense, holds up to no scrutiny, and serves no purpose other than to reach the punchy conclusion that Apple is "irredeemably evil." By Kahney's logic, any company that is different from Google —- and clearly most companies are far more different from Google than Apple is —- is evil.
More »

3:00 PM on Thu Mar 20 2008
By Jordan Golson
9,383 views, 15 comments

Latest by humorzo: I must be missing something. Why would Gruber want to demote himself to write for a kids mag ... when he has that fine column all by himself? more »

lj drama

SUP's Anton Nosik introduces LiveJournal users to European "customer service"

When SUP bought LiveJournal from SixApart, I'm sure the Russian company understood the financial details and the technological nuances, but I'm not sure it understood that the customer base is about one thing and one thing only — drama. At least, that's the impression I get from Anton Nosik in a recent interview with Izbrannoe, commenting on the March 12 move by the company to no longer offer free accounts (translated by russianswinga):
They endlessly, during the entire existence of LJ promote initiatives, whose only purpouse is to bring harm to LJ, its founders, their goal is to criticize, destablilize and ruin our reputation.
More charmingly honest observations from Nosik after the jump. More »

7:00 AM on Thu Mar 20 2008
By Jackson West
936 views, 7 comments

Latest by Owen Thomas: @CumaeanSibyl: For that, I may just have to friend you. more »

great moments in pr

Blogger-hating flack tangles with Penelope Trunk

My inbox is full of people asking who Mike Cherico is. The short version: He's a "dudeblogger" who was fired from Glamour magazine for bragging about womanizing. (Wasn't that what he was hired to do?) But what really entertains me is what happened after self-important PR guy Scott Swords spammed every blogger on the planet with an unsolicited press release decrying Cherico's evil ways. One of the recipients: Former Yahoo columnist Penelope Trunk, who cut the barely literate Swords to ribbons. The release, and Trunk's email exchange, after the jump. More »

2:00 PM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,164 views, 5 comments

Latest by raincoaster: "Columnist uses column to pull" Holy shit, stop the presses! more »

blogging for dollars

Valleywag seeking $10 million among VC blog feeding frenzy

What is Michael Arrington smoking? His self-indulgent fantasy: All the bloggers should band together into a "dream team," owning equity in the joint venture. "Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business," he writes. That existing blog he has in mind is obviously TechCrunch, though he never comes out and says it. What pushed him into this delusion? A rumor that Silicon Alley Insider is raising a $3 million to $5 million round and that PaidContent is also seeking more financing, a charge founder Rafat Ali doesn't exactly deny. Arrington doesn't want his competitors to raise money, because that will screw his ambitions for a big blog rollup. More »

11:51 AM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,671 views, 14 comments

Latest by VizionQuest: Perhaps he just worried about Valleywag's surge to dethrone TechCrunch: [tomuse.com] Keep up the great work! more »

commentards

If this tip about Engadget's Ryan Block were in English, I bet it would be interesting

We tried to translate a tip, above, about some comment purportedly deleted by Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block, but we failed. Maybe it's revealing enough as is — about the would-be Engadget commenter, not Block. Click to expand the email. More »

3:20 PM on Thu Feb 28 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
920 views, 2 comments

bloggers

Pay By Touch threatens to sue over blog post

Biometrics payments firm Pay By Touch is selling assets in "a mad scramble to recover any money whatsoever that our convicted Google stardom dreaming leader John Rogers pissed away," a tipster tells us. One of those assets was Pay By Touch subsidiary ATM Direct, a business Alex Muse and other Texas investors were hoping to acquire. But that didn't happen. To explain why, Muse wrote a post to his Texas Startup Blog. It's critical of Pay By Touch. Critical enough that Pay By Touch chief Thomas Lumsden threatened Muse with a lawsuit if he didn't remove it. Below, we've reposted the whole thing. More »

4:00 PM on Wed Feb 27 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,784 views, 5 comments

Latest by softice: Hey it's a nice a very comfortable backpack. What's wrong with that? I even have the umbrella with pbt logo on it. more »

Is Matt Marshall the Jimmy Olsen of venture capital? VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall does have a striking resemblance to Superman's Jimmy Olsen, as Jangl CEO Michael Cerda suggests. The analogy's even more apt if you compare Marshall to the Smallville version:

1 comment

After two years at Yahoo, Susan Mernit got the ax at Yahoo Personals. Know any other layoff victims? Send them in.

4 comments