(Photos by NewYorkInsider and NYFoundersClub)

Those insiders made lots and lots of money, and you won't be seeing any mea culpas from them like disgraced analyst-turned-Web publisher Henry Blodget's. It was your average American investor on the outside who took the hit on their retirement nest egg when InfoSpace went belly-up — not those who profited from flipping shares back and forth along the way.

We never touch our PC screen, and we hate it when other people touch our PC screens.... We're not particularly anal, and we polish up our Blackberry every thirty seconds or so.... So excuse us if we don't jump up and down in excitement at the thought that people are going to feel better about jabbing their fat, greasy fingers into our PC screens.

The fact that they're at the table — regardless of what they were telling themselves got them to the table — it's much more likely that they say "enough with the four foot high stack of paper outlining the details of the deal. Just merge."

Could it possibly be because she's not happy with the numbers that ComScore is reporting for her client — or, worse, the numbers NextNewNetworks is asking her to pitch? I'd like to point out the Association for Downloadable Media is giving a presentation on video advertising standards tomorrow at Ad:tech. Maybe Hammerling should give them her support instead of taking passive-aggressive stabs at companies working in the space. That seems easier.

Then Calacanis turned away from Frommer and spotted me. A look of recognition came over his face. "I just made all that up," he told me. Was he covering a slip? Or toying with Frommer — and extending the gag to me? Or seeing if he could spread a rumor sure to drive Arrington, his TechCrunch40 conference partner, completely bonkers? Calacanis is known to invent stories just for the fun of it. I asked SAI managing editor Peter Kafka. "On the record," he told me, "we're going to take the $12 million and buy a third of TechCrunch. But don't tell anyone!"

It would not be much of a story that Federated is repping Blodget's blog, save for the identity of Blodget's backer: Kevin Ryan, the cofounder of DoubleClick, one of the Internet's first online ad networks. Embarrassing: It seems Battelle knows something about selling ads that Ryan doesn't.

Swisher, aggrieved at the lack of recognition for her scoop, accused BusinessWeek and the Times of running "hand-fed" stories, a charge Lacy and Stone's editor denied. (Lacy told me she'd known since the previous Sunday, but had held the information for her column; Stone's editor told Swisher his meeting with Slide that morning was previously scheduled.)

PaidContent.org clearly felt left out. After one of its writers filed a me-too post, editor Rafat Ali skewered Lacy in a followup post, calling her a "doting, in-awe poseur."

On Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget, Lacy's cohost on Yahoo's soon-to-be-launched TechTicker finance show, came to her defense, dismissing PaidContent as an "aging, LA-based digital news blog."

Oh, and somewhere along the way, I managed to write a story on the subject without calling anyone names.

All of which shows how petty bloggers can be, and none of which answers the question of whether this matters to readers. My suspicion: Only to the extent that they may pass over a story they feel they've read elsewhere first. Google News actively punishes scoops, presenting news on a given subject by the most recent article written, a practice which encourages follow-on news articles and blog posts — and, for that matter, makes it hard to discover who actually broke a given story. Techmeme tends to favor the person who writes with most authority, drawing links from other blogs.

Turns out Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst turned blogger, has a point. And if MySpace parent-company News Corp. shares this view — that Fox Interactive is in trouble because of MySpace's slow-growing worldwide traffic — perhaps its no wonder Rupert Murdoch was seen hanging around Bebo, the social network which is officially "looking for funding" and unofficially looking for a buyer. Here's a look at Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all together on the world stage.

(Photo by jonrawlinson)

*In the sense of "persuading, especially with flattery," you dirty birds. What did you think I meant by "canoodling"?

Remember Yahoo FinanceVision? It was Yahoo's attempt to imitate CNBC, except on your computer. Launched in 2000, with an annoyingly overenthusiastic commercial embedded above, dragged on for two years before declining online advertising revenues put a bullet in it. We hear it's rising from the grave. We've confirmed that BusinessWeek columnist and certified Valley Fox Sarah Lacy has been signed as a talking head. Other rumored contributors include VC blogger and TV pundit Paul Kedrosky and manflesh connoisseur Henry Blodget, the disgraced Wall Street analyst and founder of Silicon Alley Insider. Blodget, at least, has experience talking up stocks.

Disclosure: Yes, yes, we know, we're conflicted up the wazoo here. Gilt's chairman Kevin Ryan is our chairman, Alexis Maybank, Mike Bryzek, and co are basically colleagues, etc. Whatever. You want pure objectivity without a hint of favoritism, emotion, or relationship conflict, visit TechCrunch.

Update: Henry Blodget responds.

Blodget recently resurfaced on a blog called "Internet Outsider." His latest post begins: "The most surprising thing about RBC analyst Jordan Rohan's comment that MySpace could be worth $10-$20 billion in a few years is that he deemed this assessment 'audacious'—and the press seemed to agree. Why is this audacious?"

Ahem. It's audacious because the company, bought for $518 million, is so precariously perched on an aging model of social networking that it could lose its sweet advertising deals as soon as the market implodes.

Given all of this, it's distressing to see Blodget quoted — without irony — in the New York Times. These days, Blodget is practically a voice of reason. A scary thought, unless you're into the "blind seer" archetype.

Could Microsoft Bid for eBay? [NYT DealBook]
Internet Outsider [Blodget's blog]
Henry Blodget [Wikipedia]