I like Om. He is everything Arrington wants to be when he grows up.

Arrington headlined his own post about the news "GigaOm ignores my advice," linking to a long, telling post from earlier this year in which he attempted to explain why blogs should remain financially independent. What he really means is: GigaOm shouldn't take VC because TechCrunch is the only blog that's supposed to get VC, so Arrington can buy his competitors.

Arrington has said publicly that he wants to be the one to consolidate the blogging sector into one big Voltron-like online publishing empire. When he wrote this morning that "we are one of the last large blog networks to remain independent," he probably wasn't intentionally lying. But his Web-2.0-centric worldview ignores bigger non-tech networks such as the local Sugar Publishing and the British Shiny Media.

By taking on five million dollars in further investments, Malik hasn't just picked up capital to expand his staff and marketing. Like a pufferfish circled by sharks, he's made GigaOm a much bigger ball for Arrington or anyone else to try to swallow. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Malik and Cashmore, perhaps taking a cue, didn't do any real reporting on the event, leaving that to Threat Level and Laughing Squid. The two simply blogged their Al-and-me pictures as news stories on GigaOm and Mashable, bringing themselves one step closer to the old media stereotype of the vain reporter who can't stop inserting himself into the story — or in this case, into the non-story.

What hasn’t been discussed is that the company isn’t really facing up to the fact that its layers of management have resulted in a state of masterful inactivity, masked perhaps as a culture of consensus. This starts at the top - from the company’s board and senior management down to VP level where people are prone to organizing and attending twenty meetings before deciding the fate of a project.

Granted, he may be a little petulant that Yahoo wasn't well-represented at the Structure 08 conference he threw this week — even after he gave the company's open source cloud computing software Hadoop center stage at an earlier after-work presentation GigaOm hosted. He has, however, been covering Yahoo for longer than many other publications working the story have existed, and breaking his relative silence to predict doom for the company will hopefully shake up some of the executives down in Sunnyvale. (Photo by Pete Jelliffe)

Simple food, simple clothes, a simple home and simple, clear writing. Hopefully I can stick to that plan. I have incorporated physical exercise into my daily life, given up smoking, gone almost completely vegetarian and taken to wearing jeans.

Say it ain't so, Om! You were always one of the best dressed men on the scene! While I can also report that said jeans are very stylish, still, I can't imagine any doctor demanding that you dumb down your wardrobe for the sake of your health.

• Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
• Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
• Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
• Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
• Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
• Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
• Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
• Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
• Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
• Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
• Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
• Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
• Cedric Maloux
• Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
• Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
• Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
• Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
• Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
• Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
• Esteban Sosnik
• Esther Dyson (EDventure)
• Felix Petersen (Plazes)
• Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
• Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
• Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
• Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
• James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
• Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
• John Markoff (The New York Times)
• Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
• Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
• Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
• Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
• José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
• Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
• Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
• Lars Hinrichs (XING)
• Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
• Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
• Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
• Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
• Megan Smith (Google)
• Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
• Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
• Nikesh Arora (Google)
• Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
• Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
• R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
• Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
• Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
• Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
• Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
• Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
• Thomas Crampton (Next Media)

Michael Dell figured out that he could do an end run around PC makers: get components from factories in Asia to the U.S. as fast as possible, but only after he had charged for the machine. Google is following a similar strategy. Instead of trucks and assembly plants, Google's supply chain is made up of fiber networks and datacenters.

The company spent nearly $3.8 billion over the past seven quarters on capital expenditures. Google's infrastructure is the barrier to entry. It delivers search results fast — between 0.06 to 0.12 seconds. If they're wrong, we can just start over. The faster results show up on our browsers, the less inclined we'll be to switch. Google, according to Hitwise, now has 64 percent of the search market.

That said, there's another thing Google could learn from Dell: Maintain the quality of your search results — customers will only put up with shoddiness for so long.

• Om Malik's Internet video blog, NewTeeVee, hosts its NewTeeVee Live conference today in Mission Bay, south of the ballpark. Not interested in talking business with videobloggers? Check out the game show tonight at 7 p.m., where contestants including Diggnation drinker Kevin Rose and Wallstrip siren Lindsay Campbell will compete in a Family Feud style contest hosted by comedienne Heather Gold. [NewTeeVee]
• Lotus founder Mitch Kapor gives a talk today at 4 p.m. at UC Berkeley's School of information. [UC Berkeley]
• Nate Bolt, CEO of Bolt Peters, gives at talk at Yahoo Brickhouse about UX research with an emphasis about life instead of just interfaces. I don't know what the hell that means either, but it's a chance to test morale at the Brickhouse. [Upcoming]

The boss text-messaged me instructions to report on who was there and who wasn't, but to me all business reporters and publicists kind of look alike. I could only confirm that the lanky guy whom several partygoers mistook for Digg founder Kevin Rose, complete with bedhead and horizontal stripey-shirt, was Not Kevin.

Besides the hacks and flacks, any event south of Market Street includes a few self-styled "startup CEOs" who've yet to hire a single full-time employee. Happily, one turned out to be Kyle Shank from Uncov, the cruelly funny site that aspires to be the anti-Techcrunch. (Memo to Kyle: Trade the 1997 orange shirt for some basic black. Sorry, kid, but if you give tough love, you get tough love.)

Overheard

Your name's Melody? Wasn't she the drummer for Josie and the Pussycats?

Working at home means you can drink whenever you want.

You guys coming outside? You know, around the corner, you know? Look, we're going to smoke some weed, are you in or out?

(Above: Donna Sokolsky and my wife laugh at the boys.)

As the party wound down, I followed Om out the door in pursuit of another photo. He refused. "I don't want to be the story, I want to be the guy telling the stories," he said. "People keep trying to make me the story. It's a problem." Fact check, Om: In the also-ran media world of San Francisco, you resigned from Time Inc. to go blogging. A year later you're doing better than most of those who stayed behind. You're a story. Cope.

(Photos by James Yu and Joey Wan; used by permission)

Sorry, that's a big no. Of course, much of the feud was actually in the minds of Digg users and not the two entrepreneurs. Any animosity between the Web luminaries was simply "shit talking," as Rose put it on the show, not personal. But Calacanis and Rose are known for being outspoken and opinionated, and their approaches to business couldn't be more different. Surely, the two would inject some much-needed spice into the staid program — if only for their good friends Malik and Kim, Calacanis's sister-in-law.

Instead, the most contentious point of the interview came when Calacanis made this statement:

Netscape wasn't just a copy of Digg. It basically built on it. It did a lot of things that were much more innovative than Digg had done to date. And you've told me that before.

Well, I think it's a different direction ... I don't think I'd call it ... yeah, it's a different direction.

Malik should be ashamed of himself. If he can't deliver on a simple catfight, then he's sure to lose his audience to the Valley's new sex kittens.

Says Michael Arrington:

As an aside, she's also fairly hot — Webb's pictures have been in FHM and Maxim magazine, and in April she was voted the 51st sexiest woman in the world in a FHM survey.

"How many of these ghastly tech reports can anyone watch?" asks a friend of Valleywag. One, of course — the one with the hottest chick. WebbAlert is sure to do some damage — to, say, the GigaOm Show. Blogger Om Malik, with his face for radio and voice for magazines, just can't compete with the likes of Morgan Webb, even with comely cohost Joyce Kim.

To save his show, Malik should turn it over completely to Kim. And he'd better do it soon. More competition is on the way: We hear that NakedNews.com is launching NakedTechNews.com. Now that's sure to get an Arrington review.

If anything, TreeHugger's sale marks a steady downward trend from the frothy days of 2004 and 2005, when the $519 million deal Dow Jones struck to acquire MarketWatch and the $25 million sale of Jason Calacanis's Weblogs Inc. to AOL sparked hopes of pricier blog buyouts to come. But they didn't materialize.

Instead, today, blogs like TreeHugger are evaluated more like conventional media properties, based on audience size, advertising, and growth rates, not eyeballs alone. And, of course, strategic fit matters. Discovery's TV viewers are naturally drawn to green blogs. Better for Discovery to own those blogs than let its cable audience drift away to them.

(Update: Valleywag is owned by Gawker Media, and Gawker's publisher, Nick Denton, is an investor in and advisor to TreeHugger.)

(Photo of Calacanis, Kim, and Rose by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

How will NewTeeVee, GigaOm's news site about online video, cover Revision3? "With a disclosure," says Malik matter-of-factly. Well, sure. That's the right thing to do. But NewTeeVee already partners with Metacafe for its Pier Screenings events, and it has a host of prominent sponsors in the field it covers. Om Malik is at heart a journalist, and NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes is a sharp young reporter. But I worry, that with the welterwork of disclosures, disclaimers, and digressions they're going to have to slap on the site, that it will end up either unreadable or untrustworthy.

None of that, of course, makes "The GigaOm Show" anything less than a must-watch. So far Malik has scheduled Rob Glaser of RealNetworks, Bill Watkins of Seagate, and James Hong of HotorNot for on-screen interviews. Malik's a sharp, impatient questioner, which should make for good TV. He'd better hope so, anyway. Otherwise, things are going to get ugly at GigaOm headquarters when Gannes finds herself forced to pan him.

Peron's place, which Culver is renting, is amazing. The backyard is built like a treehouse, with hidden stairways leading to the an outbuilding that doubles as a blacklight garden and hot tub. A model of the Golden Gate bridge serves as a walkway connecting the second floor to the guesthouse. Oh, and there are full-grown pot plants everywhere you turn.

The party had the feel of a high-school kegger, as if Web 2.0 High prom king Kevin Rose had convinced his venture capitalists to go away for the weekend and leave the liquor cabinet stocked. Pownce cofounder Leah Culver danced around the kitchen lip-synching to "Lip Gloss." On a screen, Randi Jayne, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, debuted her latest viral video, a very clever iPhone parody. By 11 p.m., the kegs were kicked, and people stood around holding red plastic cups, hoping in vain for more liquor. Attendees included just about every boldfaced name from the San Francisco Web scene: StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp; Om Malik and Liz Gannes from GigaOm; Sarah Lane, Martin Sargent, and David Prager from Revision3; and recent New York Times profile subject David Ulevitch from OpenDNS.

And of course, there was some drama. A group of wannabe gangbangers walked into the party and, eyewitnesses say, walked out with a MacBook and at least one purse. My purse, to be exact. After I noticed that my purse was missing, three of the alleged thieves came back to the party, apparently hoping to steal more stuff. Partygoers detained one of them, who was then arrested by San Francisco police on a conspiracy charge. Good thing they didn't check out the back yard. For a glimpse of the scene, here's a gallery:

Bonus! Hakia attached a song about "searching for better search." If you had a really great night last night, and you need a sledgehammer to bring you back into the desperate hopeless drudgery of your life, this song is better than "Birth School Work Death." One line goes, "Your childhood is posted on eBay, starting bids 25 cents."

Q: What you are looking for in a significant other?
A: Intelligence, kindness and humor. Someone who I can look at from the corner of my eye and be pleased as punch that I am her guy! Virginia Madsen, except for real!

Q: What do you look for in a significant other?
A: She should take as much interest in men's shoes as she does in Jimmy Choo's.

Megan McCarthy: okay, basically, this conference is all about widgets [embeddable pieces of code for web pages] and gadgets and it's all kind of cool and useful in practice

Nick Douglas: This is something you can hold an entire conference on?

Megan: I'm as shocked as you
I'm learning lots of ways to pimp out my myspace page
I'll be stylin' soon

Nick: And those attendees unlucky enough to nab a press pass, they paid HOW much to learn that?

Megan: about $100?
it's all about the networking at this thing
[TechCrunch blog founder] Michael Arrington ran away from me
Nick: So how good was the networking? Who'd you see?
First Marissa, then Arrington. We'll have to start a hall of fame.

Megan: the "I'm Afraid of Valleywag" club
we can send them a button
How about this, we can create an "Afraid of Valleywag" widget and they can post it on their site

Nick: so who else was there?

Megan:[GigaOM founder] Om Malik, of course
Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency
The Feedburner guys
(The CTO of feedburner showed me how to use RSS feeds. He was very nice)

Nick: any memorable talks?

Megan: a LOT of it went over my head
Marc Canter [former Macromedia exec] was his usual bombastic self
[TailRank maker] Kevin Burton's here
Met some people from Fox Interactive in LA. They told me I need to come down there for a party

Nick: so did our readers miss anything other than a chance to meet dot-commers?

Megan: Free coffee
& good sandwiches
There was a big debate: Is the terminology called Widgets? Or is it called Gadgets?

Nick: i haven't heard a worse debate since freshman year speech club.

Megan: I think they should decide by using the Thunderdome method
Fight to the death
Two terms enter, one term leaves

• Om Malik discusses Microsoft's fear of online apps. Apparently they've never been to Ning, home of web2.0 abandonware, with notable apps like Who's a Bigger Douche. [Business 2.0]


• Slate has a video history of youTube. Soon to be including clips of themselves on Court TV [Slate]


• NY Times covers Silicon Valley's secret to success. The "20-minute rule...if a start-up company seeking venture capital is not within a 20-minute drive of the venture firm's offices, it will not be funded." So you future startup CEOs, take a good look. You're not on this map, you're out. [NYTimes]


• Washington Post notes AOL executives have been spared prosecution due to a five-year statute of limitations on fraud. Can someone mail the U.S. Attorney's office a free 90-Day AOL CD so we can finish this? [Washington Post]

• Man, this is not the New York Times's best weekend. Their latest gaffe: calling Peter Hirshberg, chairman of blog search company Technorati, the CEO. Poor tech blogger Om Malik was afraid CEO Dave Sifry had been ousted. But Sifry replied on Om's blog that he's still in charge. He tells me the mix-up was probably an innocent mistake by the Times; no one interviewed Sifry for the article. [GigaOM]
• The campaign blog to free imprisoned medical marijuana dispenser Sparky Rose says that his prosecutors claim he had "no previous work history prior to the pot club." Rose was a high-rolling dot-com founder — same thing? [Free Sparky]
• CNET launches a new title called Crave, because the world needs yet another gadget blog. [Crave]
• Who wins the battle of YouTube vs. MySpace, now that the latter is aggressively moving into online video and breaking YouTube vids embedded on MySpace? Google wins, of course. [BusinessWeek]
• NY Times columnist Joe Nocera says Carly Fiorina's memoir of her time heading Hewlett-Packard is a revisionist history — she lies about earnings, he says, and her book should be called "It's All About Me." [NY Times Select]
• Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner will pay all his journalists to run their own blogs — presumably so no one else leaves like B2 writer Om Malik to start their own media empire. [I Want Media]

GigaOM founder Om Malik threw a wine and liquor party at his office in San Fran's Pier 38 last night, a trendy gathering of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and the writers who love them (or at least want them for their bodies). The tech blog kingpin floated about the room like royalty at court, but he did make one faux pas: He left copies of the guest list at the door for attendees to pick up and peruse.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's on the list, as well as SF mayor Gavin Newsom, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and Guy Kawasaki, father of evangelical marketing. You get two guesses whether any of them showed. I'm surprised no one wandered the party playing guest-list bingo. The real question is, did Om really think these bold names would come?

View page 1, page 2, and page 3 and play Bingo yourself.

Who is getting bought next? YouTube, Facebook? [GigaOM]

The basis of Web Worker Daily, GigaOM blog kingpin Om Malik's latest title, is that in an increasingly web-based, wireless world, with bloggers and web workers dispersed in diverse geographic pockets, it's becoming more difficult to mobilize the workforce. The site, which launched on Labor Day (cute timing, Om), is meant as a forum in which "2.0 users" share knowledge of technological systems and workspaces.

Part of Malik's inspiration for the blog comes from Greg Olsen, Co-Founder of Coghead Software whose fondness for expressions like "jumping the shark" and "going bedouin" when referring to start-ups that perish by way of golden temples wears a little thin at times. But we can relate to the pragmatic significance of knowing where to fill up a good cup of joe, as told by Jackson West. The Gawker Media alum and GigaOM contributor is the site's new lead writer.

WWD shows promise — unless Jackson West forces us to point a gun at his head and scream, "Say 'Bedouin' again! I double dare you, motherfucker, say 'Bedouin' one more time!"

Web Worker Daily [Official site]

— Beth Gottfried

It feels good to get someone a job. And in tech, where everyone's on their way in, their way out, or their way up, it's no wonder that every tech blog launched its own job board to capitalize on its Valley audience. So far, there are job boards at 37signals, GigaOM, TechCrunch, and paidContent, four of leading tech-pundit sites, each led by a big ego.

While happy-go-lucky papers like the Red Herring like to present this as a happy cottage industry, we hear it's a lot more rough-and-tumble behind the scenes.

TechCrunch owner Michael Arrington (pictured standing) invited both 37signals and GigaOM to join his "CrunchBoard" jobs board, but he's said that both turned him down. But word is, GigaOM's Om Malik (pictured genuflecting) was willing to talk — he just had to consult his investors.

But Mike's been telling folks that Om just can't say no, so all this investor talk was just stalling while Om launched his own thing.

Meanwhile, Jason "Let's Get Small" Fried, owner of 37signals, seems loath to hook up with Mike at all. He feels like Mike's offers of partnership are really attempts to take over the whole tech-job-posting scene.

Of course, even if these guys realize that each of them may die off unless they team up, none of them will admit the real way to fill a job in the Valley: hang out at all the monthly meetups and parties and casually ask who's looking. (For example, Mike Arrington, rather than hire through his own job board, chats up journalists and bloggers at his parties and hints that they should join him.)

Blogs start job boards [Red Herring via CrunchNotes]
37signals Jobs [37s]
GigaOM Jobs [GigaOM]
CrunchBoard [TechCrunch]
paidContent Jobs [pC]
Photo by Laughing Squid's Scott Beale [Flickr, CC]