According to Weblog search engine portal thing Technorati, a new Blog is born every second, meaning that by the time you finish reading this sentence, fifteen new Blogs will be waiting for you to ignore. Furthermore, the total number of Blogs has doubled in the last five months, and will probably double again in the next five, leading to a worldwide Blogglut of nearly 30 million meandering, meaningless, mumble-mouthed Bloggers. Like us! 13% of you are updating at least weekly, and 55% of new bloggers manage to stick with it for at least three months before, we assume, growing tired and bored and...

Maybe I should stop making fun of those people who feel compelled to update their Blogs with every tiny detail of their boring lives, particularly when one of those otherwise boring details is about how annoyed you are by the guy in your apartment who's about to kill you. Simon Ng of Queens, New York was updating his Blog, complaining about his sister's ex-boyfriend being in the apartment and wishing he'd leave, for crying out loud. Shortly after, said boyfriend tied Simon up and stabbed him to death with a butcher knife. His motive was to steal cash from Simon and...

As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: "Give me a break." Aieee! It's the apocalypso! In a drooling, fawning, icky sort of profile that doesn't include a picture of the ever-cute Choire Sicha, The NY Times drinks the Kool Aid and calls Gawker Media mogel Nick Denton "tall, slim, and salt-and-pepper handsome." And never once mentions his gigantic head. Methinks Tom Zeller, Jr. wants a job where he, too, can sit in his pajamas and make shit up all day -- although, isn't that exactly what New York Times reporters are paid to do, now? Anyway, the three-page spread...

It's official, Weblogs, Inc. "publisher" Jason Calacanis is 15 points more loathsome than Gawker founder Nick Denton. The battle for most loathsome Blog advocate was hard-fought, with Denton called a"Franken-headed" emporer to Calacanis's "floppy-haired internet huckster," but Jason wins it for fooling more bloggers into believing there's a fat dividends check waiting at the end of the Blog rainbow, while Denton is upfront about paying his writers shit (reportedly around $1,000 a month, or less than poverty scale) while raking in around $75,000 a month all for himself. Or so word on the street has it -- Denton has never stated what...

Big, juicy (or as big and juicy and pointless) scandal in the blog world brewing over Wordpress wunderkind Matt Mullenweg's decision to hide Google-unfriendly search-term links inside his .org's front page. In short, an open-source software maker is getting kick-backs from a dubious vendor wanting to use his previously high-ranking Google score to trick the search engine into reporting that his articles on medicine and auto repair and whatever are actually more relavent than they are -- which is not at all. The reason this is all so big and juicy and turgid and throbbing is that Kottke called the practice stinky...

It's been almost a year since wildly popular geek site Boing Boing stared into the abyss and saw their bandwidth bill staring back at them. Like the good DIY, indie rock, mirrorshade cryptopunk rebels they go to great lengths to demonstrate that they are, the Boing Boingers approached the obvious solution and Great Corruptor, ads, with trepidation, soliciting comments and vowing that the site would remain unchanged. And so how, now, has the experiment worked? Take a look for yourself. Boing Boing has not only embraced advertising, but appears to be giving it a vigorous reach-around in the...

With the recent acquisition of Flickr, the defining characteristic of successful Web 2.0/Blooom companies is becoming clear. No, not usefulness. No, not design. No, not social capabilities. Duh. The thing that Blogger, Six Apart and Flickr all have in common are that their co-founders have had sex with each other. Glassdog is going to be huge. ...

Due to recent technological developments, Glassdog World Domination has revised its Terms of Use. Please read and agree to the following: Glassdog World Domination ("Glassdog") and its official information dissemination organ ("Penis""glassdog.com") hereby and henceforth restrict users ("dirty rat bastards") from modifying the content of glassdog.com in any way, using any means whatsoever. Don't you people realize that weblog content is, in fact, handed down from God ("Dave Winer"), and it is a sin of the gravest order to attempt to make it useful? Geez. Specifically included in this restriction are browser-based technologies such as Google's AutoLink ("the Apocalypse"),...

Google news search for "bloggies" 8 results Google news search for "SXSW Web Awards" 3 results (one is a press release) My prediction is that in one week, the difference will be even more skewed towards the Bloggies. I bet it approaches two dozen mentions for the Bloggies. My point? As silly as weblogs and weblog awards are, SXSW devotes a whole night to their (often texas-centric) web awards, while the Bloggies are confined to an afternoon program down off a tradeshow area and the news will be relayed to an IRC channel (chat is so quaintly 1998!). But which one will garner press...

Businessweek analyst Jessi Hempel sounds off on this week's Blog item of interest, "Are Bloggers Journalists?" In light of a judge's ruling in California against three Apple tell-all sites, it appears not. The bigger picture is, as usual, a lot muddier. Does where you're reporting define whether or not you're a reporter? Is every employee of The New York Times automatically protected from revealing where they got their scoops from just because they're at the NYTimes, or is the fact that they're (presumably) doing fact-checking and following journalistic ethics that protects them? What, then, defines a news agency? Does it need...