Denton has parted ways with titles before, selling Oddjack and shutting down Sploid and Screenhead a few years back. This time he has found new homes for each of his websites. As of today, Wonkette belongs to managing editor Ken Layne. This is the second time Denton has put one of Layne’s blogs out to pasture; he was the sole editor of Sploid during its brief-ish run.

During Wonkette’s existence I have been an occasional reader and loyal critic. I am an approved commenter on the Gawker network, and every once in awhile I swing by to let them have it. Coincidentally, the most recent time was just last night.

Under Cox, I felt the blog leaned too far to the left while claiming to be non-partisan. Under subsequent editors I let go of that complaint and moved on to on the fact that it is simply not written for a Beltway audience. It breaks no news and advances no stories; it merely adds a garnish of cheap snark to the day’s headlines. Gawker matters to New York City (well, Manhattan at any rate) and Valleywag matters to the Silicon Valley (even if they hate it), but Wonkette offers no special insight on Hollywood for ugly people. Outside it’s America, which treats politics like entertainment. Here in the District, Defamer and Deadspin probably matter more, since we don’t want to talk shop after hours. But don’t take my word for it — check out the comments at DCist.

The last time Denton tried to make the site relevant to the actual District which it purports to cover, he moved Alex Pareene from New York to DC. Pareene was very funny (and still is on Gawker, for which he writes now) but these new kids — recent college student Jim Newell and total unknown Sara K. Smith — are bad Xerox copies. Fittingly, Layne doesn’t even live in Washington.

I take Denton entirely at his word in his explanation for selling it:

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did. … As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don’t come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

So now Wonkette returns to Henry Copeland’s unique Blogads advertising network, which handles a great deal of political advertising (including Blog P.I., on the infrequent occasions that someone wants to do business with us) and is a much better fit than whatever agency handles Gawker’s advertising.

Ultimately, politics just isn’t where the money is. (Don’t think for a moment Mark Penn built that tunnel between his houses in Georgetown with campaign earnings.) But as others note, now is the time to cash out. Traffic is up, likely due to growing interest in the presidential election. And just as you don’t want to sell pumpkin futures the day after Halloween, the day before isn’t any good either. Better do it while your buyers still have some expectation of getting a return on their investment.

a cruelly sarcastic euphemism used in real-life conversations for the small, cliquey group of self-appointed Web 2.0 insiders who seem to spend their days blogging and Twittering about one another. The gist is that The 250 are the 250 people who matter to The 250.

I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds to me like the “Gang of 500,” coined by Mark Halperin for ABC’s once-influential The Note. Its usage has fallen off in the past year; the phrase doesn’t appear in The Note’s archives since Halperin left to create Time’s The Page. I can’t be sure Halperin isn’t still using it, at least until Time introduces The Search.

In any case, these insidery nicknames are innocuous enough if a little annoying. As if the Beltway and Valley cultures aren’t insular enough, apparently we also have to give the elites of this elite an arbitrary fixed number to serve as a nickname.

As we’re all well aware, it’s said that DC is Hollywood for ugly people. But maybe this is wrong. Equating the District with LA is a bit presumptuous on our part. It might be more accurate to say that New York City is Hollywood for busy people. Or that Hollywood is New York for flaky people.

We shouldn’t pretend the Beltway is in their league. No, the Valley is our proper analogue. Heck, even Northern Virginia has its share of high tech companies. But then, they’ve got an Apple and a Google and a Cisco and we’ve got… AOL, which is relocating to NYC in hopes of turning itself around. I guess that means the Valley is DC for people who are good at math. Which I suppose means DC is the Valley for poor people. So, maybe our 500 doesn’t beat your 250 after all.

A hearty congrats to all featured, and I think my colleague the Virginia delegate to QandO may be quoted in the piece. Yet the pay wall leaves me wondering. As a resister of all things Star Trek (and sympathizer with K-Lo at The Corner on this) I’m not sure if I should be envious; Matt Lewis’s Town Hall commenters are pretty harsh, and not just the Ronulans.

But the article isn’t public, so I can’t judge for myself, nor can bloggers or their commentariats. C&E publishes much of its content on the website, but right now there is a little symbol next to the one article that’s actually about bloggers. Who are the ad wizards at C&E who came up with this one?

I also wonder if the falling out between David and Erick (and others) from a few months back gets any inches. My guess is not, and even if I’m wrong, it makes me think it’s too bad Wonkette doesn’t report on its city’s industry in the same depth as Valleywag (retooled in early 2007) or even Gawker (retooling, but not pulled).

Certainly the Beltway and the District is as much a company town as the Silicon Valley/Palo Alto, so where’s the 100-word-version? Someone, please, quote the key grafs in a blog post. Make it so.

And to tell the truth, I probably watched ST:TNG on afternoon television for at least thee years in middle school.

Update: I have now read the article, and I am pleasantly surprised that the kerfuffle noted above is indeed covered, and that author Walter Alarkon even used the word “kerfuffle.” Aside from the annoying Star Trek motif and an embarrassingly lame pull quote, the article does a reasonably good job of explaining the current challenges Republican web strategists face. If the piece brings a wider awareness to these issues, it’ll have done all it needs to.

You can read the article here in the original layout; thanks to Theodora in the comments for bringing it to my attention. Still, the snazzy NXTbook software (which doesn’t even live on the C&E page) features no plain text, so it’s next to invisible to search engines. Likewise, it doesn’t let you copy and paste, so it’s next to useless for blogging.

Updated again: In the comments, it has been pointed out that there is an XML page running in the background, so it’s not a total SEO disaster. Meanwhile, Rob Bluey is weighing in…

I wasn’t going to post it, but I feel the need to set the record straight. For starters, I hate Star Trek.

The State of the Blogosphere continues to be strong.

though the curve representing new blog creation finally begins to flatten:

Sifry says this “may be” the result of improved spam-fighting measures: “Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.”

He also buries the lede by skipping too quickly past this newsworthy finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

As usual the report is not lacking for beautiful charts (some of which I have appropriated for this post) but a chart showing the number of active blogs is not among them. Contrary to the bold-faced boast

Currently Tracking More than 57 Million Blogs and Counting.

there are not actually some 60 million active blogs out there. The number is closer to 33 million, which still sounds impressive even if it too is probably a little inflated, and most importantly, has the virtue of being a useful number.

In the (now mysteriously unavailable) comments on the post, one of the early respondents asked that a future report show what the top blogs are actually writing about, perhaps based on the search engine’s top 50 tags. Anyone can check out the most-used Technorati tags for themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to go down the list and figure out what genres or categories define the Top 100 and count them up.

As you can imagine, that’s quite a list. So here’s the color key for the chart and a sample:

Ready for the full list of 100? After the jump:

After the list, check below for more comments. So, what’s in the Technorati Top 100?

Thoughts:

• Blogs about technology and business make up half of the top 10 blogs and nearly a third of all blogs in the list. Is there anything interesting to say about that? It’s not just that the geeks got there first, but that they’re by definition interested in technology, and blogs are, to put it mildly, kind of a big development.
• Niche blogs are big. Considering they’re almost on par with the tightly linked political blogosphere, which also has a capable external support system in none other than the MSM, some niches must be bigger than we might have thought. This category is probably the one most would disagree with; they weren’t all easy calls. Ze Frank could be considered politics, technology or entertainment (maybe in a future edition, I’ll create tags instead of categories). But he’s also a video blogger, which is unique enough to be niche. I welcome all feedback.
• Sifry’s SOTB reports have consistently shown that about 60% of tracked blogs are written in not-English. But this 60% is vastly underrepresented in the list. One possibility is that more blogs have to compete for fewer readers in the non-English blogosphere. But considering that the relationship between links and traffic is nebulous, perhaps there simply fewer cross-links between those blogs. They are spread out over many different languages after all; 33% is Japanese, but the rest is, shall we say, Balkanized. Or, overall blog readership is the same but the readership curve is relatively flat across all blogs, and the not-English blogosphere is impervious to power laws.
• Considering how much money Americans spend per year on entertainment, blogs so themed (including gossip, sports and music) appear to be slightly underrepresented in the top 100. Does this mean that those bloggers are less influential compared to tech and political bloggers? Perhaps. It could be that entertainment journalism has satisfied reader demands better than in hard news and all the niches. Or maybe their readers don’t demand quite as much?
• MySpace is a lousy blogging platform, but it does host a couple of very successful blogs — and one of them is soft core porn. Imagine how much better represented here it would be if MySpace was more like Vox.
• Of course, these are just the top 100, the very tip of the long tail. More detailed patterns would surely emerge as one moved from 100-999 and beyond. Technorati and Dave Sifry could pull those numbers together, and I like his charts showing that blogs rival the MSM once you get to just 51-100 for inbound sources. Here’s hoping it’s in the next report.

As my high school political science teacher, Mr. Marchese, used to (and for all I know, still does) say: Questions, comments, reservations?

When all else fails, never underestimate the power of a screengrab to masquerade as actual content. It’s quick, it’s easy, and requires little effort on your part.

It’s true: Screen grabs — a.k.a. screen shots and screen caps — are the perfect complement to almost any under-developed blog post. In addition to the virtues listed above, screen captures are often intriguing, revelatory, even thought-provoking. At a bare minimum, they can add a dash of color to a gray block of text (which you may have borrowed from the very same website). Of course, since Blog P.I. is largely devoted to covering other websites, I’m pretty sure we’ve got more justification than most.

More seriously, if there is any downside to using screen shots — other than overusing them, of course — it might be that they undermine your ability to drive traffic to the sites you’ve linked (not that Blog P.I. drives much traffic). Why should readers bother following the link if you’ve already shown them what you’re talking about?

That said, there are many good uses of screen shots: to capture a moment in time, whether an embarrassment soon to be erased or merely a page you know will not be archived; to focus on a small area on the page; to show something that is not on the World Wide Web.

So let’s hear it for the screen shot — the underused and underestimated shortcut of meta-bloggers everywhere.

Sometime over the weekend, Denton dismissed Douglas from the site, implemented a new layout, new typesetting, and apparently a new focus (more money, less sex). Here’s what it looked like yesterday:

And what it looks like today:

Moreover, Denton has installed as interim blogger none other than himself. Which could work — he was a tech journalist prior to being an entrepreneur, and was an early, uh, blogebrity himself (if you remember Glenn Reynolds linking favorably to Denton’s hawkish post-9/11 proclamations, pat yourself on the back).

However, here at Blog P.I. we make no bones about getting a kick out of comment sections that turn on the site’s bloggers, and the reaction to Denton’s first post is truly something to behold. Some of the better responses:

Come on. Valleywag can spill the beans on every other “change in employment,” but you try to pass this crap off when Nick Douglas leaves? What gives. You say, “letting him go” which typically means fired. You can do better than that.

Funny, the design was one of the few in the Gawker empire that I liked. Now I’m not sure which of your generic, overlapping sites I’m on. I guess I’ll just have to deal.

How many photoshop filters had to throw up before you got that logo treatment? It may be the single most ugly thing I have ever seen in my life, and I just saw the “Naked Jen” flickr set from Dave Winer.

Oh, and IBM just called from 1955, they want their Courier font back.

The new site design sucks balls. As for Nick leaving, it COULD be a breath of fresh air (I grew tired of reading The Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis Show), but you’re already on thin ice due to the less than forthcoming nature of the announcement.

well, it was a nice ride. ass design + letting go of your most valuable asset + renewed focus on crap people care even less about = removal from my daily web surfing routine. best of luck to both of you Nicks!

Before Spiers stopped talking to me, she once offered advice about the prospect of working for Denton or Calacanis: (I’m paraphrasing here) “It’s the old lesser of two evils thing, but at least with Jason you’re gonna get someone who is completely honest and won’t stab you in the back.”

I think this post needs more context. Who is this Nick Denton person and why should we care?

And elsewhere, tech bloggers are none too pleased, either. Here’s Zooomr evangelist Thomas Hawk:

Denton refuses to spill the beans. Was Douglas fired? Did he quit? Douglas is a pretty young guy so I doubt the old “he’s taking time off to spend more time with his family,” line works. Denton should know better than to offer us a weak, “Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go.” … So you are saying he was fired? Or was he not fired? Very, very weak for a gossip blog Denton.

Ethernet inventor Richard Bennett looks at it from a different angle:

It’s probably a step closer to relevance, but still has a long way to go. … The editor was some pimply-faced teenager from Pennsylvania who had no clue about Silicon Valley life (and still doesn’t), the mix of stories is too sophomoric and Google-centric, the comment policy is bizarre, and the design was too hard to read. The new design is even worse, using a faint monospaced font, the comment policy remains the same, Denton is the temporary editor, and the story mix remains to be demonstrated.

And he’s not alone — Matthew Ingram updated a critical post to praise Denton’s later report on mega-sites Fark and Digg ditching John Battelle’s Federated Media for a new ad network run by Maxim (yes, that Maxim). It’s a new direction, for sure. Whereas Gawker, Defamer and Deadspin reign as the definitive gossip sites for NYC media, Hollywood and professional sports respectively, Valleywag wouldn’t be considered a rival to, say, frequent Douglas target Michael Arrington of the hugely popular TechCrunch. It looks like Denton wishes to compete with Arrington, rather than merely antagonize him. And Denton certainly has the connections to make that work. But Douglas’ Valleywag was something different. Denton’s Valleywag, not so much.

Meanwhile, lit fic crit Edward Champion keeps things short and sour:

Nick Douglas has apparently been shitcanned from Valleywag and all I got was this crummy T-shirt (and one of the worst blog designs I think I’ve ever seen).

As I always say about this time: Tough crowd. But that’s the blogosphere for you, and if anyone’s developed an epidermal layer strong enough to withstand this onslaught, it’s Denton. And if there’s anything serious to be said here, it’s that the blogosphere expects accountability and openness from its counterparts in cyberspace as well as its subjects/targets in meatspace. That’s one thing you would think Nick Denton would have figured out by now.

P.S. For what it’s worth (and I realize it may not be much) I was among the first to notice Blogebrity when the site launched as a preview of an alleged blog equivalent of People Magazine speculate about what it was way back when it launched in May 2005. I would also add that I was among the first to report the truth — it was an entrant in the first Contagious Media contest — although I believe I was the only political blogger to pay it any attention at all. History repeats itself.

Update: Via 10 Zen Monkeys, I learn that I didn’t read far down enough to find the actual best comments to Denton’s first post:

JasonCalacanis: Someone tell little Nicky that I have a job for him running NickDenton.net: all Denton all the time.

NickDouglas: Jason, calling me “little Nicky” is an AWESOME way to make me consider a professional relationship with you.

If there’s an Adam Sandler joke to be made here, I don’t know what it is.

Second Update: Wisely, Valleywag has dropped the use of Courier in the regular copy.

And again via 10 Zen Monkeys, the truth comes out: Douglas was indeed fired, apparently for trying to lure News Corp. (!) into suing Nick Denton. Can’t say that sounds unreasonable.

But as I added to the comments at the end of the linked post, I recall when Denton launched Defamer in early 2004, Mickey Kaus quipped:

Why not go all the way and call it Defendant!

Can’t say that doesn’t sound like Denton’s ethos caught up with him.