And That's What It's All About

It pains me when blogging's credibility gets a shot in the arm, especially with a needle from the haystack. God knows why Stephanie Klein plagiarized a children's storytelling exercise (now that is a tragedy) or how someone (in comments) even discovered it. But let's try to put this all in perspective. Is her offense so wrong? Someone noted earlier, "Having read the post, it is obvious the Fierst excercise is being performed by the characters in her post. Would it be plagiarizing if she said "They told me to put my left foot in then take my left foot out"?

I dunno, would a monkey shine your shoes if you stuck your foot up his ass? Precisely. Your point doesn't make any sense either. Fierst's exercise is no "hokey pokey" and doesn't fall under public domain. It's just so weird he wasn't credited. But don't take it from me, let's hear from the injured party himself. He commented here earlier too:

"I am astonished to discover that not only would someone plagiarize my study guide for creative dramatics, but that someone else would recognize the words as mine and pull that paragraph out of a whole book. Beats me how Stephanie Klein got to use my words for fantasy play. I don't even know who she is. I guess I could be flattered that my words are worth stealing. Considering what I get paid and what I understand she gets paid, I think I have been underestimating my talents."

I have since communicated with him via email and he genuinely wonders how this happened. (He's also available to be a celebrant/storyteller at your wedding, a commitment ceremony, a house warming, a baby naming, or a death.) At the very least, Ms Klein owes him and her readers an explanation. Not just for his sake, but most importantly because she has come down so hard on people plagiarizing her own work, and not just in the recent Tale of Two Sisters affair. In past entries titled, "stephen or stephanie?" and "flattery" she sharply pokes at others:

nycplagiarist just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Come now, copying people should cease after the age of three. Give it up for Lent, or hand it over with your Peter Pan Syndrome tights. "You. Are. Beautiful." Is a nice way to flatter. "I steal your stuff" is soooo ba-donka-a-donk.

It's also rama-lama-ding-bat-shit, but give her credit for the youthful thinking. Her readers responded then as well:

I prefer to neologize and call it PLAGUErism, because let's face it, it's a filthy disease distributed by hosts with minds as hollow as sewerage pipes, and lined with worthless shit of their own.

Wow! How hard would it have been for this person to have just posted "I did not write this, but I wish I did" and link to your post?

Theft is theft-- ideas are intellectual property and they, whether or not they make money, belong to the person who wrote them. It IS a big deal. It's not cute, or funny, or something that someone should "lighten up" about.

I'm unclear exactly when someone should "lighten up" about something but I do know that hypocrisy almost always darkens the mood of a situation.

UPDATE: Subtext Whore has pointed out that within the last 24 hours the plagiarized text has been removed from Klein's post with nary an explanation. No defense is often more offensive but everyone knows the Internet is a giant rug without an anti-slip lining and it's very easy to lift it up to see what's been swept under. Ready gang? Push 'em Back! Push 'em Back! Push 'em Waaaaaaaay Back!

"It's Like Faking An Orgasm" With A Blow-Up Doll

Now that I've been alerted to these online spats involving book-deal wielding chick-lit bloggers I can't tear myself away from the ringside action and ring-size drama. Ahhh, the drama. Ol' Johnny. Or like the Sleater-Kinney song puts it, "The Drama You've Been Craving." There are those among us who take up permanent residence at the Dramada Inn where the pool is pear-shaped and the motto is: "You can check-in any time you want, but be careful where you dry-heave."

Enter the current thread between blogger with a $$$ book deal Stephanie Klein and Tale of Two Sisters (note: newly located site), a Stephanie Klein parody blog that has the potential to be offered a publishing deal somewhere north of a six-part comic strip series wrapped around a piece of bubblegum. So Ms. Klein (or her handlers) are none too happy about the parody and have threatened to sue for copyright infringement. I'm no lawyer and to me "fair use" sounds like a deal between two teenage boys time-sharing a stack of Playboys, so I won't comment on the merits of either side's arguments.

But here's an interesting itty bitty titty twist. It's been revealed (not by me) that the Judith Regan crowned blogger/aspiring writer who is suing the parodists for plagiarism is quite possibly a plagiarist herself. (That's Drama with a capital "D" right here in cry me a river city.) The material in question comes from, of all things, a grade-school storytelling exercise called "Watering Hole." (The imagery is impossible to make up.) Behold:

The Smoking Google Search

Imagination Exercise: Watering Hole
Pretend to be an animal in the jungle. Think about how it moves - fast and sneaky, or slowly and majestically, with heavy footsteps or on dainty tippy toes, slithering, hopping, swinging, or creeping? Every animal moves differently. Use your whole body, not just your arms and legs. How does the animal move its head? Its chest? Its tail? How does it stand when it listens to a faraway sound? How does it grow sad or angry or happy?

Stephanie Klein: "Make Believe"
The song "Nothing" in Chorus Line is about a woman who couldn't pretend to be a bobsled or ice cream cone, so she was kicked out of her acting class. In Miracle on 34th Street, small Susan refuses to play "zoo" with the other children. And why should I pretend to be a monkey when I'm a girl? Pretend to be an animal - excuse me, I can't do that. Go on, think about how it moves - fast and sneaky, or slow and majestically, with heavy footsteps or on dainty tippy toes, slithering, hopping, swinging, or creeping? How does it stand when it listens to a faraway sound? Um, no, I don't think you quite get it. I can't pretend.

Perhaps there's a perfectly reasonable explanation (like maybe she knows Gerald Fierst and helped him write the exercise for Scholastic?) but it sounds like Klein's prose was picked from the playground lot in "fairly used" condition.

UPDATE: Gerald Fierst, of Scholastic's Storytelling Workshop and author of the "Watering Hole" imagination exercise, gives his take on the situation:

"I am astonished to discover that not only would someone plagiarize my study guide for creative dramatics, but that someone else would recognize the words as mine and pull that paragraph out of a whole book. Beats me how Stephanie Klein got to use my words for fantasy play. I don't even know who she is. I guess I could be flattered that my words are worth stealing. Considering what I get paid and what I understand she gets paid, I think I have been underestimating my talents."

Proud Hens

Becca and Hens at The Magician. Damn could that dog blog. Photo by Bluejake.

Sad day at 125 Stanton. My roommate's little dog Henry was hit by a car while they were visiting her mom in West Palm Beach. He was buried on Sunday. I was never much of a pet person before (not particularly fond of dogs in our youth, the Krucoffs briefly housed some hamsters and a canary) but Henry wasn't a pet to me in the traditional sense since I didn't have to take care of all the (unsavory) things a dog owner has to do. Henry was more like a friend. At times very quiet, at times very loud. He was a champion yapper, best in shout.

Becca took him to work everyday where he played with other dogs in an unusually casual office atmosphere (even for downtown New York) and often dropped him off at the apartment before going out for the night. As a chihuahua he was much like a cat, minus the smell and condescension. He had his pee pad (in Becca's room of course) to take care of business and he spent 90% of his time curled up on a chair sleeping. He was quite possibly the only living thing lazier than me. God I envied him.

On many nights we would watch tv together, almost always at a distance from each other. He stuck to his bark-a-lounge, I glued to my futon. We felt no need to play silly games with a ball or pair of smelly socks; we were just a couple of dudes hanging out, sharing spaghetti, and watching a lot of VH1 Classic. The Road to Sturgis will never be the same for me.

I'd like to think it was a friendship of few words but an understanding that could fill a library. Or maybe just a book shelf. One that contained HST's The Great Shark Hunt, Vonnegut's Jailbird, and the entire Ricky Jay collection. Hens was that kind of dog. Becca returns to New York today and it will be hard to imagine life at 125 Stanton without the little guy around. R.I.P. and all that.

Selected Works from Henry's Online Anthology
Young Manhattanite Interview [Gothamist]
Hard Drive video [HiFiNY]
Fire It Up (Henry in the Hamptons Re-mix) video [SixFive]
New Year's Day on Cocoa Beach: Photos and Go! Team video [SixFive]

PBR Street Gang, this is Almighty. Do your read me? Over.

Young Manhattanite/TOP Music will be moving bedposts and posting bed moves at a pace somewhere between horror movie murder victim and geriatric snail until after Labor Day weekend. I'm not going far (or technically anywhere) so feel free to drop in and see what little I'm up to over at Blottered, a non-certified blogger prep academy, or the Re-inhabilitated Farm ("Re-inhab" for short) which has been converted into a hospice for terminal bloggers.

Meanwhile, here at corporate HQ (that's the best I could do to antonymize "back at the ranch")...I will keep the floor open for one of those obnoxious "open thread" discussions you'd find on Daily Kos or some shit. I appoint Sac as moderator and Gage as the Three Anonymous Wise Men. I have my doubts but I'm pulling for you two to break 20 comments.

I said I'll flip ya, flip ya for real

Every spring the trees are full of underwear, every fall the toilets explode...and in summer Gawker starts its annual fall fashion magazine coverage, as they did yesterday with this post. It links back to August 2004 where I contributed a chart measuring magazine weight and circulation for a slew of titles. I wanted to state now, for the record, that I would never besmirch Anna Wintour's good name with any disparaging remarks, much less one involving the phrase "fucking flip" that appeared last year.

My copy was viciously altered by the real hater, Jessica Coen, who I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw a 50 lb bag of vicodin. I believe my original parting thought was: "Couldn't we just litter-bomb Iraq with the entire load and wake up in the morning to a new capitalist-loving free democracy sweeping through the Middle East?" See, I promote world peace through rigid fashion analysis while others would like to use it as a wedge to widen our differences, from petite to triple-plus.

Crofton, MD: The Two-hundred Fifty-Third Borough

Old news by now, but Philadelphia Weekly reporter Jessica Pressler got a piece in last Sunday's NY Times about Philly's transformation into the "sixth borough" - as if its "hipness" is related to being an extension of NYC. (Is the heroin that good down there too?) Apparently the local "cool-but-we'd-never-say-it crowd" got all brothers-up-in-arms about it with the standard territorial hissing and the like.

It's not exactly an original concept and I seem to remember Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections made some reference to Philly being Brooklyn without Manhattan next door or something to that effect. When I read that I thought, well big shit-steak, you could say the same about Baltimore or several other East Coast cities on the rise but there's a major problem with that logic. It only works in reverse. Better stated: Brooklyn without Manhattan would be Philly or Baltimore.

Those towns are what they are and will only be what they'll be because they don't have a big stinkin' center of the world island next to them. Catch my drift? I'm talking about the ones sweating off the Hudson and East Rivers, which brings to mind, hasn't the conglomerate of Hoboken and Jersey City been the "sixth borough" for some time now anyway? Philly needs to get in line like everyone else. When they pull the #7 ticket I'm sure Wilmington, DE (home to cool indie label Jade Tree!) will be elbowing in for a piece of the action and I hope this ass-lickle-down effect would eventually reach my hometown of Crofton, MD: All along the watertower.

One last thing, I knew the name Jessica Pressler sounded familiar. In one of her old columns she linked to the infamous interview on Lasagnafarm about my experience with Friendster in summer 2003 which gave birth to the Young Manhattanite brand. (Yes, I'm smirking). Jessica P. must have seen it after it was picked up by Gawker which means she dates back to the Spiersolithic era of "snarky" blogging and the woman deserves some street cred!! (Yep, still smirking...)

300 Looks For The Summer

There are rumors about free beer tickets and a t-shirt contest that involves water.
Update: Here's their official email announcement.

We switched the No Data cell service from Cingular to Verizon last week. Apparently a little known feature with Verizon is that you can dial up your sophomore year in college. So we did. This is what picked up:

$4 Buds/Bud Lights
$4 Jagermeister shots
$4 SoCo/Lime shots

No Data
Thurs. Aug. 18th
Lucky Jack's (in the basement)
129 Orchard St. (btw. Rivington & Delancey)
10pm->onwards

dens+grellan+randy
www.nodata.dj

Tastes Like Chick-lit

I have no idea what to make of this since I don't know the people personally or read their sites, but YM was tipped by a reader that it should be of interest to whoever follows the rash of girlie blogs. (But I guess if you're already into that stuff then you've probably read all of this by now? Whatever, Young Manhattanites, go forward and fuck!!)

A former muse of an Amy Sohn article devotes two full length entries attacking the "publicity-hound" Stephanie Klein. Really fascinating. Reading these posts makes reading Klein's site like taking a walk through Lizzie Grubman's tinkled pink asshole: lots of shit, pampered, and packaged. Gawker has reported on this failed casanova before.

NYC Consigliere - "Greeked-Tragedy"

NYC Consigliere - "Chasing Amy"

New York Mag - Amy Sohn article

Gawker - "Chris London Megaplayer"

Don't Call It an Archipelago; It's a Barrier Reef

It was more out of laziness than anything else but here's Gage spreading some exciting TOP Media news:

He's too modest to say it himself, but Krucoff is a talent scout. Just last week, he launched another writer into the stratosphere by following the William Shawn model of editing: let the writers write.

Star Blottered blogger Martha, who posted to the crime site more than all the others combined, landed a job with Cinematical and shouts out that "Blottered made a big difference" in her landing the gig.

With nary an editorial oversight (though the occasional masthead-wide-sent e-mail), Krucoff offers up the podium. Care to stand behind it? It's the charm school for wannabe writers.

I can't believe it, Jason Calacanis poaches ANOTHER writer from a rival blog network!! His persuasion tactics are peerless. First Pete Rojas, now Martha. Our sweet sweet Martha who was the only consistent contributor to Blottered. Damn thee Calacanis, I've got my crosshairs on one of those Divester dudes. With the constant threat of terrorism on our shores, marine crime coverage is entering its golden age and even McNulty made it look cool on The Wired's second season.

But seriously (I'm sounding kinda drunk, no?), congrats to Martha and it couldn't have happened to a nicer person I've never met. If you want to follow in her finger-steps and crave an audience that includes such blogging luminaries as Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton, Lockhart Steele, and even a writer at Court TV, then send me an email and you could be blogging about Dairy Queen stick-ups by tonight.

Note: we're a no-ads, not-for-profit recreational blog network struggling to avoid not-for-content status. We pay our writers with a simple "thanks" and an annual staff happy hour. First 30 mins are open bar.

Same Mold Same Old

As Pauline M. notes in the comments from the post below, she wrote nearly the identical thing for The Simon last week. But if we're to be honest with ourselves, these similar pieces are written every six months. Maybe I'll start writing about my feelings...

Apocalypse, Now What?

The weekend is over, boxes of cereal are empty, watermelon rinds re-odorize the trashcan, 40 lbs of laundry wait in limbo, and my appetite to discuss blog traffic methodology has been thoroughly dulled pulseless by heat, thunderstorms, and laying in the dark for a couple hours listening to NPR's old The Mideast: A Century of Conflict series. (Don't ask, I won't tell.) But it was this comment on a previous post that signaled the final bell on this ballyhoo:

god- do you remember when our fights used to be about sexy, important stuff, like who called who a bad name, or who was quitting what and going to work for who? now everyone is fighting about statistics and methodology. for shame, krucoff- i would have thought you'd at least try to sex it up.

No, I don't remember any of that but I take your point in any case. So I now officially abandon all talk of panel research and enumeration proclamations to the fifty filthy flies who care enough to hover around that shit for more than a couple days. I've got other fish to cater to and stink up the joint with.

Oozing right along to the next meaningless and self-righteous right-on debate, perhaps it's time to go retro and dust off the always available two-faced sword of Damocles dripping mocca brown doom over the once dead, then resurrected, now booming, you-get-shot-die, back to alive-and-kickin', oops it's dead again Lower East Side. In other words, "Daddy Starbucks, must you throw out all the old cool stuff from our garage we don't use anymore so you can have room for that circular saw or whatever it is you use to hack little babies into pieces?"

To get worked up about the "soul" of a neighborhood changing is at best pointless and hypocritical at its worst. You can't cheer Schiller's, The Hotel on Rivington (bet ya thought it was much cooler as Surface Hotel), Rothko, The Delancey, etc. as well as everything else that infests the twin death strips of Ludlow and Orchard between Houston and Delancey without eventually expecting a large multinational chain of coffee shops to rattle one of its fence links onto a soul-patch of your backyard. If you don't like it, then move or don't patronize it. Others will, you can't change them. Washed masses, rinsed and conditioned, repeated.

The signs of that Starbucks sign were sprouting 3 to 4 years ago, with roots planted well before that, when going out on the Lower East Side rapidly turned into a no-fly zone on Friday and Saturday nights for those living there. I think I can count on both hands (even after being "late on payment" once or twice) the number of times I've been to a bar on Ludlow or Orchard between 10pm and 3am on a Friday or Saturday in the last three years. It turns into a carnival of "misplaces" or parade with the scariest of clowns on those nights. Stay inside, venture beyond the wilds, or go to hell. Those are your options. It's the same reason one would avoid Broadway on any day of the week, but especially the midtown and downtown stretches on weekend days unless you're a tourist or dying to get a police scanner at Radioshack. (This time if you ask, I'll tell.) Do you write Soho off for good? No, you only go there during the week, preferably during the day.

But for those hot heads battle-crying about a neighborhood stripped bare from gentrification and genital fixation, I suggest you cool off your boys (or flowers, girl) at the Hamilton Fish Park pool on Houston and Pitt. I spent Saturday with a friend in the big pool where it was comfortably populated, adequately chlorinated, and if you said "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" to anyone, well, they probably would.

My point (crap, just realized I probably said it better last year): This is New York, and the ONLY thing that doesn't change is people complaining and condemning. If you're looking for a more static environment then move to the suburbs or country where change moves at a more glacial, though less chilling, pace. Me? I've been living in the same spacious two-bedroom, criminally-cheap, rent-stabilized apartment on Stanton and Essex for ten years and unless some tenant's temerity causes irreparable structural damage to the building, I'll be right here 'til the cash-cows come into my home with plans for a Barnes & Noble and NYU frat dorms.

We Blog In Public Dot Com*

I was beginning to think Calacanis's one weak spot, a major one, in this whole Comscore traffic hoo-ha is the fact he doesnt make traffic numbers public on his blogs, even if it's with those crappy Sitemeters. Denton has long been transparent in that regard and Jason needs to catch up. But he says here in the comments that he's now going to fix that. Good to hear. I'll try not to count down the days of WINPublicStatsgate.

*How's that for a little Josh Harris reference?

Wolff Bites, Boy Cries

This is kinda embarrassing. Gawker either needs to hire an assistant to keep track of magazines or do a better job of looking at newsstands when they're bopping around town with their iPods listening to show tunes or the new Death Cab because Vanity Fair is out and about. Not just on newsstands, but in mailboxes too!

Editor & Publisher grand poobah Greg Mitchell previews Michael Wolff's column on Plamegate in the forthcoming Vanity Fair — that’s the Jennifer Aniston issue, and, no, by the time it hits newsstands there won’t be anything in it you haven’t already read about — and he discovers Wolff in full-on conspiracy-theorist mode.

Wait, maybe I shouldn't be so fast to judge Gawker. It's highly possible that this issue is SOLD-OUT in New York. Please folks, send your phone cam pics in now!
Michael Wolff Continues to Make Friends, Influence People [Gawker]

Stand Up And Be Counted

It's a shame Deb Schoeneman is on some sorta "book sabbatical" (yes? no?) from New York magazine because she'd be the bend-over, knock-down winner in this pageant poll.

Image from Team Party Crash: Pundits on Parade

Statistics, Lies, and Fart Jokes

How noble of Fred "A VC In NYC" Wilson to chime in and try to play the school principal in the playground dust-up over the Comscore blog report. To be clear, he fully disclosed earlier, "I am an investor in and a director of Comscore and have been working with this great company since 1999." That's awesome dude, so your opinions and thoughts are totally objective on this matter. Fantastic, good to see you fighting the good fight.

Anyway, most of this comes down to PR and how Denton & co. blew it. Here was the first big "state of the blogs" research report and it's co-sponsored by just one company on the publisher side. Seems odd, no? (Is there a fast-food industry report that's widely held in high regard sponsored solely by Burger King and the American Beef Association? Just curious.) I can't decide if Nick is that arrogant or that stupid. I am 100% sure the numbers were NOT massaged or tinkered with at all to favor his blogs (the numbers are just plain wrong through whatever mechanisms the methodology entails) but there was no reason not to include others in this industry-impacting project. Was he trying to be a glory hog?

It makes no sense to give anyone, *especially* Calacanis (and maybe me), a reason to think any impropiety is going on. Throw in the fact one of Nick's good friends, Rick Bruner, co-wrote the report and admitted he contacted Nick first at the start of this project and saw no reason to include anyone else (Jason says he tried to give his two cents early on but was clearly ignored) and you've got people scratching their heads asking "why wasn't this an inclusive effort?" Again, by NO means do I think Rick and Nick's relationship had any effect on the outcome of the numbers but still, from a PR standpoint, they had to expect raised eyebrows given all the circumstances. Once more, I don't know if it's arrogance or stupidity.

But what about the data itself? The overall blog numbers are great, advertisers should take notice and behold the power of blogs with their increasing ability to reach "sexy" consumers. But really, who knew blog readers were young and relatively affluent?? That's crazy how early adopters of tech trends are young and buy a lot of shit. Breakthrough stuff here, folks. But if that's what is needed to convince the moron account planners and media planners to pour lots of money into blogs, then more power to it.

(I still think Jarvis is right in saying we need to start thinking of "new" metrics to measure the blogosphere and engagement. Off the top of my head, how about a comment-counter ranking to track interactivity? Oh wait, Denton's blogs don't have comments because he's still stuck in that old media thinking that his blogs are online magazines and readers don't deserve a voice. Exclusivity and not letting others have a voice seem to be a pattern with him.)

My only problem is with the breakout of specific blog data because it's clearly wrong. (Sorry Rick, if you can't grasp how or why then I can't help you because I don't have access to data to prove beyond the long shadow of your doubt.) Again, I'm sure Comscore did the best they could with the analysis but clearly it shows major flaws if some of these rankings are incredibly off by so much. I simply think it was a bad PR move to release the specific blog data. It wasn't too early to be testing those waters, but it was obviously premature to set sail on them. Everyone could have held hands and danced around the blog fire with the overall numbers and not a soul would have complained. Instead, they released very questionable numbers and the debate (admittedly very insider) is focused more on Comscore's shortcomings. That's not ideal for anyone.

Oh, to end this circle jerk back to Fred who calls for Jason to "chill out" I would suggest he do the same. These numbers are being lauded as the potential "industry standard" and the currency with which ad agencies make deals with. That's major stuff. If Jason is freaking out it's only because he's trying to protect his investment, not unlike Fred's courageous defense of Comscore in the first place.

Disclaimer: I've worked for Gawker Media in several contributor capacities, even as recently as writing a party crash report for Gawker last month and a post for Oddjack too. I'm friends with most of them. Still, I won't let those relationships get in the way of my objective opinions on any issue. And while I expect them to buy me drinks whenever we go out, I still can't understand why Curbed is linked almost everyday on Gawker yet there is no mention that it's GM managing editor Lockhart Steele's blog. Please people, let's embrace the transparency.

Disclaimer Update: Gage questions the purpose of my disclaimer on this post so I am now compelled to say I wrote it upon the request of Lockhart who thought it was only fair to reveal my Gawker connections and friendships. If he says so, I have no problem with it. Man, I feel Jarvis's pain everytime some bozo makes him point out his New York Times and many other connections.

There's nothing to hide here, folks. Move along to the back. Yes, to the back. Keep going, uh-huh, back back. You got it. Go, go, just a little further, yep. Looking good, you're almost there...

Retarded Redux

I've said to Chris Gage a million times and as recent as yesterday, "That ridiculous gossip-curve chart is still our greatest contribution to the Internet. We'll never top it." (At least in our minds and that's all that counts for us.) I neglected to give him credit for it when I posted it while guest-editing Gawker for a week in May '04 but it's never too late to throw around some post-humorous props. Also, Elizabeth Spiers who was at New York mag at the time may have helped with the ordering of the labels but she probably wouldn't want any association with it.
Info-Gossip: The Trust Curve [Gawker]

Ode to a 25 Year Old Account Planner

There's a lot of hub-bub surrounding the Comscore Blog report co-sponsored by Six Apart and Gawker Media. There's nothing I like more than hub-bub, especially when statistics are involved so I wrote Comscore and I'm currently waiting for a response on some of these numbers. I would also like to know why Six Apart and Gawker Media didn't bother to ask Weblogs Inc (WIN) to be involved with the development of this research project considering they are one of the biggest blog networks. Can't we all just get along? I don't think we've seen the end of discussing this tasty little report.

Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2005
From: "Andrew Krucoff"
Subject: Blog Report
To: press@comscore.com

Hi, I'm a citizen media reporter and I run a blog called Young Manhattanite. I've read your new blog report and I have a background in surveys and online panels so I understand the theory behind the methodology. The overall findings are quite impressive and I'm pleased some light has been shed on blog traffic so that advertisers can get a better feel of their worth.

My problem, and question, has to deal with with the individual breakout of specific blogs and determining their rank by unique visitors and visits. Publicly available stats highly contradict these rankings and I'm curious as to how you would explain a blog like Gawker.com, among others, (is it a coincidence they co-sponsored this report?) would rank so much higher than Engadget when Engadget's traffic dwarfs Gawker.com's in reality?

How reliable is this panel data when projected on blogs with considerably less traffic than, say, the top 100 sites on the Internet overall?

Thanks,
Andrew Krucoff
http://youngmanhattanite.com

Note: It's relevant to point out that Rick Bruner, director of research at DoubleClick, helped develop the list of the top 400 blog domains as well as co-authored the report. Rick and Nick Denton are old friends from their Budapest days. Also, I wonder what Six Apart thinks of WIN's Blogsmith software, which is possible competition for Six Apart's Movable Type, being released to the public.

Editors Poll: Reader Credibility At All-Time Low

Hank Stuever slam-dunks them: Everything's Not Always About You
Jack Shafer shows them the front door: Why I Don't Trust Readers
I tried to smother them with shit: The Artful Doubter

Be Aggressive, Be Be...

Open Letter to Elizabeth Spiers
Re: Women's magazines

When you're done dumping on the mass market women's magazine audiences by claiming there's a pretty vacant slot for a "smart women's mag" (have you considered how a selection of current blogs by women probably fills this void collectively?), you might want to ponder some of the reasons behind Mirabella's failure and the same ones Bee Magazine will soon face. Or you could, I dunno, stop complaining about editors who are supposedly unwilling to take risks long enough to put on your own print entrepreneurial raincoat and see if you don't get struck by a lightning bolt of market demand reality.

Conjecture and Divide

I favor un-uniting the states of America into two color-coded constitutionally-independent countries as much as the next Washington Square drum circle participant. I'll even go as far to say that if there was a Manhattan Separatist movement I would wholeheartedly support the cause by live blog-rolling it and barreling down Broadway in a Mitzvah Tank with a megaphone. Still, I'm uneasy with Gawker's Jesse Oxfeld using his Peter Jennings tribute for a platform to roll-up a copy of The New Yorker and smack it across the faces of Bush's Bumblefuck Brigade.

Jennings was an anchor for the blue states. This is not to say that his politics leaned one way or another, or that he somehow provided a friendlier newscast for liberal causes than for conservative ones; we have no idea of his personal views. What we mean is that Jennings showed, as John Kerry couldn’t in the last election, that there’s a value in being smart and sophisticated. While Brokaw was always the all-American, just-folks, nice guy, Jennings was worldy and urbane and unafraid to be a bit of an intellectual. That seems to be the incorrect mien for success in this country today, but, for those of us actually do appreciate the smart and sophisticated — for New Yorkers, in other words — it was nice to see one of us spend so long on top.

Oxfeld would probably say they're too dumb to know what hit them (and maybe that's true) but to suggest Jennings was only appreciated by "smart and sophisticated New Yorkers" is not only the biggest pile of horseshit this side of Central Park South, but it's also a huge disservice to the man's career and accomplishments.

Germfree Acquiescence

Krucoff.com has been re-designed and Bloggerized for your edification. If you stand still, don't say a word and concentrate very hard, you might be able to hear a bell or whistle.

My Bubbe Made a Kishka

Summer at Kutsher's Country Club: Constipation Camp

"Nice purse, ladies, you got some Danish in there?"

"Do you believe in sex before marriage? I don't, it holds up the wedding."

"I think about suicide a lot. My final quest is to get on the Letterman show and then I'll have nothing to live for."

"You're so sweet that you could give a man diabetes."

"Alfred Silverman to the front desk. Alfred Silverman to the front desk."

"You're a nice advertisement for Kutsher's food. You're eating like you're going to the electric chair."

"How did Captain Hook die? He had jock itch and scratched himself with the wrong hand."

"I like to frustrate spoiled Jewish kids. They all think they're so smart but no one ever lasts a minute."

From the Catskills' Last House Jester, Kosher Corn [NY Times]
Related: Henny Youngman MP3
Note: Three of the above quotes from the article aren't actual jokes. Of course, they're the only funny ones.

100 Blogs To Leave Your Lover

Open Letter to Jason Calacanis
CC: David Sifry, Malcolm Gladwell, The Teamsters, Michael Musto, Rupert Murdoch, Houston, Robert Blake, Page Six, Rafael Palmiero, the chick who does the Hermitude in NYC blog, Citizens for a Drug-Free America, Jessica Alba's butt, Mr. Goodwrench, Human Resources
Re: Perhaps a Regular Feature

I read your thoughts on creating the "Blog 500" (does anyone else see the huge sponsorship potential with NASCAR on this? think people, THINK!) to rank the top performing, influential, etc sites and I was amused on several levels. First, let's parse this one out:

"Some background: Having created what became an absurdly powerful 100 list with my last company, Silicon Alley Reporter, I’ve seen the controversy, venom, and power such lists can create."

Absurd is right. I was at Jupiter Research (also iVillage for a short, hazy spell) in those days and while we were full of more shit than a cow field laced with laxatives, SAR was the litter box lining we used for this scruffy pup named Sheffie. (You don't wanna know...but it's much, much worse than you can imagine.) Salon even took the time to mock the artificial sweetener you sprinkled on these lists and began the article with the classic, "Once a year, Jason McCabe Calacanis makes enemies in Silicon Alley." Only ONCE A YEAR back then?? It's encouraging to see how you've done a fine job of "getting the numbers up" since then. (I kid, I kid...but do I? Yeah...I think so.)

I realize your opinionated SAR list is very different then this proposal of blog meritocracy, but god knows they share one thing: they're only of interest to insider weenies while the rest of us who carry the ad-free flag couldn't give a shit. Maybe even 500 shits if you give us enough chili and time. But let's hope that's all they have in common. It would be a shame to see the Blog 500 suffer the same fate of those SAR 100 beauties.

BTW, what ever happened to that iron-clad prediction of the Digital Coast pulling a tsunami on the canals of Silicon Alley? It's a shame it didn't pan out, we really could use the water now.

Turn It Up and Sit Down

Gotham-Ladyists, I hear you (too much, frankly) but I don't think you're ready to be crowned the Amerigo Vespuccis of the downtown bar and restaurant scene anytime soon. With all the mucho calor clamoring surrounding La Esquina, a goddamn taqueria with a "secret" bar downstairs (sorry but I don't see the big deal with the whole speakeasy vibe because there's just one little problem...THE SELLING AND CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOL IS LEGAL), your review on Gothamist is last in a long list of online coverage before the NYT Sunday Styles took a smash in that taco bowl.

Eater provides a nice timeline of the buzzapalooza but misses one important press mention: the NYT Food Stuff column on June 28 that gives an early review of the place and also reveals the brasserie downstairs. Verbose Coma and Thrillist still take top honors and I hope each gets a taco or tequila shot named after them. While scooping the Sunday Styles has never been a miraculous feat, even in pre-blog days, you ladies weren't even close to tackling the Times.

Of course I am flattered that you've set the goal of proving me wrong, which should be a very easy mission, but this time you came up colder than the San Loco leftovers in my fridge.

Young Team: Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home

Gage re-designs the minimalist Kid Dig It for the sixth time in six months. Not satisfied with just posting MP3s on Joonr and pics/links on HiFiNY, Randy launches the skateboarding blog Pushr to expand his own empr. Teendrama Mondays are back on track with some bottle service delays. Grellan goes green, which shouldn't surprise anyone. And while Josh hasn't updated photos on SixFive since Adult Camp, I don't want the guy to feel left out.

Keep Reading, We'll Print More

Cans of Sprite have been selling out at vending machines in office kitchens country-wide!!

Wait, no, false alarm.

Cans of Sprite were seen available in vending machines by office spies in recent days. What's going on here?? You can't trust a damn word out of office managers these days. Are they trying to tell us that Sprite caved in to consumer demand and re-stocked to sell more? Well shit on a Pringle, talk about your "corporate sell-outs."

Perhaps if a bi-monthly magazine sold out on the newsstands well before their next issue they would order and ship reprints too? Ohhhh, this is starting to make some business sense. To quote Steve Martin's character from The Jerk, "IT'S A PROFIT DEAL!"

That's right Gawker, it's just like that bag of Doritos you've got in one hand and a copy of RADAR in the other. Keep eating and reading, they'll make more.

You'd almost think no one at Gawker ever worked for a (failed) magazine before.