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Blog Lords

By Adrianne Jeffries 11/02/11 2:26pm

Blog Lords

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The Verge: How the Engadgeteers Broke Free of Aol and Built the Site They’d Been Dreaming Of

The Verge launched yesterday in the early a.m. without a hitch: a sleek tech news site complete with longer analysis, forums, a product database and a Q&A with insanely-popular Apple blogger John Gruber to ensure a nice inaugural traffic boost.

“For me, this was an idea that was forming for a long time,” said Josh Topolsky, former Engadget editor and current editor and co-founder of the new site. The editor—Jimmy Fallon’s gadget consultant and electronic musician—was getting notes from co-workers as he spoke to Betabeat this morning by phone (“26, 27 editorially-focused employees? Okay, I’m being told it’s 29″).  Read More

By Ben Popper 10/27/11 12:00pm

Blog Lords

Image via Vanity Fair

Suit Alleging Arianna Huffington Stole Idea For HuffPo Moves Forward

UPDATE: Reuters reports that The New York Times is suing AOL Inc to force the The Huffington Post to change the name of its new blog, Parentlode, which borrowed the chief writer, Lisa Belkin, and most of the name from her previous  NY Times column, Motherlode.

“The Times said Belkin “clearly intended” to confuse readers into believing her new blog was the same as her old blog, which she called a “virtual koffee klatch” for parenting,” reports Reuters. “The Times sued AOL for trademark infringement, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices. It also wants AOL to abandon its trademark application for the Parentlode name.”

Last November two advisers from the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, Peter Daou and James Boyce, filed suit against Arianna Huffington, claiming she stole the idea for the Huffington Post from them and cut them out of the business. Along with her co-founder Ken Lerer, Ms. Huffington filed to have the case dismissed. Now, as PaidContent reports, New York state Judge Charles Ramos has ruled that the case can go to trail.

The judge threw out seven of the eight complaints filed, but said that Ms. Huffington herself had confirmed the idea was something concrete and novel in a 2008 interview with Playboy. The pressure is now on Ms. Huffington to settle or be draw into a public court battle. Read More

By Ben Popper 10/04/11 9:42am

Blog Lords

Image via Flickr user jdlasica

Can Erick Schonfeld Keep the TechCrunch Swagger Alive?

For the last decade, Erick Schonfeld has been the lone wolf of tech media, working as the East Coast point man for tech publications headquartered in Silicon Valley “He’s the kind of reporter who can handle anything you throw at him, from a trendy Web 2.0 startup to a Fortune 100 titan,” said Josh Quittner, who was Mr. Schonfeld’s old boss at Business 2.0. “For us he played the one man band.”

The thirty-nine-year-old father of three lives in the suburbs near Chappaqua, forty five minutes north of New York City. (He left a tip on Foursquare about his morning commute from the Metro North station: “Get here early and snag a metered parking spot.”) Read More

By Ben Popper 10/03/11 9:17am

Blog Lords

Huffington Post Joins the Billionaires Club, Pageviews Hit New Record

It’s Ad Week in New York, so expect a lot of announcements geared to catch the attention of the buyers who spend big bucks for top brands. The Huffington Post kicked things off with a bang, announcing that it had broken one billion pageviews for the first time this past this past August.

The growth is paired with a push by Arianna Huffington to craft verticals around every type of audience. The site has recently launched HuffPost Gay Voices, HuffPost Weddings and HuffPost High School, among the more than twenty new categories it has brought online since being purchased by AOL.

International expansion is also ramping up. Ms. Huffington was in Brazil when the whole Crunchfund drama erupted and is planning more trips abroad in the coming weeks.

There was no indication in the press release of how much of this new traffic comes from AOL’s considerable network. If the growth is simply the result of the new partnership, then  it’s less interesting than new organic highs.

As Kara Swisher points out, HuffPo is also acquiring companies and continuing its hiring binge, taking full advantage of its big new bottom line.

By Nitasha Tiku 9/21/11 11:54am

Blog Lords

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WordPress Must Like the Looks of Tumblr Because It Just Added a ‘Follow’ Button

There must be something in the water. First Facebook announced it would formalize its stalking function with a subscription feature. And today WordPress announced it will be adding a follow feature to give users another way to subscribe to a blog, in the hopes of driving traffic. It looks like Tumblr’s “follow” button only further down the page–and ends up in your inbox. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 9/19/11 9:54am

Blog Lords

Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Parsing the TechCrunch Burn Book: Reactions to Paul Carr’s Resignation Bomb

Those of you who hopped on a plane without Wifi Friday evening can be forgiven for not keeping track of what AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher described as “pure twaddle wrapped in ridonkulous grandstanding.” First came TechCrunch writer Paul Carr’s lively public resignation letter. That was followed by newly-crowned TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld’s equally public resignation acceptance. And then, to pile it on, TechCrunch writer MG Siegeler offered a semi-private anti-Huffington IED because hey, it’s no fun if you can’t play too.

Digg’s Kevin Rose compared all the adolescent drama to “a LiveJournal page,” so put on some emo jams and join us, won’t you, as we flip through the pages of TechCrunch’s Burn Book. And, yes, for the most part, you’ll find it at the same URL where the professional tech blog used to be. Read More

By Ben Popper 9/15/11 9:42am

Blog Lords

Mr. Arrington flashes his "first amendment" gang sign.

Mike Arrington Introduces Us to the “First F*cking Amendment”

Betabeat published a story yesterday about the ways in which tech investors who write about private companies on public blogs might run afoul of SEC regulations. It focused, naturally, on Mike Arrington, who saw the post around 2 a.m. this morning and responded with this tweet:

“Screw that. Let me introduce you to the first fucking amendment to our constitution.”

Mr. Arrington failed to provide any links to the first amendment, but luckily, Betabeat had spent yesterday afternoon conversing with Prof. John Coffee of Columbia University, one of the foremost experts on securities law in the nation. Read More

By Ben Popper 9/14/11 9:05am

Blog Lords

Image via BacktoGeek

Venture Capitalists With Powerful Blogs May Run Afoul of the SEC

Has Blogging Become the New Insider Trading?

“People think there is a distinction between how an major investor can talk about a public company versus a private company,” said Ralph Ferrara, former General Counsel for the SEC. “But if you read the law carefully, you see that everything that you can do wrong when combining a public company with the media applies to investments in private companies as well.”

Michael Arrington wanted to have it all. The editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, the nation’s most powerful tech blog, had, except for a brief hiatus, invested his own money in the companies he covered. The move always prompted a bit of grumbling in the blogosphere, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

Then Mr. Arrington decided to go bigger. He tapped Silicon Valley’s royalty to raise a $10 million pool he dubbed CrunchFund. Read More