The real problem, Ars Technica says, is that the iPhone–and other modern smart phones–disconnect from the network whenever possible to save power.

“The fact that almost all of the complaints from iPhone users come from the U.S. suggests that AT&T’s network is at least partially to blame,” the story asserts. “In fact, users in other countries have told Ars that they don’t experience the kinds of problems that U.S. users often report. Well, other countries except one.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Seems stocks are running low, there’s no sign of resupply shipments and current SKUs are being scrapped. That all this is occurring in advance of Apple’s as-of-yet unannounced Sept. 9 event suggests that a fall iPod refresh is a near inevitability. Though just what it will entail isn’t clear–presumably, increases in clock speed and memory, and perhaps even a camera.

Sell ads that look exactly like the content itself.

That’s the strategy that Condé Nast is taking–cautiously–with Reddit, the Digg-like news aggregator it bought a couple of years ago. And it might be working.

So says Josh Stinchcomb, who runs sales and marketing for the “business” group of Condé’s digital properties, which also includes Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Web sites for the likes of The New Yorker and Portfolio. About three months ago, Stinchcomb began running ads that look exactly like the story headlines Reddit users submit and vote on.

The only difference: They sit at the top of the site’s homepage and carry a “sponsored link” tag. Like this (click to enlarge):

The results have made Condé “cautiously optimistic,” says Stinchcomb. You can measure that two ways: Click-through rates for the ads are running at about five percent, which is several times more than the industry average. And readers haven’t revolted.

The latter is a real possibility at a site like Reddit, whose users are fiercely protective of the community they’ve built, and antagonistic toward advertising in general. Stinchcomb says about 20 percent of Reddit’s users have installed ad-blocking software on their Web browsers.

If Condé keeps using the ads–they’ve run them from three sponsors so far and are tinkering with a self-service version that would allow marketers to submit ads on their own–it won’t create a torrent of cash. Right now the ads are priced at a $7 CPM (that’s $7 for every 1,000 eyeballs Condé gets in front of the ads), and Stinchcomb says he’ll probably have to knock that rate down. (He says he may also consider changing ad pricing to a cost-per-click/performance model, which would be a first for Condé).

But even a little bit of money would be a plus for Reddit, which has remained more or less a revenue-free property for Condé, even though traffic has shot up since the acquisition. Stinchcomb says Reddit now attracts five million uniques visitors a month, up from 1.5 million when the publisher bought the site (per usual, third-party traffic meausurements are much smaller).

Just as important, if it works for Reddit, it could have big implications for Digg, which has a significantly bigger audience, but faces the same problems selling ads.

Digg has raised $40 million so far, at a very high valuation, but revenues have been paltry. The site is reportedly planning to start selling ads that will look and feel a lot like the ones Reddit is already trying. High time to start experimenting.

[Note to Techmeme's Gabe Rivera: Yup, you have sponsored content, too. In fact, we've seen versions of this model for as long as we've had mass media. I think this iteration is particularly interesting, though.]

That’s the lesson you can learn by perusing 24/7 Wall St.’s list of the 25 most valuable blogs and comparing it to the version the two-man publication put together a year ago. Editor Douglas A. MacIntyre has given sharp haircuts to many of the Web publications he assessed last March. But not all of them.

MacIntyre thinks TechCrunch, for instance, is now worth about $25 million; last year he pegged the tech blog’s value at $36 million. Web 2.0 chronicler Mashable has taken a 75 percent drop, from $10 million to $2.5 million.

But MacIntyre also thinks that the uber-aggregator Huffington Post is now worth $90 million, up from $70 million a year ago, even though the site’s political coverage doesn’t have the same appeal it had last fall. And he thinks the most valuable company on his list, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, is now worth $170 million even though (or perhaps because) Denton has been consolidating his list of titles. Last spring, MacIntyre thought Gawker was worth $150 million.

Since every one of these blogs is a small operation that provides little to no visibility into its financials, every one of these valuations is, at best, an educated guess. And it’s easy to pick nits or arguments with any one of MacIntyre’s valuations. But then again, those arguments are sort of the point of a list like this.

And it’s hard to argue with his overall thesis: The same advertising woes that have caused problems for Yahoo (YHOO), the New York Times and nearly every other big media company are being felt by the little guys too. Maybe even more so since many of the little guys were hoping that the big guys would snap them up, as Condé Nast did with Ars Technica and the Guardian Media Group did with PaidContent last year. Hard to argue that we’ll see deals like these in 2009.

Here’s MacIntyre’s top 10: You can see the full list here.

1.  Gawker Media: $170 million. Last year: $150 million.

2.  Huffington Post: $90 million. Last year: $70 million.

3.  The Drudge Report: $48 million. Last year: $10 million.

4.  Perez Hilton: $32 million. Last year: $48 million.

5.  Sugar, Inc.: $27 million. Last year: Not listed.

6.  TechCrunch. $25 million. Last year: $36 million.

7.  MacRumors. $21 million. Last year: $85 million

8.  SeekingAlpha. $11 million. Last year: $15 million

9.  GigaOm: $9.5 million. Last year: $8.4 million

10. Politico: $8.7 million. Last year: Not listed.

I have posted below a video interview with ContentNext’s founder Rafat Ali, who spoke about the deal. I caught up with him in his New York hotel this morning (by coincidence I flew into New York today on a redeye).

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

Several sources told me TechCrunch has been in off-and-on talks recently with Time Warner’s AOL (TWX), which wants to pay from $20 and $30 million for the site.

I could not find out what price TechCrunch thinks is fair, although one might assume it is higher than that.

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde told me via email that she had no comment. “My policy is not to comment on rumors of our business,” she wrote.

TechCrunch, which was founded in mid-2005 by Michael Arrington, is a group-edited blog that has grown large by focusing–”obsessively,” according to the site’s About page–on Web 2.0 start-ups, covering every jog and tittle of their life cycles.

Sources said the talks between TechCrunch and AOL have been ongoing for the past six to eight weeks, although the site has been in talks with several other large media companies interested in it in the past and these have not led to an acquisition.

AOL would probably be a good home for a site like TechCrunch, since it has a blog focus from its own Switched site and sites it bought, like Engadget.

AOL acquired that popular gadget site in 2005 in the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, which was founded by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis, by the way, runs an annual tech conference with TechCrunch, now called TechCrunch50.

Also, I have stayed in Calacanis’s house in the Brentwood (see post and video here), when I was interviewing a Disney exec onstage at a paidContent conference in Los Angeles recently.

Oh, yes, it’s a small tech blogging world after all.

But the money has suddenly become big for the sites involved in that universe too, although most still have relatively small businesses.

Nonetheless, tech bloggers have grown in number and influence, as sites–like this one–compete to break news and attract readers.

Such efforts take funding–despite the lower costs as compared with traditional media–and this probably means inevitable consolidation.

Before its acquisition by Guardian, for example, ContentNext had been raising several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

Other sites have also recently raised funds, such as GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat.

Most of them have also been talking about various roll-ups between and among one other. Sources told me that VentureBeat, for example, has spoken separately in the past to both paidContent and TechCrunch about joining forces.

VentureBeat’s Founder Matt Marshall would not comment on that, but did note that “size matters, so you have to do what you can to get the economics of scale.”

That includes adding on more sites and doing conferences, as VentureBeat has done (its new conference is called MobileBeat, for example, which will take place in Sunnyvale, Calif. on July 24.)

“Consolidation is what you are probably going to see,” predicted Marshall about the tech blogging arena.

Here’s ContentNext’s Ali talking about exactly that and more today:

In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company.

The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.

The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.

Longtime digital media exec Larry Kramer is on its board and ContentNext recently hired media exec Nathan Richardson as its CEO.

Sources said ContentNext would continue being run independently after the Guardian purchase.

This sale comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica, a much larger tech-focused site, to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million.

More to come soon.

But until then, here’s a video I did with Ali just over a year ago in a when I visited his then-new offices in Santa Monica.

Since everyone and their mother saw fit to grab and post BoomTown’s video of our prescient interview last month with Ars Technica’s founder Ken Fisher in the wake of its acquisition by Condé Nast to be announced today, we thought we should post it too–since we did it!

Boston-based Ars, one the largest and longest-running tech blogs, will become part of CondéNet’s Wired Digital group.

Here is our post on the site, which I love for its accuracy and breadth, despite some annoying attribution snafus it should fix tout de suite.

Also, who wouldn’t like the name, meaning the “Art of Technology,” suggested by a quote from the “father of medicine,” Hippocrates:

“Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile,” which is translated as, “Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”

And here is my video interview with Fisher:

When I was recently in Boston, I had the pleasure of taking Ken Fisher, the founder and editor-in-chief of the tech news and analysis site Ars Technica, to dinner.

Why? Well, to begin, in a crowded sector, Fisher runs a site that has a breadth of deeply techie coverage, original news, a dash of attitude, nice writing, fair analysis and a highly passionate community of serious tech enthusiasts.

And, of course, a totally uber-academic Latin name, meaning the “Art of Technology,” suggested by a quote from the “father of medicine,” Hippocrates:

“Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile,” which is translated as, “Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”

And, interestingly, the seemingly esoteric tone does not extend to its readership or its writers, most of whom have been drawn from that community.

And while not as well known in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, the site has long been one of largest in the tech content arena, in terms of both audience and page views and is also one that has been one of the earliest to the table, having started in 1998.

But what’s a relief is that Ars also can cover more viral and perhaps silly tech topics with equanimity, such as its post yesterday on the uproar about the goofy internal promotional video that Microsoft did and which the hair-trigger tech blogosphere treated as a criminal offense.

Wrote Ars writer Emil Protalinski sensibly: “So what’s the lesson here? There is none. Microsoft still likes making fun of itself and people still like making money off of headlines that bash Microsoft. It’s just another day on the Internet.”

If this sounds like a mash note, it is, although Ars is not perfect. For example, it did get into a little trouble in 2006, when a writer did not properly attribute text from IPDemocracy blogger Cynthia Brumfield, but it apologized and then properly linked.

But, because while there is a lot of noise out there, signifying nothing, it is nice to find such a large and successful tech site that does not need to shout to be noticed (like, well, the sometimes I-scream-you-scream BoomTown, for one!)

Or, as Ars Technica gracefully notes in its description of itself: “We work for the reader who not only needs to keep up on technology, but is passionate about it…But at Ars, ‘opinion’ never devolves into dogma; we strive for measured judgments and carefully relayed contexts…It was once said that sine scientia ars nihil est, that is, ‘without knowledge, art is nothing.’ We agree, but there’s also a corollary: sine ars, scientia nihil est.”

Here’s a video (which is hosted on YouTube due to a Brightcove snafu) I did with the soft-spoken and professorial Fisher about Ars, the state of content on the Web, why Ars does not need to be in Silicon Valley and the possible return of the three-syllable word:

Actually, it does get bricked out. Sources at Apple tell Ars Technica that the activation limbo into which unlocked iPhones are sent is the company’s definition of “bricking”: “Current attempts to reactivate across the Web are failing and therefore [a hacked] iPhone cannot be used to do anything–no phone calls, no Safari, no iPod, nothing. An unlocked iPhone that runs firmware update 1.1.1 is unusable no matter what SIM is in it.”

UPDATE:The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) reports that Apple Stores around the country are restoring bricked iPhones. “We’re not sure whether they’re doing a low-level reflash or just swapping units out,” TUAW explains. “We have reports of at least four customers who walked in with iBricks and walked out with iPhones. It is unclear at this time whether these customers unlocked their iPhones or not–we’re also receiving reports of iBricks from people who never unlocked or modded their units.”