The only real difference between Facebook and Tumblr is that the former achieved escape velocity before the founder was diluted — and neutered.

– Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, sort-of defending Tumblr CEO David Karp, in the comment section of a Valleywag story about Karp’s recent oddly worded public layoff notice

We are thrilled to welcome Jason Del Rey to the staff of AllThingsD, where the accomplished reporter will be covering e-commerce.

That includes such critical companies as Amazon, Groupon, eBay and the fast-growing online payments business, as well the escalation of the Internet of Things and the continued mashup of the offline and online worlds.

Del Rey is perfectly suited to the task, having been a business journalist since 2007, when he joined Inc. magazine in order to write about startups and fast-growing small businesses across all industries.

He was most recently a reporter at Advertising Age, where he covered older digital media companies such as Yahoo and AOL, and upstarts such as BuzzFeed and Gawker Media.

Del Rey has also worked as the executive editor of Open Forum, a Web publication for small business owners and entrepreneurs. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The entire AllThingsD staff is thrilled to welcome Jason, who will be starting in two weeks.

Brown will be Wired’s “New York editor,” a new role that will have him weighing in on the brand’s magazine, tablet edition and website. It’s his second time at Wired, where he had previously worked as a deputy to then-gadget-boss Mark McClusky. McClusky now runs the company’s website, under new editor in chief Scott Dadich.

Gawker Media owner Nick Denton hasn’t named a replacement for Brown, who ran the site for the last two years; veteran Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson will lead a search for a new editor. “We’re looking for someone with design background,” Denton said.

This one seems like an amicable Denton/editor breakup. Here’s Brown’s take, delivered via IM (he’s still a Gawker employee, after all): “I’ve had an amazing few years at Gizmodo — the team here is among the best in any business, and I love them like family. But I am pumped about going home to Wired. With Scott and the team he’s put in place, it’s like we’re getting the band back together.” (Update: And here’s more from Brown, who is also an extremely patient Pai Gow poker tutor.)

And here’s more from Denton, also via IM (because, see above): “Gizmodo began as the online embodiment of the Fetish section of Wired. And it’s a good time to recover that central purpose: the cataloging of beautiful things. Especially with image annotation on the new Kinja platform. Applications for [the] EIC role should go to joel At gizmodo dot com.”

Instagram user @luch313

Tons of great Sandy coverage on the Web last night and this morning. Largely absent from the conversation, though, are three New York-based news/aggregation sites: BuzzFeed, Gawker and the Huffington Post.

All three publishers relied on Datagram, a Manhattan-based ISP, according to a BuzzFeed post published late last night. When that went down, so did their sites.

This morning, all three are making do with temporary fixes.

Huffington Post is running a bare-bones homepage (as Bruce Upbin notes, no nip-slip slideshows this morning); Gawker has reverted to its pre-redesign form; and BuzzFeed is relying on individual Tumblr accounts (see John Herrman’s excellent thumbsucker on instaTruth).

And all three sites, of course, are making excellent use of Twitter, which really had its moment last night: Best place to get the most information on the Web.

Twitter is the “biggest blown business opportunity in media or tech,” Tate says, because six years into it, it’s losing money, not minting it like Facebook.

It’s certainly no Facebook. It probably won’t ever be anything like Facebook.

But Tate’s numbers do describe Twitter as a rapidly growing media company.

In 2010, the year it started making tentative moves into advertising, it generated $28.5 million in revenue. In the first three months of 2011, it came close to matching all of the previous year’s revenue, with $23.8 million. If Twitter’s growth rate never budged after that, that would put it on track to do $95.2 million in 2011.

The pace of Twitter’s losses appears to have ramped up, too. Tate says it lost $67.8 million in 2010, and another $25.8 million in Q1 2011. Not a huge surprise, given that Twitter has been on a multiyear hiring binge.

So is that bad? Good? Hard to really say without taking a deeper dive into the numbers.

For instance, my hunch is that almost all of Twitter’s 2010 revenue came from data-licensing deals, not its ad business, and that most of its 2011 revenue came from ads, not data. If that’s the case, then its ad business is ramping even more rapidly than Tate’s numbers indicate. But I can’t tell from the outside, just like Tate can’t.

I do have a sense, based on my own reporting, that Twitter’s ad business was pretty much an experiment through most of 2010. “A work in progress,” I called it back in February 2011.

But if you watch what they’ve been doing in the last year, they certainly appear to be scaling up. They started pushing more ads, in more places, without any obvious signs that they were losing users as they did so.

And they’ve recently added a “self-serve” option for small advertisers. That’s a crucial step because it allows them to really pick up the pace of their ad sales (just like self-serve has done for, um, Facebook). It’s also a sign that they believe they finally have enough ad inventory to satisfy advertiser demand, a problem that held them back early on.

Given that advertising on Twitter isn’t a foregone conclusion at all — unlike Google, it doesn’t have an obvious way to figure out what its users are interested in buying, and unlike Facebook and other Web publishers, it doesn’t have a lot of real estate to jam with marketing messages — all of that seems pretty encouraging to me. (I really don’t like this pay-per-Tweet scheme, though.)

Okay. But what about Tate’s argument that Twitter’s been at this for years, and has cycled through multiple CEOs in the process? No argument there: Twitter’s corporate history has been messy, bloody and confusing to people in and outside of the company.

And Twitter’s original founders went out of their way to avoid the ad business for years, presumably in the hope that some less-icky way of generating revenue would show up.

But it’s no coincidence that plans for Twitter’s ad business started to come together around the time that Dick Costolo left Google and joined the company as COO, back in the fall of 2009. And that they really started speeding up by the time Costolo took the CEO spot in 2010.

Hard to blame current Twitter for the fact that old Twitter didn’t want to dive right into the ad business. You can blame current Twitter if they can’t build a business that justifies the $8 billion valuation they earned last year. Which, remember, needs to be much more than $8 billion for investors to see a return.

If they do get to that point, it will almost certainly involve a public offering, so we’ll all be able to pore over Twitter’s financials. And if not, Costolo and company will have much bigger problems than Gawker’s report.

But it’s always good to remember that most of the world has no idea who Denton is. Hence the utility of this 11-minute profile on NBC’s “Rock Center,” which aired last night.

Here’s Denton’s description of it, via Facebook: “Some internet insiders disdain the dumb questions of network television. Their contempt is misplaced. The dumb questions are almost always the interesting ones.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

Which is good, because here’s another one: BuzzFeed, the online publishing start-up that’s the toast of people who like to write about online publishing start-ups, is adding a tech section run by Gizmodo star Matt Buchanan.

This follows a now-familiar pattern we’ve seen from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Last month, Peretti brought on Politico star Ben Smith to start up the site’s political coverage and to run its overall editorial operations. A couple of weeks ago, he hired Doree Shafrir from Rolling Stone’s Web site to oversee “culture” coverage for the site.

Now Buchanan*, a five-year veteran of Gawker Media’s gadget-obsessed site, will start a new “vertical,” along with John Herrman from Popular Mechanics.

All of this hiring comes as Peretti is flush with cash courtesy of a $15 million funding round, and has reconnected with many of the people he used to work with at Huffington Post, which he co-founded.

Fellow HuffPo cofounder Ken Lerer is also a BuzzFeed co-founder, and former HuffPo ad boss Greg Coleman has come on as an advisor. Everyone who types about the media business likes writing about Peretti, but if you haven’t read any of this yet, I’d suggest starting with this New York Observer profile.

Buchanan and his crew will start publishing in mid-February, says Smith, who says the coverage will be something like what Buchanan did at Gizmodo, and also nothing like it. Think more “tech culture,” and less “stuff about gadgets.”

Well, maybe you should hold off on calling it “tech culture,” too, Smith says. “I guess I hesitate to call it tech culture, because I don’t think there’s a clear line between tech and culture anymore.”

Okay. So what’s next up in the BuzzFeed expansion plan? There’s got to be a bunch of cash left, right? “There will be more. Stay tuned.”

And now, a lightly edited version of a superfast exit interview I conducted via IM with Buchanan, who I gather is headed out for a couple of drinks as I type this.

Peter Kafka: Why’d you leave Gawker Media? I know lots of people have come to you in the past. Why go now?

Matt Buchanan: It’s an opportunity to build something completely new on a really exciting platform, which, even though the hallmark of Gizmodo is the immense freedom we all have, you know, the one thing I can never get here is the chance to do it all from scratch. And to do something that’s different from what a lot other tech sites are doing, I hope. I do love Gawker, and everybody here. I was from the generation that never got screwed over, so I only have good things to say about it.

Kafka: So should we be looking elsewhere for unboxing coverage, liveblogs of Android OS unveilings, and other blow-by-blow standards of tech coverage? Or will you leave all that behind?

Buchanan: Leaving almost all of that behind. I think technology deserves writing and criticism at the same level as any other aspect of culture, like film or music, because the reality of our world now is that it is just as important as those things. It is mainstream culture now. So we want to do tech for humans, as a main thing — but I also want hardcore tech readers to like what they see, too.

Like, we’ll talk about phones and gadgets to the extent that we find it interesting, and that other people might find it interesting, but no, this isn’t another gadget site. I would like to note that it is the first technology site powered entirely by ginger tears, which is what I’m most excited about.

Kafka: Curious about your take on your new employer. Seems to me that, while they’re uncomfortable saying this out loud, Jonah and crew are really setting out to build a new version of HuffPo: Build site by aggregating/curating, etc., other people’s content, then use that momentum/money to hire their own folks to build on that. The big obvious difference is that there isn’t a personality driving it from the get-go. And it’s tuned more to social than to search. Thoughts?

Buchanan: Yes! I think it’s too early to tell for some of that — even for me — but what I’m into is the fact that it’ll give John and I the freedom and flexibility to do the kind of tech writing and journalism that we want to do.

*Disclosure: I’ve met Matt a couple times, have chatted with him online a few more times, and I like him. He’s also an excellent resource if you’re planning a trip to Momofuku Ssäm (which you should definitely do, unless you’re a vegetarian) and need help with your ordering strategy.

Nick Denton has something for you: The Gawker Media owner is pawning off Fleshbot, the porn site he has operated for eight years in addition to sites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Deadspin.

In addition to, but not really “along with” — Fleshbot, which is most definitely not safe for many workplaces, has always been kept at a distance from Denton’s other properties, at least when it came to advertising and PR.

It’s not that other Denton sites are prudish — ask Brett Favre — but they’re still in the business of attracting mainstream advertisers. And Fleshbot could never do that.

“As GM has grown, its sales strategy and technology platform have ceased to effectively support Fleshbot’s needs. We think someone else could be a much better partner to grow the site with us,” editor Lux Alptraum wrote in a “for sale” post yesterday.

As with all things Denton, the move will touch off a little wave of speculation about What It All Means, etc. I figured I’d kick things off this morning by asking him myself, via IM.

Denton: “Just hadn’t fit for a long long time.”

Kafka: “y i know. so why not anytime in the last tk years?”

Denton: “Oh, I don’t know. Because I’m slow to realize the inevitable?”

Thanks to AVN for spotting, and Jim Romenesko for aggregating.

Meanwhile! In other Nick Denton news: Denton held a party in his Soho loft last night, to toast the new editors of the Guardian, the U.K. paper that’s trying to establish a footprint in the U.S. (join the club). Had you been there (I wasn’t), you would have seen bold-faced names like the New York Times’ Bill Keller, New York magazine’s Adam Moss, (rhetorical) bomb-thrower Naomi Wolf, and some of the folks who spend time figuring out how to Occupy Wall Street. “Best party ever,” Denton types.

Here’s the host (sitting on the back of the sofa), along with fellow online heavyweights Jacob Weisberg (Slate), Arianna Huffington (duh), Janine Gibson (guardiannews.com) and Henry Blodget (Business Insider). “152 million global uniques,” Denton boasts.

Tonight at 1 am PT, techies who have nothing else to do — that would be me! — can click onto a brand new tech site called The Verge.

Well, kind of — it’s the result of many months of work by the gang that defected from AOL’s popular Engadget tech powerhouse, set up temporary shop under the Web site name This Is My Next and busied themselves with creating The Verge.

I have another screenshot below of the new site that will be focused on news, reviews and features about tech, and which has been getting a final tweaking all today.

From my quick perusal, it has a vibrant and slick design, with a lot of packed boxes, swooshy movement and plenty of content.

Along with the launch, The Verge’s parent company — formerly doing business as SB Nation, focused on sports — will also transform into Vox Media.

In a chit-chat with Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff, top exec Marty Moe and Josh Topolsky, The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, the trio of former AOLers all said they were going to for the big time.

“We want to build the platform for talented native Web voices, in sports and tech for now, and then we plan to grow more verticals,” said Bankoff.

“We want to create more than a news site or blog about tech — the frustration at AOL was that we did not get the resources or manpower to realize that bigger vision,” said Topolsky.

(You’re speaking to the choir, brother!)

Said Moe: “We think this category has not had a large enough vision…not enough has been innovated over the years and we think it is a big opportunity.”

Topolsky said the site, along with a mass of original content from 30 writers, will also be helped by a strong database of information about all its topics and gadgets and also focus a lot on community input.

“What we want to do was graduate beyond the blog,” he said.

(Hmm…and here I just got the hang of this blog thing.)

Bankoff, who would not say how much Vox spent on launching The Verge — my back-of-the-envelope guess, several million dollars — said that costs were spread out between the tech and sports sites with centralized sales and product teams.

Initial launch sponsors are BMW, Sony and Samsung, said Moe, who is aiming to sell “major brand advertisers on the idea that we will be the premiere destination of consumer tech coverage.”

It has to grow past big sites like Engadget to do so, but Topolsky said that This Is My Next had three million unique visitors in the last month and more than 10 million page views.

“We have done that with a lot of editorials and in-depth reviews,” he said. “I think people are really hungry for great content and stories.”

As to competitors, Topolsky said that “this not to necessarily I win if you lose,” although his clear aim is to unseat sites like CBS-owned CNET, Engadget and Gawker Media’s Gizmodo and perhaps even newsier sites such as TechCrunch and AllThingsD (as if!).

“We are going to do the nuts and bolts stuff,” he said. “Somewhere between Engadget and Wired.”

Topolsky compared The Verge to a “boutique hotel — we have the same stuff everyone else has, but it is a much more elegant experience.”

Later, that will change, he promised, noting that “this is only version 1.0.”

Of course — but what else would you expect from a gadget site?

(Good luck and congrats to the entire The Verge team from AllThingsD!)

And here is another lovely screenshot, as promised:

Except not really.

Here’s a video featuring Gawker Media boss Nick Denton; Curbed’s Lockhart Steele, who helped Denton build his business; Rex Sorgatz, a “microcelebrity” once covered obsessively by Denton’s blogs; and Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, who writes about Denton a lot. Also featured: Samantha Ronson, who knows Lindsay Lohan.

If you don’t want to spend a couple minutes watching Salmon narrate the event (and you should, because Felix is an entertaining person even when he’s sober), Sorgatz has the concise version.

Brian John Hogan, 22 years old, and Sage Robert Wallower, 28, pleaded no contest on Tuesday to misdemeanor theft of lost property for selling an Apple Inc. iPhone prototype for $5,000 to a technology blog in 2010. The pair was sentenced to one year of probation and 40 hours of public service, according to San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe.

Messrs. Hogan and Wallower are also required to pay Apple a total of $250 in restitution. Mr. Wagstaffe said the pair are allowed to keep the $4,750 they made on the sale.

The sentencing brings to a conclusion a particularly weird episode — even by Silicon Valley’s skewed standards. At one point, a special police task force kicked in a reporter’s door in search of evidence.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Next week Denton’s Kotaku gaming site will start showing complete episodes of “Retro Game Master,” a long-running Japanese reality/comedy show.

I’m a little fuzzy on what the show actually entails, but as far as I can tell it involves a dude trying to master ancient, NES-era games, and it’s apparently a big hit in Japan and a cult favorite on the Internet.

Gawker Media has bought the rights to the first 12 episodes of the show, which have been dubbed in English, and has the ability to show more if it goes well, says Kotaku editor Joel Johnson. The idea is to treat the show both as “live” TV — a new episode will be made available each Thursday, at 8 pm ET — and as traditional Web video — Kotaku readers can watch the show on demand whenever they like.

Gawker has already made a significant commitment to video, via its Gawker.TV site. But that site is pretty much dedicated to other people’s viral videos and TV clip compilations that Gawker’s staff assembles. Here the company has gone ahead and purchased the rights to videos it will have exclusively in the U.S. (Eric Spiegelman, last seen on this site working on his “Old Jews Telling Jokes” series, put the deal together for Gawker Media).

This is an experiment for Gawker Media, and the publisher hasn’t sold advertising against the show yet because it doesn’t know how it’s going to perform. But if it does work, you should expect to see more full-length shows on different Gawker Media sites says COO Gaby Darbyshire.

So how much does it cost to purchase the U.S. Web video rights to a hit Japanese TV show, anyway? “Not very much money,” says Darbyshire. “Put it this way — it was not an extravagant experiment to make. Surprisingly small.”

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the publishing impresario was feeling just a titch…defensive.

But Thursday night, Denton hosted a gathering of 100-plus chitty-chatty newsish media types at his SoHo loft, and there he seemed quite confident again. Midway through his cocktail party, he dimmed the lights, clambered up on a windowsill and toasted his sales team, his technical team and his writers. As well as former New York congressman Chris Lee.

And then he played us this movie, which shows quite clearly what he’s trying to do with his properties. He wants to morph them from “blogs” into something more ambitious, but also older: He wants them to be like TV.

A Day in the Life of Gawker Media – FINAL from source/record on Vimeo.

That’s supposed to change next month, when the site adds a new “In Focus” photo blog, curated by Alan Taylor. The assumption is that Taylor will be doing something very similar to the work he has been doing at the Boston Globe’s site, where his “Big Picture” site has been averaging eight million page views a month.

It’s fairly easy to describe what Taylor does: He grabs brilliant images–culled from Getty, Reuters and the Associated Press, as well as from a personal network of photographers–and assembles them on a no-frills site. But it’s impossible to describe the photos’ impact, so best to take a minute and see the work he’s been doing at Boston.com.

Back? Okay. Now, head over to check out a few of Gawker Media’s beta sites, which showcase the blog network’s upcoming emphasis on big, pretty pictures.

Again, hard to really appreciate how good this stuff can look on a lot of browser windows, but if you’ve got a big enough display–or more interestingly, if you’re looking at this stuff on a TV screen on your wall, or your iPad screen on your lap–you’ll get the full effect. Which is: This stuff doesn’t really look much like the Web–it looks like TV.

And that’s sort of the point.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101217/careful-where-you-click-google-flags-hacked-sites/ http://allthingsd.com/20101217/careful-where-you-click-google-flags-hacked-sites/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:54:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27199 Gawkergate got you feeling itchy about the sites you visit? Perhaps Google can help: The search engine is now telling searchers when it thinks a site may be hacked. Or in Google’s words, it tells you, “This site may be compromised.”

Here’s a sample, from Google’s blog post announcing the change (via SearchEngineLand). Click on the image to enlarge:

Google has already been flagging sites it thinks are distributing malware, so this is just an incremental step. And Google apparently thinks a “compromised” site is less dangerous than one it thinks “may harm your computer”: If you click on the link for the latter, Google will send you to an “are you really sure you want to go there?” message, but Google won’t actually slow you down if you want to head to a hacked site.

[Image credit: Picture Perfect Pose]

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-hacked-site-notifications-in-search.html

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101217/careful-where-you-click-google-flags-hacked-sites/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101214/the-gawker-hack-ripple-hits-linkedin/ http://allthingsd.com/20101214/the-gawker-hack-ripple-hits-linkedin/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:37:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27043 Gawker Media is still cleaning up the mess left by a hacker attack this weekend, but now other sites have their own work to do. That’s because Gawker commenters who had their logins and passwords exposed may have used the same combinations on other sites, creating more headaches.

Example 1: Twitter saw a rash of promotional tweets for a bogus berry weight-loss product, the result of a security breach thought to be connected to the Gawker break-in.

Example 2: LinkedIn has temporarily disabled the accounts of any users whose email addresses turned up in the public database of hacked accounts. It’s asking those users to reset their passwords.

LinkedIn PR guy Hani Durzy says the move, which started yesterday afternoon, has only affected a “small fraction” of LinkedIn’s 85 million members. He says the social network made the decision proactively, not because it had any evidence that any accounts had been misused;  LinkedIn now has a blog post on the topic.

Some context/math: Gawker has said it has had to notify users of 1.5 million email addresses to change their passwords following the break-in.

If, for argument’s sake, half of those emails belonged to LinkedIn users, that would be less than one percent of the company’s user base. And likely much less: For some reason I have two emails connected to my single LinkedIn account. And both were exposed during Gawkergate, so I got two emails this morning.

No real debacles so far, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see them. Who’s next?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101214/the-gawker-hack-ripple-hits-linkedin/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20101214/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/ http://allthingsd.com/20101214/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:00:27 +0000 Zachary M. Seward and Albert Sun http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33964 Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: “123456.” So is the runner-up: “password.”

On Sunday night, hackers posted online a trove of data from Gawker Media’s servers, including the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made public as part of the hack. Using that dataset, we found the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords.

How do Gawker Media users express themselves when no one is watching? While many of their passwords are common phrases like “qwerty,” others appear distinctive to the Gawker community. Where else would “f—you,” “blahblah” and “whatever” rank among the most popular passwords? And why, oh why, is “monkey” in the top 10?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101214/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/nick-denton-so-very-sorry-about-giant-gawker-media-hack/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/nick-denton-so-very-sorry-about-giant-gawker-media-hack/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:56:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27014 It takes something pretty catastrophic for Nick Denton to apologize in public. So mark this one down: The Gawker Media owner says he’s “so very sorry” about the hacking attack that exposed some 1.5 million of his readers’ passwords.

Denton being Denton, he made his mea culpa in a relatively obscure corner of his blog network–an open comments thread with Gawker readers. And if you had a bit too much of the wrong kind of skepticism, you might think that this photo Denton posted to the thread was a bit cavalier:

But nope, says Denton. That’s real contrition: “Okay, here you go. That’s me on the left and Tom Plunkett, our CTO, on the right. We’re looking appropriately glum. It didn’t take any acting.” (Also worth noting that Denton was responding directly to a reader request for “a photo of yourself wearing a dunce cap or something of that nature. With a big ‘I’m sorry’ sign.”)

In more important news: Denton’s sites, which stopped posting yesterday afternoon as a result of the attack, are now back up again. And if you’ve ever left a comment on one of the sites, you should go there and change your password, then do the same at any other site where you’ve used the same login/password combo.

A few other notes:

• Gawker Media says that readers who used Twitter or Facebook logins to leave comments on the blog network haven’t been affected. But people who used the same login on Gawker as they have on Facebook or Twitter may very well be in trouble. Which may be one reason so many Twitter users I know are now promoting a bogus weight-loss berry.
• There’s a Google document that contains some of the hacked email/login info, and something called Hint has been emailing some hacked commenters with a reminder to change their passwords. (Who are they? Why do they want to associate their yet-to-launch site with a security breach? Anyone?) But not finding your info on the document and not getting an email doesn’t mean you don’t have a security problem. Play it safe and change your password now, regardless.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/nick-denton-so-very-sorry-about-giant-gawker-media-hack/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20101212/gawker-hacked-if-youve-left-a-comment-on-a-nick-denton-site-change-your-password-asap/ http://allthingsd.com/20101212/gawker-hacked-if-youve-left-a-comment-on-a-nick-denton-site-change-your-password-asap/#comments Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:47:52 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26944 Have you left a comment on one of Gawker Media’s sites? If so, you should change your password there, and on any other sites where you’ve used the same login/password combination, as soon as possible. Gawker says its “user databases appear to have been compromised” by hackers. More background from Mediaite and The Next Web.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101212/gawker-hacked-if-youve-left-a-comment-on-a-nick-denton-site-change-your-password-asap/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101120/gawker-yanks-palins-book-excerpt-after-court-order/ http://allthingsd.com/20101120/gawker-yanks-palins-book-excerpt-after-court-order/#comments Sun, 21 Nov 2010 00:55:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26125 Hope you’ve sated your curiosity about Sarah Palin’s upcoming book: Gawker Media, which published unauthorized excerpts of the book on Thursday, has pulled them off the Web following a federal court order.

The ruling comes following a lawsuit filed Friday by Palin’s publisher HarperCollins. AP:

A federal judge on Saturday ordered Gawker Media to pull leaked pages of Sarah Palin’s forthcoming book “America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag” from its blog.

The injunction prohibits Gawker from “continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages from the book” pending a hearing on Nov. 30.

The link to Gawker’s original post now generates a 404 error message. Palin’s book is due out on Tuesday, a full week before the scheduled hearing.

I’ve asked HarperCollins if they have any additional comment beyond the statement they sent me this morning (the publisher is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site). I have yet to receive any comment from Gawker Media.

But Gawker Media owner Nick Denton did tell me this morning, via IM, that he was eager for the day that his company would only run video ads, and referred me to this clip, running on his Jalopnik site.

Via Politico, here’s the court order. Note the handwritten note at the bottom, indicating that a hearing was held at 3pm Saturday afternoon.

gawker media order

[Image credit: sskennel]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101120/gawker-yanks-palins-book-excerpt-after-court-order/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101120/sarah-palin-sues-gawker-over-book-excerpt-you-havent-read/ http://allthingsd.com/20101120/sarah-palin-sues-gawker-over-book-excerpt-you-havent-read/#comments Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:04:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26114 Want to read parts of Sarah Palin’s biography before it’s officially released? Head over to Gawker, which has been displaying excerpts from the book since Thursday.

That’s despite the fact that Palin’s publisher HarperCollins filed a lawsuit yesterday against Gawker Media, citing copyright infringement. The post in question is still up there for anyone to read. Palin’s new book,  “America By Heart”, will be officially released Tuesday. [UPDATE: It's gone now, following a federal injunction].

I’m not sure what legal case HarperCollins can make here. Pre-publication book leaks are exceedingly common, and happen most often because news organizations simply buy the books, from stores, before their official release date.

HarperCollins’ statement, via spokeswoman Erin Crum: “We believe that the reprinting of pages from Governor Palin’s book without permission constitutes a blatant infringement of copyright. HarperCollins sent a cease and desist letter to Gawker, which was ignored. Accordingly, HarperCollins has filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York to stop the infringement and to protect our legal rights in the content of the book.”

Gawker hasn’t explained how it acquired the excerpts, but it’s not the only place you can find bits of the book on the Web. Gawker has published a response to the lawsuit, titled “Sarah Palin is Mad At Us for Leaking Pages From Her Book”.

I’ve asked both Gawker for comment. Harper Collins is owned by News Corp. as is this Web site.

Legal issues aren’t new for Gawker Media, which often angers people with its provocative and popular posts. What’s different here is that the Palin book has attracted very little attention, at least by the published metrics that Gawker displays next to each post: As of Saturday morning, the excerpts had attracted a mere 52,000 views.

That’s pretty small beans by Gawker standards. A piece published Friday, for instance, which purports to detail John Travolta’s “secret sex life”, has nearly double the traffic, at 90,000 views.

And those numbers really pale in comparison to Gawker posts that have generated legal threats. Last year, for instance, the company published a sorta-sex tape featuring actors from “Grey’s Anatomy” that generated 3.5 million views.

And most famously, a post showing off Apple’s stolen/lost iPhone4 prototype generated more than 13 million views this year. In that incident, police seized a Gawker Media employee’s property, but have yet to charge Gawker with a crime.

But it’s worth noting that Gawker eventually settled with the Grey’s Anatomy actors, and pulled the video off its site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101120/sarah-palin-sues-gawker-over-book-excerpt-you-havent-read/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20101011/nick-dentons-new-yorker-profile-the-video-version-bonus-one-paragraph-version-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20101011/nick-dentons-new-yorker-profile-the-video-version-bonus-one-paragraph-version-too/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:30:39 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24331 The New Yorker‘s new profile of Nick Denton isn’t behind the magazine’s pay wall. So when you have time, you should read the whole thing. It’s good!

If you’re in a hurry, though, you can get a good sense of Denton, at least in present tense, via this clip. It’s an abridged version of my onstage chat with the Gawker Media founder at an Interactive Advertising Bureau event last month, and the editors have done a nice job of distilling it down to seven minutes. Bonus for you guys: This thing is so well-edited that I don’t appear in a single frame.

And if you’re in a real hurry, here’s the money quote, which I extracted from Denton by asking him if he thinks what Gawker does is “journalism”:

In the U.S., traditional media has killed itself. And it’s provided a great opportunity for organizations like us, because they have cared too much about the journalism, about the Pulitzers, about the respect of their peers–and too little about the entertainment of their readers.”

If you’re looking for more detail from our talk, which included Denton lavishing praise on Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs but refusing to shed any light on the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 case, check out David Kaplan’s summary at PaidContent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101011/nick-dentons-new-yorker-profile-the-video-version-bonus-one-paragraph-version-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101007/naked-brett-favre-wont-make-money-for-nick-denton/ http://allthingsd.com/20101007/naked-brett-favre-wont-make-money-for-nick-denton/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:27:02 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24243 Gawker Media’s Deadspin sports site says it will publish nude photos of Brett Favre today, along with some voicemails it says the quarterback left for a woman who is not his wife.

Which means that corner of Deadspin is going to be very, very popular today.

As well as unprofitable, says Gawker Media owner Nick Denton.

“These things are always money-losers,” Denton says via IM, before referring me to Gawker Media marketing director Erin Pettigrew for more.

But while I wait for her to get back to me, I can make some educated guesses to explain why lots of traffic won’t mean lots of money for Denton today.

• It’s hard to serve ads into traffic spikes. Or at least that’s what Denton always says about his most popular posts, like the iPhone 4 prototype that Gizmodo showed off to Apple’s dismay, or a sorta-sex tape featuring “McSteamy” from “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.
• In this case, Gawker is very likely to serve up the Favre post without any advertising, anyway. When I interviewed Denton onstage at an Advertising Week event last week, I asked him specifically about how advertisers feel about “athlete dong” photos, which his readers love. His answer, in short, was that advertisers are understandably squeamish about this stuff, and can opt out of posts that contain it in advance. Have to assume this is one of those cases.

Requisite to-be-sure: Denton runs a for-profit business, and he won’t run athlete dong photos or anything else unless he can make money doing it.

So while those individual pageviews that the post generates won’t make him money, those visitors may well end up visiting other, dong-free posts on Gawker sites today, which will have ads.

And of course, the post will give Gawker and Deadspin that much more publicity, as mainstream media outlets that would never stoop to running athlete dong photos find time to talk about the site that did. (Cough.)

UPDATE: Sure enough, both the Favre post and the rest of Deadspin are currently ad-free. Via e-mail, Erin Pettigrew explains why that’s so:

In the case of major ad/edit adjacency issues such as this, we have a cadre of tech tools to handle the display conflict. Usually the decision is made to prevent ads from showing next to NSFW or similarly questionable content and then the tech solution is put into place to effect that immediately after. The tech tools range from removing ads on a per-post basis to scanning post content for particular topics against which we can negatively target ads.

If the adjacency affects takeovers and sponsorships where ad inventory cannot be otherwise rerouted, we communicate the scenario upfront to the client and involve them in the decision-making. The same tech solutions then apply.

It’s the classic airplane ad next to an airliner crash scenario for which publishers need to develop contingencies. For this particular scoop, the decision was indeed to clean the Favre post pages of ads.

I saw your note about spikes — you are correct that we aren’t able to instantly match ad demand to the surge of inventory supply caused by traffic spikes. This is because our inventory is 100% directly sold versus hawked by real time auction marketplaces. More pageviews does not directly equal more dollars! Also, note that our ad bookings close weeks to months before creative hits the websites. So, unless a spike is ‘scheduled,’ it can’t really be sold.

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