Highschool 2.0

Hope Dave, a commenter from TechCrunch, doesn’t mind me borrowing that, that’s what he called this post on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington, Blogger Wars: How Jason Calacanis Gets Even. This kind of reminds me of some YouTube videos I have seen recently, well she said and he said and she said, yadda, yadda, yadda, but I think this is kind of the nature of things sometimes on the Internet. I think everyone says things differently online, everyone is quicker to say something than they would be face to face, you can see it in forums and chat rooms everywhere, and now, even with the “A-listers”.

Nick Denton (pictured left) likes to use his blog Valleywag to take shots at competitors - his most recent hit job was on [tag]Jason Calacanis[/tag] (on right), who founded and then cashed out of the blog network Weblogs, Inc. Denton has always played second fiddle to Jason, never quite achieving the same level of success. Many say this is because he can’t handle it when his writers get more attention than he does, and he finds subtle ways of undermining them. His recent firing and public trashing of writer Nick Douglas certainly lends credibility to this rumor. Source: TechCrunch

It started with this post from Nick Denton, called “Netscape: the Calacanis effect” where he said Jason was just leaving because it was a good time, that he was killing Netscape and that traffic had dropped 70%.

Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m page views. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m page views.

Calacanis has resigned from AOL ostensibly out of loyalty to Miller, and, having founded Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc., he probably also has several startup ideas. Part of the truth, for sure. Valleywag’s more cynical theory: he messed up Netscape.com, and used Miller’s departure as cover. Source: ValleyWag

Jason’s response? To talk up one of Nick’s best bloggers, Gina Trapani from LifeHacker, describing how he had tried every two months for a year to hire her away, but it was never enough. He described how she has grown the site and how he figured the site made a million a year. Obviously, he is trying to cause some friction there, and either get her asking for more money, or other companies offering her more money to jump ship.

The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.

Gina is the Peter Rojas/Ryan Block of software… for real. Source: Calacanis.com

I say the hell with the bullshit, lets just talk some bullshit, get away from the attacks and back to some technology stuff. Wonder what’s on techmeme?

Added: Just saw this post on Scripting.com, in which he says Arrington is being challenged be Valleywag, which Nick has already admitted, and that this is a shot because of it.

And Mike, isn’t it good that Nick is focusing on business instead of the salacious stuff? Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the bathroom at a conference and not worry about whether your sanitary habits might appear in Valleywag (true or not). Maybe Mike is protesting because the new Valleywag is getting a little close to TechCrunch? Nahh, couldn’t be.

Note that Nick has more or less said he’s aiming Valleywag at TechCrunch. So when Mike gives Nick grief for challenging a competitor well, Mike ought to be careful about that, because he appears to be doing the same thing. Source: Scripting.com

I guess it doesn’t really matter to me whether all these guys like each other or not, I’ll be reading the good stuff and passing over the rest.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels November 2006

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