Blog fight!
: The Denton/Calacanis Gizmodo/Engadget blog fight is picking up steam. Denton yesterday offered a transparent view of what happened. Today, in the comments here, Calacanis pulls a bitchslap in return:
Nick plays down the business of blogs for one reason: to pay people less. Trust me, Nick is not doing blogs just for the fun of it, or because he loves the medium. He is hiring people, putting up tons of google ad words, and spending money on expensive logos for a reason: he wants to make money. If he just wanted to do blogs for fun he would post to his personal blog and not be doing highly targeted, highly- profitable (read: porn and gadget) verticals.
That being said, there is nothing wrong with making this into a business. Who wouldn’t want to work from home blogging and make a living?! Nick is a great businessman and he is going to be very, very successful and I commend him, even if we have different styles.
But the real fight won’t occur at this level (it’s like reporting on a fight to get a new general manager at your TV station… who the hell cares?). The real fight will occur on the products. And Denton is upping the ante there; today, he had Cory Doctorow empty his gadget bag; that kind of original reporting from a lifestyle perspective will make Gizmodo more compelling and readable. Competition is good, eh?
