Used to be that most of their fulminations generally went unanswered, because:

1) Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera generally keeps to himself, at least in the physical world.

2) Rivera created Techmeme using an algorithm that was supposed to automatically suss out which stories were most important, using a link-based hierarchy similar to Google’s (GOOG).

But dudes who are still unhappy with Techmeme (and yes, I mean dudes; with a couple rare exceptions that prove the rule–hello, boss–this is unfortunately a Man’s Man’s Man’s World) have someone they can vent at/to. Meet Megan McCarthy, the former Valleywag writer Rivera hired late last year to add a human’s touch to the site. Headline for his blog post announcing the move: “Guess what? Automated news doesn’t quite work.”

That doesn’t mean that Techmeme has abandoned the algorithm–just that Rivera wants McCarthy tweaking the site and making sure that important/useful/interesting stories bubble up. Or that’s their argument, anyway. Sounds right to me.

If you’re at South by Southwest this weekend, you can chat McCarthy up yourself–she’s the very tall, very pleasant woman who seems to know an awful lot of people. Or you can watch this clip, where she bravely agreed to let me hold a Flip camera in front of her face.

Important (at least to some people) addendum to my interview: When I argue that Rivera “favors” certain kinds of coverage, I mean just that–that he’s more interested in, say, Web 2.0 news than he is in gadget coverage, and that he’s set up Techmeme to reflect that.

That seems to be the lesson in a flap between the paper and Newser, an aggregation site whose motto is “Read Less, Know More.” Newser, which links to and summarizes work from news sources from around the Web, routinely uses a logo from the source site as a visual shorthand. See example below.

If you clicked on the image, you’d find a Newser page with a two-paragraph summary of the Times story; the summary cites the paper and links back to the original article. Not good enough, according to a letter the paper’s legal department sent to Newser earlier this month.

Newser co-founder Michael Wolff sums up the paper’s complaint in a post he published today:

It seems that the Times doesn’t want us using an itsy-bitsy T logo to identify the Times as one of our sources. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of media oranizations we link to at Newser only the Times has raised this as an issue. Given its perilous financial state, you’d think the Times should surely be spending its money on solving other problems.”

What Wolff doesn’t mention: The Times also complained about his use of one of its photos, says spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. “We asked Newser to take down a photograph that they took from NYTimes.com, without permission (and misattributed) and we have asked them not to use our gothic ‘T’ logo,” Mathis says via email. “While we appreciate Newser linking to Times articles, we need to protect the use of our trademarks, such as the gothic ‘T.’”

Wolff says the letter he received was from Deborah Beshaw, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as an administrative assistant at the Times. He wouldn’t forward me a copy, but described it as legal boilerplate warning that the Times would “pursue all available remedies, both criminal and civil” unless Newser stopped using the logo.

It’s tempting to turn this into a bigger think piece about the nature of aggregation sites, the “link-based economy” and the suit the New York Times Co. (NYT) recently settled with GateHouse Media, which accused it of violating GateHouse’s copyright when the Times Co.’s Boston.com site linked to GateHouse sites.

But if this is really just about a photo and a logo, then there’s less fire than smoke here.

Even Wolff, who understands the value of a good headline as much as anyone, admits as much, saying that he’ll stop using the Times logo–if that’s what the Times really wants. “I could care less about their logo.” he says. “I would be perfectly willing to replace it with a skull and cross bones.”

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.

This is the second time Denton has folded up one of his sites and tucked it into his Gawker flagship–last fall he did the same thing with Valleywag, his Silicon Valley gossip title.

Given that Denton had previously put Defamer up for sale, it’s not a stretch to conclude that there wasn’t a ravenous appetite for a standalone Hollywood gossip site with decent if declining traffic (Quantcast puts Defamer’s monthly unique visitors at one million. I had previously looked at Gawker Media’s own stat page and concluded that February traffic was down from a year ago, but Denton points out that February isn’t over yet–which means that this week’s Oscar traffic should boost those numbers a bit).

Denton’s spin: “Ultimately, the brand was worth more to us–as a section of the Gawker site.” Gawker Media is now down to nine sites, from a high of 15.

The big picture: Web publishers are increasingly trying to aggregate eyeballs at fewer sites, in order to cater to marketers who want to buy one title instead of spreading their dollars around at smaller pubs.

Denton’s post explaining the move is here. Money quote: “Fortunately, the three Defamer writers have decent employment prospects even amid the great media die-off–a testament to their talents.”

And here’s the take from one of the writers, Seth Abramovitch, who’s still working at the site for a week. Abramovitch and his soon-to-be former co-workers will be liveblogging the Oscars tonight.

Time Inc. boss Ann Moore made her case for the survival of magazines, and in a broader sense, traditional media: If they don’t make it, who’s going to do the work to get hard-to-find information?

If she’d just waited a few weeks, she could have saved herself some trouble and simply handed everyone she met a copy of today’s New York Observer, which has a great story about the story behind the Alex Rodriguez/steroids story that her own Sports Illustrated broke on Saturday.

Per the Observer’s John Koblin, here’s some of what SI reporter Selena Roberts (pictured above) went through to get the story:

• Roberts started on the story at least four months ago, when she was assigned a general profile of the Yankees superstar.
• By January, Roberts and colleague David Epstein were confirming rumors that Rodriguez’s name had surfaced in a 2003 drug test. They eventually cobbled together four different sources to confirm their story.
• Last week, Roberts flew from New York to Miami to confront Rodriguez directly. After an encounter with a security guard and the Miami police, she drove by his house, then tracked him down at a local gym.
• After getting a “no comment” from the player, she conferred with her editors, and the SI team then spent another 48 hours dotting i’s and crossing t’s before publishing.

It’s a neat tale, and one the folks at Time Warner (TWX) should be proud of. And it’s a good counterpoint to pundits who assure us that one day soon in the brave new world, old media gatekeepers like SI will be replaced by the collective wisdom of the Web. Because the last time I checked, crowd-sourcing didn’t pay for months of reporting, flights to Miami, a team of lawyers, etc.

Could a dogged individual, working without a net, have gotten this story? Theoretically. And some bloggers working primarily with crowd-sourced tips have done some great work, too–see the great work that  Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo did on the Justice Department/Attorney General scandal last year. And, just to knock down that straw man–big media, armed with all sorts of resources, does get all sorts of stuff wrong, as the New York Times has admitted on a couple of occasions now.

But look at how much work Roberts and SI had to invest in tracking down what in the end isn’t a story that’s truly important, in a State-of-the-Union sense of the word. Now think about how much work it takes to suss out answers to much less sexy but more crucial questions, about, say, the way our government works.

I still don’t think that Moore’s argument–that these publications will survive because we need them to–will pan out. And I worry that only a small slice of us will get good info about important stuff. But when that day comes, I hope someone will have created a free Web archive of reporting like Roberts’s story, so that the rest of us can get a sense of what we’re missing.

You owe me. I had to get off my sickbed today to call David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, and ask him if he really was in talks to sell his company to Yahoo (YHOO), as you reported today on Gawker/Valleywag. For the record, David says your report is “categorically untrue.”

I’d spend more time discussing it, but, as I said, I’m feeling under the weather. And your story is not true. So here’s what Karp has to say via his Tumblr account.

And here’s what Marco Arment, who helped start Tumblr with Karp a couple of years ago, says:

And here’s what venture capitalist Bijan Sabet, whose Spark Capital helped raise a $4.5 million round for Tumblr last year, says via his Twitter account:

Now I’m going to return to my convalescing. Please give me a break for another day or so.

[Image Credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

Denton wouldn’t comment on the sale of Consumerist, an advocacy site with attitude that he put on the block last month. And he would only confirm that Defamer, his attempt to break into Hollywood coverage, is for sale.

But I’m told that Consumerist may have fetched something in the “mid-six figure range,” and that a logical buyer for Defamer would be BuzzNet, the pop culture blog network that picked up Denton’s Idolator music site earlier this year.

When the Defamer sale is complete, Denton will have nine blogs left, down from a high of 15. He has also laid off staff, reduced compensation and is trying to force vendors to cut their fees–and generally followed most of the playbook he published this fall in his “doom-mongering” memo.

Last month, Denton boasted about record revenues. But he says that December sales are poor–as they have been across much of the Web world.

UPDATE: Here’s a comment from Nick, who objects to my use of the verb “shrink” in my first paragraph. He suggests “prune” as an alternative: “The six sites we’ve put up for sale or merged this year represent about a tenth of our total page views. Our core properties–Gizmodo, Gawker, Kotaku, Jezebel, Lifehacker, io9, Fleshbot, Jalopnik and Deadspin–make up for that in about two months of growth.” And he notes that Gawker Media pageviews are up 67 percent, to 259 million, in November, according to Quantcast.

Editors’ Note: December 22, 2008
Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.

We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.

We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.”

Expect this story to generate a lot of new media rulz! from the blogosphere. But you can file that in the same place you put the “Twitter is like a news wire, only better!” arguments. I’m just glad the Times can afford to have a staff big enough to verify the authenticity of every letter it prints. And I worry that this won’t be the case in the near future.

Theoretical questions no longer. At least for people who visit New York’s Lower East Side for the next few days.

That’s where Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s crazily successful gadget blog, has set up a gallery of odd, cool and awesome stuff. For a very limited time–it opened on Thursday and it runs through this Sunday.

Head Gizmodo geek Brian Lam gave me a tour of the gallery yesterday, and it’s great fun: In addition to the iPhone prototype, there’s a handful of other cool things from Apple (AAPL), including a 20th anniversary edition Mac and a prototype of an Apple Tablet machine that never saw the light of day.

So if you’re at all interested in gadgets, or the people who are, drop on by 151 Orchard Street. It’s free, but they’re happy to accept Toys For Tots donations (which also qualifies you for some cool giveaways).

If you can’t make it, you can see still images on Brian’s site, or you can check out my first attempt at Web video-making with the mandatory All Things Digital Flip camera. I’ve added a few subtitles to compensate for the fact that Brian is soft-spoken and the dudes playing “Call of Duty” in the gallery were loud. The fact that the camera is shaky and that the camera-holder says “awesome” a lot is entirely my fault.

[Image Credit: Gizmodo]

This is now clockwork: Some kind of calamity happens somewhere. Shortly after, an Internet debate breaks out about who did a better job of breaking and/or covering the story–citizen journalists/bloggers or boring old mainstream media.

The new variation on an old theme: Does Twitter constitutes a “news” source?

If you want to read about that at length, be my guest–there’s plenty over at Techmeme. But Dave Winer has summed it up pretty well in a couple of words:

What you see on Twitter, when: 

1. People witness events that others are interested in; and 

2. They’re posting about it on Twitter; and 

3. The interested people are reading their posts… 

It certainly is news. Whether it’s journalism or not isn’t a very interesting discussion, to me. 

To the user, both extremes, Twitter and the most vetted pro news, require skepticism. The reader triangulates”

The Indian police, meanwhile, seemed to take Twitter seriously, at least according to the Times “Lede” blog, which reported that cops asked that both reporters and Tweeters “do not discuss their movements, because they are concerned that the terrorists in the Taj and Oberoi Hotels are watching television to monitor the situation.”

What I haven’t seen on the blogosphere–or any news outlet–is a reasoned and thoughtful discussion of why India is seemingly beset with terror attacks. But I don’t expect to read or hear that a day after a news event, in any medium, because that’s not fast-twitch material.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what actual Twitter users are actually saying about the Mumbai attacks, head over here (even though Twitter spent some $15 million buying a search engine, it makes its search function inexplicably hard to find).

From what I can see, at this point Twitter is basically a good place to find quick links to other people’s coverage of the event, but maybe I’m missing something. (Click on image to enlarge)

[Image Credit: Stuti, which seems to have lifted the image from NDTV India]

It is hard to call this a layoff since I’m not an employee of the Times and I will likely still contribute to the paper occasionally. Yet I have been feeling a lot like someone who has been laid off. For starters, I have tried to build a narrative based on the little information that was shared with me by my editors, who have told me they were nearly as surprised as I was about this decision. As in a layoff, the decision was made in response to the economic realities of the media industry, which is a polite way of saying that newspapers are in difficult financial shape.”

The Times (NYT) had a round of layoffs/buyouts earlier in the year, but last month Executive Editor Bill Keller told his troops he would try very hard not to cut anyone else. It seems increasingly clear that Keller will struggle to make good on that pledge, given the Times’s deteriorating  financial picture. But since Alboher wasn’t an actual employee, her canning won’t technically count as a layoff–it just feels like one to her.

The Times has been ramping up its use of columnist/bloggers over the past year, and has brought most of them on as contract workers. I’ve asked the paper if it has made other columnist/blogger cuts recently; no response yet. But it hasn’t made cut any other of its columnist/bloggers, says the NYT’s Catherine Mathis.

As an aside, news of Alboher’s demise reached me via The NYTPicker, which appears to be a month-old blog written by someone who loves the Times so much that they scour the paper each day to write something nasty about it. It’s a sort-of heir to SmarterTimes.com, a now-defunct site that existed solely to point out liberal bias at the paper (its operator, Ira Stoll, moved on to run the now-defunct New York Sun).

Does that sound like something that appeals to you? If so, be warned: NYTPicker won’t be posting for next few days, since its anonymous operator will be traveling to see their folks, who “still subsist on dial-up Internet service.”

Yes, this is the third post I’ve written today about Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, who seems to prefer to get all of his news out at the same time.

But briefly:

• Denton has put Consumerist, his, um, pro-consumer site, up for sale.
• Denton is folding Valleywag, his Gawker-for-techies site, into…Gawker. Editor Owen Thomas will keep his job, and essentially become Gawker’s man in Silicon Valley. Writer Paul Boutin will contribute some stories, but likely fewer.
• Denton has more moves to come. Conveniently, he has provided a playbook for them via his post this morning, in which he spells out what Internet publishers should do in the face of a cratering ad market. Educated guess: If you sell ads for Denton, or work for one of his most successful titles (Gawker, gadget site Gizmodo, videogame site Kotaku), there are decent odds you will get to continue doing so in the future. Everybody else, all bets are off. Then again, that’s the same position that all those with a job in media finds themselves in these days. Cheers!

That’s what Portfolio magazine’s Kevin Maney tried to do last Friday, when he announced that as part of the cutbacks at Condé Nast, he’d no longer be writing his Tech Observer blog.

It had a great lede: “If Tech Observer looks a little sparse from here on, that’s because it is dead.”

But by Monday, Maney’s post had disappeared. Is Maney going to be writing the blog, after all? No, I’m told, he’s not. But Condé’s just not that excited about telling people that, especially since it may try to keep a small crew of bloggers working on the magazine’s site even after it fires the majority of the staff.

Luckily, I still happened to have a browser window open with Kevin’s now-vanished goodbye post. Here’s the full text:

Oct 31 2008   7:50PM  EDT
The End of This Blog

Kevin Maney writes: If Tech Observer looks a little sparse from here on, that’s because it is dead.

Some of you may have already seen the news that almost all of Portfolio.com’s staff is getting cut, and the site will be reformulated as something less costly and ambitious. As part of that, my contract to do this blog has been terminated.

I’ve enjoyed being here. To quote Douglas Adams: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

If you’re in the Bay Area, come see our band play on Dec. 2 at the charity event Silicon Valley Rocks. Or buy our CD, Privacy. Perhaps you can help me leave journalism to become a rock star. (You know, I’m looking for a profession with more job security…)

Next fall, keep an eye out for my book, to be published by Doubleday. At the moment it’s titled, The Fidelity Swap: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t.

And I’ll still be writing for Portfolio magazine … and hoping the economy gets fixed. Soon. Really soon.

Take care.

Kevin”

Unfortunately, it’s almost certain that we’re going to be seeing a lot more goodbye posts over the next few months. The silver lining is that sometimes people write really good stories as they’re being fired. Not sure I’d be up for writing one myself, but I sure do appreciate reading good stories.

Here’s the best one I can recall: Seth Mnookin’s report on the end of his job at Brill’s Content/Inside.com, from way, way back in October 2001. I scoured the Web looking for this one but couldn’t find it, and ultimately asked Seth for help.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one; I think this story is now a bit legendary. And Seth turned out just fine–fancy jobs, big deal books–so this tale has a happy ending. Here’s hoping this era’s layoff stories turn out the same way.

[Image Credit: Shht!]