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I Think ValleyWag Likes BMW Graffiti Drawing Contest, I Think

Hey, thanks, ValleyWag!

If it makes you uncomfortable to read mention of FM on ValleyWag without middle-fingers raised in the Battelle Salute, here you go.

Brazell’s Battelle Salute

FM’s Bill Brazell demonstrating Battelle Salute.

More on the BMW 1-Series Graffiti contest in Facebook here.

Digg Accelerates Conversation, Ars Technica Starts It

According to analysis by Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica is the source of 87 front page Digg stories in the past 30 days, making Ars the top source for Digg conversations. Gizmodo and Engaget are close behind, filling out the top three. TechCrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are other FM sites in the top ten. These are the brands that start the conversations, while Digg spreads the conversation to a much wider audience.

Ars Logo

Techmeme’s Leaderboard does a similar analysis of sites-of-origin for stories tracked by its service. For the past 30 days, the top ten (in order) is TechCrunch, CNET, Engadget, NY Times, Ars Technica, ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, WSJ, The Register, and PaidContent.

Techmeme Leaderboard

Gawker Loses Half Editorial Staff

From NY Times:

“In a posting Friday afternoon, Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too. Gawker’s three remaining staff members were all hired within the last three months.”

More interesting to me is why:

“Ms. Gould, who has been with Gawker for a year, said she was upset about a new compensation system that pays writers according to how many times people view their blog posts rather than only by how many posts they write. The system, she said, pits writers against one another. ‘It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,’ Ms. Gould said. ‘You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.’”

Here, for example, is the image that usually accompanies coverage of rumors related to FM — FM’s founder and CEO, John Battelle, giving the Battelle Salute, taken sometime in the late 1990s:

Battelle Salute