img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/post_image/post_image-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_00.jpg" border="0"br Paris Hilton wants to play a live-action version of Tinkerbell, and Disney is actually considering letting the tower of wonk play the beloved role of Peter Pan's fairy sidekick, according to a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/12042008/gossip/pagesix/paris_tinkers_142561.htm"Page Six/a: blockquoteA source tells us the celebutard is lobbying for the title role in Disney's live-action version of "Tinkerbell," in which the pixie finally gets a chance at life as a real girl. "Paris has worked on her acting chops lately and showed some comedy prowess in her YouTube spoof of running for president," our insider said. "Disney suits saw it and think she may be developing some comedic-actress potential."/blockquote WALT DISNEY: Damn, I can't believe that freezing shit worked. Thanks for thawing me out. EXEC: Our pleasure, sir. We'd like you to meet the new face of Tinkerbell. This is Paris Hilton. PARIS: Hello! Mickey Mouse is hot. WALT: Why does this young woman smell of ham and vinegar? PARIS: My daddy's a billionaire which allowed me to live a promiscuous lifestyle full of unprotected sex and undeserved celebrity status. Tee hee! WALT: *blinks* I want to go back. Put me back! EXEC: Sir, that's the refrigerator. WALT: How do you set this thing to 3000 AD? Is it the broccoli? div style="width: 425px; margin: 0 0 0 30px; padding: 0;"ul style="list-style-type: none; display: block; width: 425px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"li style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_00.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=1" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_01.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=2" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_02.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=3" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_03.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=4" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_04.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=5" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_05.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=6" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_06.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/lili style="display: block; float: left; width: 90px; height: 134px; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px 10px 0;"a href="http://thesuperficial.com/2008/12/paris_hilton_wants_her_own_dis.php?bfm_index=7" style="display: block; width: 90px; height: 134px; background: #CCC; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; padding: 0;"img src="http://cdn.thesuperficial.com//bfm_gallery/2008/12/1204 Paris Hilton Macys/gallery_thumb/gallery_thumb-1204_paris_hilton_fairydust_07.jpg" style="display: block; border: 1px solid #cccccc; width: 88px; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/a/li/uldiv style="clear: left;"/div/div div class = "credit"Photos: a href="http://www.splashnewsonline.com"Splash News/a/div pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/gVB_sJJD94M-PxPwX6pnpvX68wU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/gVB_sJJD94M-PxPwX6pnpvX68wU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thesuperficial/SNxk/~4/RU5tVM-0z3Y" height="1" width="1"/

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=47a93ad44b543772005f81femaxX=140maxY=140" border="0" alt="NBCU.jpg" title="NBCU.jpg" width="140" height="140" /Layoffs at NBC Universal (GE), a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/nbc/nbcu_to_cut_500_jobs_layoffs_begin_at_nbc_news_bureaus_102371.asp"TV Newser reports:/a/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"TVNewser has learned NBC Universal will be cutting up to 500 jobs in a round of layoffs which are now underway at all levels of the company - television, film and parks. That amounts to about 3% of the workforce. An insider with knowledge of the situation says the cuts are expected to continue into next week./p pa href="http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/nbc/nbcu_to_cut_500_jobs_layoffs_begin_at_nbc_news_bureaus_102371.asp"Continue Reading at Media Bistro /a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Va9ANQYHKat3VDIxBZLjTfKPX8o/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Va9ANQYHKat3VDIxBZLjTfKPX8o/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=OAnDIk5j"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=OAnDIk5j" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=dHXi8Q3f"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=bTrnPioN"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=4Ba9puvq"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=4Ba9puvq" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Zn3jMtos"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=spAnRpYq"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=5676hs5L"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=yxmqzKcg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/ZIZYFldV6YI" height="1" width="1"/

Here come the regulators. Insiders have been predicting a gesture of new rules in the wake of the business crisis for a patch now, and proof that they’re correct is eventually surfacing. It comes in the form of the SEC’s new rules governing credit rating agencies — the folks who, backwards in the [...]

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=492ac4b6796c7abf0000e603maxX=300maxY=297" border="0" alt="eliot spitzer happy.jpg" title="eliot spitzer happy.jpg" width="300" height="297" /Five years ago, after a previously-little-known Attorney General named Eliot Spitzer got me kicked out of the securities industry, during a period when I was sure that, among other things, no one would ever be caught dead professionally associating with me again, an editor named Jacob Weisberg at emSlate/em reached out a helping hand. With a big smile, Jacob said he liked the idea of my launching my "comeback" (his word) by covering the Martha Stewart trial for the magazine./p pI've never stopped being grateful to Jacob and his emSlate/em colleagues for that, and over the years, I've had the privilege writing several series and more than a hundred columns for the magazine. Those assignments opened the door to others (including a book on how not to get screwed by Wall Street), and ultimately led me to emSilicon Alley Insider/em. /p pIronically enough, it was also through emSlate/em that I actually got to meet Eliot Spitzer for the first time (I had been near his office before, in 2001, when his prosecutors spent five days grilling me, but I had never actually met the man). A year or so after the Martha Stewart affair, Eliot dropped by a emSlate/em event before launching his run for governor. I met him in the buffet line:/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"strongME/strong: Hi, Eliot, Henry Blodget, good to meet you. You made my life a bit rough there for a while!/p p style="padding-left: 30px;"strongELIOT /strong(3,000-watt smile): That's my job!/p p(Yes, he was charming. I even voted for the bastard.)/p pAnd now I see that a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2205995/"emSlate/em has a new columnist/a: a very well-known ex-Governor named Eliot Spitzer, who has recently had a rough patch of his own. I can imagine Jacob Weisberg's huge grin as he signed up his newest reputationally-challenged charge, and I can imagine Eliot's smile in return. And now that several bizarrely connected twists of fate have placed all three of us on the same team, I can't wait to shake both of their hands./p pI amem definitely /emgoing to the emSlate/em Christmas party this year./p p /p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/SRAEyDJk_Zyq3p6I2p3DsWEe118/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/SRAEyDJk_Zyq3p6I2p3DsWEe118/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=QyQZvVHX"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=QyQZvVHX" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=tOegvvTN"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=KGqEscxh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=phoPq8TI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=phoPq8TI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=VM96QDMS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=BqfDt0VI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=xK9xjLH8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=EcwV1jj0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/K6HALUYaVrc" height="1" width="1"/

Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google Cost Cuts Take The Company Away From Its Engineers (GOOG)  —  Google was never quite the engineer company its public relations and human resources teams made it out to be, but as Google gets serious about cutting costs, that myth of a decentralized company run by its engineers …

Filed under: Online, Meta (about Joystiq), MMO

December is here, and where are WoW players? In Northrend, of course -- a sizable amount of the population has hit 80 already, and the rest of us are scrambling through the new content to join them. In the meantime, WoW Insider continues to have everything you need to know about the world's most popular MMO, from new spec and gear guides to the coolest quests and items on the way up. Here's our most popular posts from the past week. News

• Level 80 Death Knight solos Zul'Gurub
  Even more old content made trivial by a few extra levels and a new class.
• Dual spec update
  A dev updates us on one of the most awaited features in the game right now.
• Ghostcrawler: Wrath's difficulty is where we want it
  Is Wrath too easy? GC says no.
• Four year anniversary pet and feat of strength achievement
  For the game's fourth birthday, we all got a baby bear pet as a gift.
• Wrath of the Lich King breaks internal records at EB Games
  A secret correspondent in the big games retailer snaps a shot of the internal email about how well the expansion did.

Features

• WoW Insider's 2008 holiday gift guide
  Yes, it's that time of year again, so here's a guide that will help find a gift for the WoW player in your life.
• Five old world vanity pets you may have missed
  Everyone's chasing achievements, so if you're trying to get every single noncombat pet out there, here's five you may have missed the first time around.
• A Death Knight's first dungeon: Dos and Don'ts part 1
  How to run your first instance with a new class.
• The Oracles' mysterious egg is a must-get
  We're slowly finding out about some of the cooler rep rewards in Northrend.
• The Queue: Tradeskill bits and pieces
  Our Q&A column answers reader questions about tradeskills. Have one of your own? Ask it in the comments.

The best of WoW Insider: November 25 - December 2, 2008 originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

pFiled under: a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/online/" rel="tag"Online/a, a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/meta-about-joystiq/" rel="tag"Meta (about Joystiq)/a, a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/mmo/" rel="tag"MMO/a/pdiv align="center"img hspace="4" vspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/12/sholazartitan.jpg" /br / div align="left"December is here, and where are emWoW/em players? In Northrend, of course -- a sizable amount of the population has hit 80 already, and the rest of us are scrambling through the new content to join them. In the meantime, a href="http://www.wowinsider.com"WoW Insider/a continues to have everything you need to know about the world's most popular MMO, from new spec and gear guides to the coolest quests and items on the way up. Here's our most popular posts from the past week./div /div h3News/h3 ul lia style="" href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/26/level-80-death-knight-solos-zulgurub/"Level 80 Death Knight solos Zul'Gurub/abr /Even more old content made trivial by a few extra levels and a new class./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/26/dual-spec-update/"Dual spec update/abr /A dev updates us on one of the most awaited features in the game right now./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/29/ghostcrawler-wraths-difficulty-is-where-we-want-it/"Ghostcrawler: emWrath/em's difficulty is where we want it/abr /Is emWrath/em too easy? GC says no./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/22/four-year-anniversary-pet-and-feat-of-strength-achievement/"Four year anniversary pet and feat of strength achievement/abr /For the game's fourth birthday, we all got a baby bear pet as a gift./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/28/wotlk-breaks-internal-records-at-eb-games/"emWrath of the Lich King/em breaks internal records at EB Games/abr /A secret correspondent in the big games retailer snaps a shot of the internal email about how well the expansion did./li /ul h3Features/h3 ul lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/12/02/wow-insiders-2008-holiday-gift-guide/"WoW Insider's 2008 holiday gift guide/abr /Yes, it's that time of year again, so here's a guide that will help find a gift for the emWoW /emplayer in your life./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/29/five-old-world-vanity-pets-you-may-have-missed/"Five old world vanity pets you may have missed/abr /Everyone's chasing achievements, so if you're trying to get every single noncombat pet out there, here's five you may have missed the first time around./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/30/a-death-knights-first-dungeon-dos-and-donts-part-i/"A Death Knight's first dungeon: Dos and Don'ts part 1/abr /How to run your first instance with a new class./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/30/the-oracles-mysterious-egg-is-a-must-get-for-pet-and-mount-coll/"The Oracles' mysterious egg is a must-get/abr / We're slowly finding out about some of the cooler rep rewards in Northrend./li lia href="http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/12/01/the-queue-tradeskill-bits-and-pieces/"The Queue: Tradeskill bits and pieces/abr /Our Qamp;A column answers reader questions about tradeskills. Have one of your own? Ask it in the comments./li /ulp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/03/the-best-of-wow-insider-november-25-december-2-2008/"The best of WoW Insider: November 25 - December 2, 2008/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.joystiq.com"Joystiq/a on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./pp style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"nbsp;/ppa href=http://wowinsider.com/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/03/the-best-of-wow-insider-november-25-december-2-2008/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/forward/1388629/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/03/the-best-of-wow-insider-november-25-december-2-2008/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ooboCd5WfucDwLDCBpiOILQ3NLY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ooboCd5WfucDwLDCBpiOILQ3NLY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=6fDJm3RM"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=6fDJm3RM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=qwRFPooz"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=qwRFPooz" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/Xa3bIz1QVss" height="1" width="1"/

Insider Software has added support for Adobe's Creative Suite 4 and QuarkXPress 8 to its newly released FontAgent Pro 4.0.3. The update specifically includes auto-activation plug-ins for Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator in CS2 through CS4, as well as QuarkXPress versions 6 through 8.0.1. The download also adds support for French and Italian language systems, and detects and installs in the user...

Vista's Service Pack 2 rumoured to be released to manufacturing in April 2009:

From the other side of the world comes a report that Windows Vista Service Pack 2 will be released to manufacturing in April 2009, roughly a year after SP1. The Malaysian website TechARP has a pretty good track record with this sort of prediction, and my sources tell me that schedule sounds about right.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S.A., some people are inferring more Vista doom and gloom from this schedule. My buddy Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle says “SP2 is being rushed out the door” to keep up Vista’s momentum. Eweek’s Channel Insider calls SP2 a “last-ditch attempt to drum up sales for [the] beleaguered [Vista] operating system.” The Register says “Microsoft seems to be in a hurry with this release.”

They all need to dust off their Windows history books to see that the reality is exactly the opposite. If Vista SP2 does make its official appearance in April, it will mark a return to normal development and release cycles for Microsoft, which lost its way badly with Windows XP.

I’ve got the proof, in easy-to-read chart format. Here’s a timeline of every Windows service pack Microsoft has delivered since the release of Windows NT 4.0 in July 1996. Each color-coded bar represents the number of days between each service pack and its predecessor (RTM, in the case of SP1 releases). See any patterns?


As measured by service pack releases, the XP era was a distinct anomaly for Microsoft. Over the past 12 years, Microsoft has delivered 14 Windows service packs. The gap between SP1 and SP2 was a record 697 days, nearly two full years. But that pales in comparison to the gap between SP2 and SP3, which was nearly four years. If we throw out SP3 and also disregard NT4 SP2, which appeared a mere 59 days after its predecessor, we discover that the average gap between service-pack releases is around 300 days, or just under a year apart. If Vista SP2 arrives in mid-April 2009, it will be 355 days since its predecessor, or very close to the historical averages.

In fact, the chart gets even more interesting if you include major updates delivered in formats other than service packs. The expanded chart below paints an interesting picture:


Sometimes these not-quite-a-service-pack updates take the form of “update rollups.” The most noteworthy recent example was Update Rollup 1 for Windows XP, which was released on October 15, 2003, about midway between XP SP1 and SP2. It wasn’t a service pack, but it did offer an easy way to install a year’s worth of security patches on Windows XP without having to download them via Windows Update. (And no, there was no Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP, although Microsoft has used that term for several cumulative updates to the Media Center and Internet Explorer components of XP and Vista.)

Beginning with Windows Vista, Microsoft is using Windows Update to deliver reliability, compatibility, and performance fixes in addition to security patches. For Windows users, this is a new development. Windows XP users never got this type of update, but Vista users were treated to a steady stream of them.

Source - Ed Bott's ZDNet Blog