Young enlightened Egyptian bloggers write about their society's sex code, racism, bigotry, and lust after scandals - all in an attempt to make Egypt a better place to live in.

An Egyptian Citizen wonders where this country is heading:

بجد مش تهريج البلد دي رايحة على Ùين انا مش هتكلم عن سوزان تميم ولا عن مقتل ابنة ليلى غÙران انا هتكلم عن العن٠الي بقى موجود ÙÙŠ المجتمع اية دة Ùˆ كمان اخلاقيات الناس اتغيرت Ùˆ معدتش Ùية احترام لا لقناون ولا الانسان … الناس الي بتعلق ÙÙŠ المواقع الاخبارية بقى عندهم حقد طبقى ÙÙŠ المجتمع Ùˆ الÙقراء ÙÙŠ مصر بيجمعو كل الاغنياء على انهم حرامية Ùˆ انتهازين Ùˆ خونة Ùˆ بيحللو ان واحد يسرق. دة غير اية العن٠الي موجود ÙÙŠ المدارس اكتر من جريمة ÙÙŠ مدارس ÙÙŠ خلال شهر بين ضرب Ùˆ قتل هو احنا بقينا ÙÙŠ غابة ولا اية الواحد كمان مبقاش يمشي ÙÙŠ الشارع امن احسن يخا٠حد يطلع علية Ùˆ يسبتة بمطوة Ùˆ لما يروح يشتكي ÙÙŠ القسم مش بعيد الشرطة تلÙقلة تهمة ولا تعذبة دة غير ان الناس خلاص مش مستحملين بعض Ùˆ ماسكين على التاني كلمة او غلطة Ùˆ دة باين ÙÙŠ اشارة المرور اوي Ùˆ حتى الناس المتطرÙين ماسكين على اي واحد كلمة Ùˆ يقلبوها لطائÙية Ùˆ اعمال عن٠و يحللو اراقة الدم Ùˆ بيستغلو المظاهر Ùˆ بيحكمو على الناس بالمظهر الديني بجد الواحد مبقاش عار٠البلد دي رايحة على Ùين Ùˆ مين المسئول عن الكلام دة كلة اكيد مش الحكومة وحدها Ùˆ الشعب بردو مسئوول I am not joking; I am seriously asking where is this country heading? I will not talk about the murders of singer Suzan Tamim or daughter of singer Laila Ghofran. I will talk about the mushrooming aggression in our society. People's ethics have changed for now people respect neither law nor human beings … those who leave comments of news sites have revealed lifelong grudges against the more affluent segments of the society. The poor have unanimously agreed that the rich are thieves and they are worth mugging. Add to that, violence in schools in the previous month range from severe beatings to murder. Do we live in a jungle? One fears being held up in a street. One fears reporting an incident to the police for a bigger fear of being implicated in a crime one did not commit. Look at your neighbor in a traffic light and see how he is picking a fight .. we lost our tolerance. We no longer know where we are heading and who is responsible for this - definitely it is not the government single-handed … the people are equally responsible.

Lobna Khairy attempted to define the Egyptian Sex Code saying:

In almost every country there happens to be 2 taboos; politics and religion. But in Egypt and some Arabian countries, we couldn’t settle for less than 3; politics, religion and sex!

#1: The porn denial - Parents do not believe that their kids get their sexual education from porn

#2: Men - decent men who have no prior experience will not satisfy a woman

#3: Women - decent women who understand how babies are made are indecent

#4: Only a manly need - women do not need sex

#5: Milk him - to keep him

Denoting that sex is all that occupies their mind and hence if you want to keep your man, you better fulfill his physical appetite excessively or else he’ll be running down the streets searching for other women who can! How degrading is this for both males and females?

Mona Eltahawy reveals the Arab world's dirty secret when she tells a tale of racism:

I was on my way home on the Cairo Metro, lost in thought as I listened to music when I noticed a young Egyptian taunting a Sudanese girl. She reached out and tried to grab the girl’s nose and mouth and laughed when the girl tried to brush her hand away.

The Sudanese girl looked to be Dinka, from southern Sudan and not the northern Sudanese who “look like us”. She looked black African and was obviously in distress.

I removed my headphones and asked the Egyptian woman “Why are you treating her like that?”

She exploded into a tornado of yelling, demanding to know why it was my business. I told her it was my business because as an Egyptian and as a Muslim who was riding the Metro, her behaviour was wrong and I would not stay silent about it. I knew she was Muslim because she wore a scarf.

I told her that the way she was treating the Sudanese girl made the scarf on her head meaningless. Her mother asked me why I didn’t cover my hair and I replied that I didn’t want to be a hypocrite like her and her daughter.

As distressing as I found that young woman’s behaviour, I was even more distressed that the other women in the Metro car with us watched passively and said nothing. They made no attempt to defend the Sudanese girl nor to defend me when I confronted the Egyptian woman.

The racism I saw on the Cairo Metro has an echo in the Arab world at large where the suffering in Darfur goes ignored for two main reasons – firstly because its victims are black people and we don’t about those with dark skins and secondly because those who are creating the misery in Darfur are not Americans or Israelis and we only pay attention when America and Israel are behaving badly.

My argument on the Cairo Metro was a also a reminder of our double standards. We love to cry “Islamophobia” when we talk about the way Muslim minorities are treated in the West and yet we never stop to consider how we treat minorities and the most vulnerable among us.

For those of us who move between different worlds – where one day we are a majority as I am as a Sunni Muslim in Egypt and another we are a minority as I am as a Muslim in America – it is clear that to defend the rights of a Sudanese girl on the Cairo Metro means to defend my right on the New York Subway.

Insomniac wrote about bigotry hidden under thick layers of religious and liberal pretenses saying:

Coming from a religiously conservative family, I was brought up to take extra pride in my faith, even though I did not necessarily understand it enough to practice it properly. Almost everyone in my family (from both sides) has a meaningful name influenced by religion.

Until college, I used to go by my first name and my father’s middle name. That combination made my name sound perfectly neutral; people couldn’t guess my religion and accordingly treated me cautiously in fear of offending me.

Until I got veiled!

I was confronted by how cruel society can be, judging people by their looks. I realized that my neutral name and non-significant appearance shielded me from awkward moments. I realized it was a blessing having been treated with extra caution!

And no, it’s not the expected group of people who judged me, whatever that is. Against the general assumption, I travelled to the US the next summer, and I barely had any troubles because of my veil. Average Americans, aside from the “notorious” political agenda (which is not up to me to support or condemn), do not judge people based on their looks the way people do in Egypt (and perhaps the Middle East). We are such racists and bigots and the sad part is that we hide it under thick layers of fake religiousness and liberalism which we barely practice when unwatched.

Please meet those who judge me...

- Strictly religious Muslims who consider what I wear not hijab, and expect me to dress more modestly, and
- Pseudo-Liberals, either Christians or Muslims who seem to be very appalled by my veil!

Now I won’t go defending my choice or my religion because I don’t think those who judge me or my likes would either understand or appreciate what I have to say. All I can say is “SHAME ON YOU”, both parties.

I find both parties hypocrites, who miserably fail practicing what they preach and give their causes a horrible horrible names.

It used to hurt and offend me when I felt mistreated because of my veil, but then I realized something; it’s a unique way of blocking all the fakers and pretenders who can’t handle but judge me based on my appearance rather than my personality. To those people, I say it’s really your loss, touché!

Ahmed El Sabbagh wrote about the dishonest keyboard:

مطلوب لأعلى سعر كيبورد غير شريÙØ© تصلح لسب الأصدقاء والإبداع ÙÙ‰ تألي٠إتهامات باطلة والقيام بتلميحات قذرة وكتابة تعليقات مجهولة ØŒ ويشترط ان تكون متواÙقة للعمل مع مدوّن متÙرغ لإصطياد أخطاء الغير ØŒ وتألي٠قصص خيالية قذرة ووإشعال الÙتن ØŒ ودس السموم بين البشر
حيث لوحظ إن الكيبورد التى أمتلكها “بتستعبط” ولا تواÙÙ‚ على كتابة كلمات قذرة ØŒ وبها حرو٠معطوبة مثل حر٠القا٠والـذين والأل٠والراء والتاء المربوطة ØŒ وكلما حاولت كتابة كلمة قذرة بتÙصل باور والزراير بتعلق وبتعمل حركات قرعة وقد قمت بمحاولة شراء عدة كيبوردات وكلها بها Ù†Ùس العيب وقمت بإستبدالها أكثر من مرة ØŒ وظننت أن جميع الكبيوردات المتوÙرة حالياً من النوع الشريÙ

حاولت إصلاح الكيبورد ÙÙ‰ أحد محلات الصيانة Ùنظر لى Ùنى الصيانة شزراً وقال
دى موش معيوبة .. روح إتعلم القذارة وهى تشتغل زى الÙÙ„ .. عشان ده عيب يوزر

 

Wanted for the highest bidder: A dishonest keyboard that would come in handy when offending friends, getting creative in making up scandalous stories, posting dirty innuendos, and leaving anonymous comments. It has to be compatible with a full-time blogger whose sole business is finding fault with what other people write. It has to support him in his fire-starting filth-throwing poison-spreading mission.
The keyboard that I currently own plays games with my mind and refuses to type dirty words and every time I attempt to write one of those words it shuts down or hangs up leaving me at a loss for words. I tried buying several keyboards but they all seem to be similarly flawed - guess they only sell honorable keyboards nowadays.
I tried to get it fixed in one of the maintenance shops … the technician glared at me with anger and said “work on your dirty skills and it will work like a clock; this is a user error!”

Last but not least, Fantasia's World wrote about the qualifications of a scandal in the Egyptian media:(...)

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/new-google-reader.png" width="800" height="515" style="display:block;float:none;" /The Official Google Reader Blog announces a handful of changes to Google Reader today, most notably in the form of a visual refresh designed to bring a more streamlined look and feel to Google's popular newsreader. That means less visual clutter, more space, and a softer, less saturated skin. Beyond that, the new Reader update adds collapsible navigation to each section of the sidebar, improved options for sharing items with friends, and the option to hide unread counts for any section of readermdash;like your friends' shared items. As a final (and probably least exciting) addition, Google has created more feed bundles for subscribing to a topic en masse (e.g., music blogs, Nascar, etc.). Keep reading for more detailed screenshots of the new features./p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Collapsible Navigation/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/collapsible-nav.png" width="266" height="230"br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"Hide Unread Counts/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/hide-unread.png" width="258" height="165"br clear="all"/p h3 style="font-size: 120%; margin-top: 20px;"New Feed Bundles/h3 pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/feed-bundles.png" width="756" height="343" style="display:block;float:none;" /br clear="all" br We're not seeing the update on our accounts yet, so if you're in the same boat you're likely to see it on yours within the next few days. Still not happy with the simplified Google Reader? Try a href="http://lifehacker.com/5100555/helvetireader-facelifts-google-reader"recently mentioned Helvetireader/a for another minimalist Reader skin./p div class="related"a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/12/square-is-new-round.html"Square is the new round./a [Official Google Reader Blog]/div br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=7632ae6731f73eca84238e7d285e433dp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=7632ae6731f73eca84238e7d285e433dp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=7632ae6731f73eca84238e7d285e433d" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=uxho7Qau"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=0S0eZJvh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=77Mt9zWH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=77Mt9zWH" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=LNFlO36p"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=LNFlO36p" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/e30nO0GvAS4" height="1" width="1"/

[Musique br /http://www.pcr-rcpcanada.org/common/music/l_appel_du_komintern.mp3] br /Quittez vos machines, br /Dehors, prolétaires, br /Marchez et marchez, br /Formez-vous pour la lutte br /Sites web déployés br /Et les RAM chargées br /Intel cadencé. br /Pour l'assaut, AMD, br /Il faut gagner le Monde, br /Réel et Virtuel. br /L'ADN de nos frères br /Réclame vengeance, br /Plus rien n'arrêtera br /La colère des masses, br /A Londres, à Paris, br /Budapest et Berlin, br /Prenez le pouvoir, br /Facebooks ouvriers, br /Prenez votre revanche, br /IP maquillées. br /Les (...)

Elle n’est peut-être pas capable de contenir un nombre infini de livres mais cette étagère de Platzhalter peut certainement vous aider à contenir plus de livres en s’agrandissant en #8220;V#8221;. Quand l’étagère atteint sa masse critique, le résultat est plutôt intéressant, même si organiser vos livres peut s’avérer problématique. Malheureusement, le design est seulement un concept [...]img width='1' height='1' src='http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/648/f/8318/s/2800dd0/mf.gif' border='0'/div class='mf-viral'table border='0'trtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2_fr.html?title=L’étagère qui se dédoublelink=http://www.gizmodo.fr/2008/12/04/l%e2%80%99etagere-qui-se-dedouble.html" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/partagez.gif" border="0" //a/tdtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark_fr.cfm?title=L’étagère qui se dédoublelink=http://www.gizmodo.fr/2008/12/04/l%e2%80%99etagere-qui-se-dedouble.html" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif" border="0" //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/25853590321/u/49/f/8318/c/648/s/41946576/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/25853590321/u/49/f/8318/c/648/s/41946576/a2.img" border="0"//a

Elle n’est peut-être pas capable de contenir un nombre infini de livres mais cette étagère de Platzhalter peut certainement vous aider à contenir plus de livres en s’agrandissant en "V". Quand l’étagère atteint sa masse critique, le résultat est plutôt intéressant, même si organiser vos livres peut s’avérer problématique. Malheureusement, le ...

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/ford/" rel="tag"Ford/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/autoline-on-autoblog/" rel="tag"Autoline on Autoblog/a/pspan style="font-weight: bold;"FORD REPORT: DIESEL VS. HCCI VS. STRATIFIED CHARGE/spanbr / br / img width="200" vspace="4" hspace="4" height="287" border="1" align="right" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/john-media-photo-3-opta.jpg" alt="" /To hear Ford's CTO tell it, all these painful layoffs and budget cuts going on at the company can actually be beneficial. "It gets you really focused on what's really necessary," says Gerhard Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer at Ford.br / br / Ford now evaluates its Ramp;D efforts by comparing the money it spends to the percentage of fuel economy improvements it gets. "This makes you structure your portfolio for what's really key, not just what's interesting to explore," he says.br / br / So Ford is taking a very safe, but very sound approach to the technology it's developing. And its goal is to make that technology affordable for the masses. "Henry Ford didn't invent the combustion engine," says Schmidt, "but he made it available to everybody."br /br /emJohn McElroy/emem is host of the TV program /emema href="http://www.autolinedetroit.tv/""Autoline Detroit"/a and daily web video a href="http://www.autolinedetroit.tv/journal/?p=981""Autoline Daily"/a. /ememEvery week he brings his unique insights as an auto industry insider to Autoblog readers./empa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/autoline-on-autoblog-with-john-mcelroy/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emAutoline on Autoblog with John McElroy/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/autoline-on-autoblog-with-john-mcelroy/"Autoline on Autoblog with John McElroy/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:32:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/autoline-on-autoblog-with-john-mcelroy/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1391340/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/autoline-on-autoblog-with-john-mcelroy/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/tqmLGVKBG7cm71nl0GF31J_loOU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/tqmLGVKBG7cm71nl0GF31J_loOU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=1YXuSkED"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=1YXuSkED" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=s73DyMZv"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=s73DyMZv" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/_ay4VJSPk1Q" height="1" width="1"/

psmallINQUIRER Newsdesk a href="http://www.theinquirer.net/"the Inquirer/a, Thursday 4 December 2008. 13:18:00/small/ppi Alpha release looks to the future /i/ppOPERA SOFTWARE releases a sneak preview of its web browser Opera 10 today. The release showcases Opera’s new rendering engine, Opera Presto 2.2 which will become the foundation of all future Opera 10 products. The Norwegian company reckons that the new engine offers a 30 per cent faster browsing experience.../pimg width='1' height='1' src='http://feeds.theinquirer.net/c/554/f/7127/s/27f6c82/mf.gif' border='0'/div class='mf-viral'table border='0'trtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=Opera for the masseslink=http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/12/04/opera-masses" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif" border="0" //a/tdtd valign='middle'a href="http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=Opera for the masseslink=http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/12/04/opera-masses" target="_blank"img src="http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif" border="0" //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/25853572129/u/89/f/7127/c/554/s/41905282/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/25853572129/u/89/f/7127/c/554/s/41905282/a2.img" border="0"//a

pDespite not being in working condition, stronga href="http://www.brokenspindles.com/" target="_blank"Broken Spindles/a/strong somehow keep cranking out records at a fairly steady clip. Indeed, stronga href="http://www.thefaint.com/" target="_blank"Faint/a/strong bassist Joel Petersen's electronica-ish side thing has another one just about ready for us: emKiss/Kick/em will descend on the masses February 17 thanks to the Faint's own stronga href="/article/news/50592-the-faint-start-their-own-label-to-release-new-album" target="_blank"recently birthed/a/strong stronga href="http://www.blankwav.com/" target="_blank"blank.wav/a/strong imprint.br /br /Petersen was just getting started on his latest opus when we stronga href="/article/news/41620-joel-petersen-talks-new-faint-album-broken-spindles" target="_blank"talked to him/a/strong way back in the pre-stronga href="/article/record_review/142810-the-faint-fasciinatiion" target="_blank"emFasciinatiion/em/a/strong days of March 2007. At the time he spoke of using "live drums" and making something that sounds "a bit more like a band than an electronic record," and the press release suggests these goals were met. And yes, as expected, emKiss/Kick/em does feature another little dude made out of three-dimensional shapes on the cover (see below). There are few things you can really count on in this life, but little shape dudes on Broken Spindles album covers is one of them.br /br /Joel and the Faint are off in Europe at present, and they'll rock a week's worth of U.S. shows later this month.br /br /img src="/sites/default/files/kisskick.jpg" border="0" /br //ppa href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/node/147907" target="_blank"read more/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QT9aXiZJVqm4aIOElB4fev-xdvw/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QT9aXiZJVqm4aIOElB4fev-xdvw/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pitchfork/today/~4/GW8xj755KL8" height="1" width="1"/

Societe : ISIMEDIA - Lieu de travail : Paris - Type de contrat : CDI - Salaire : à négocier - Detail : Missions Nous recherchons pour l'un de nos clients un analyste-programmeur disposant d'une expérience significative en environnement Microsoft SQL Server. Sous la responsabilité d'un chef de projet, vous aurez pour mission la réalisation de traitements de données en masse. Profil Titulaire d'un diplôme bac + 2 à bac + 5 ; vous disposez d'une première expérience significative de 3 ans minimum. Une bonne connaissance de la création de procédures stockées, du tuning et une forte capacité d'adaptation à un environnement fonctionnel complexe ; ainsi que la maîtrise d'un plan d'exécution et de l'analyseur de requête SQL Server sont demandés. Aisance relationnelle, goût du travail en équipe et capacité d'adaptation sont des qualités essentielles pour réussir à ce poste. Poste Poste en CDI, basé à Paris à pourvoir le plus vite possible. Rémunération : à négocier + tickets restaurant, mutuelle, prévoyance, prime collective d'objectifs et PEE. Postuler Adresser votre candidature par mail à recrutement@isimedia.com sous la référence AP_SQL_RP15_JEUDIS (CV et lettre de motivation au format Microsoft Word).

BRUXELLES Dégager le top 3 des friteries bruxelloises ? Un défi, dans la masse de patates servies dans et autour du Pentagone. Il est cependant d'inaltérables fritkots. Sans prendre le risque de départager ...

A Courville-sur-Eure, un magasin de chasse et de pêche a été cambriolé dans la nuit de mardi à mercredi. La porte d’entrée a été cassée à coups de masse. Plusieurs armes et des munitions ont été volées. L’enquête est en cours.

Phénomène de masse.Sans surprise, la banque d'investissement Merrill Lynch, en train de fusionner avec Bank of America, pourrait réduire de moitié les bonus versés cette année, selon l'agence Bloomberg. La réduction moyenne de ces bonifications serait

!-- 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"/