What do Gadget Weblogs and Bunnies have in common?
Since Peter Rojas left Gawker Media’s Gizmodo to start the EnGadget weblog for Weblogs Inc, there has been some bad blood between the two. The other day I attended CEO Jason Calacanis’s presentation, Monetizing the Blogosphere, at SXSW, and he made several nods to this.
The most entertaining bit was when he said (paraphrasing) "I invited [Gawker’s] Nick Denton to sit on this panel with me, but he declined, so this bunny will be playing the part of Nick." He then conducted a rather comical dialog with the bunny. (See my photo at sxswblog)
The non-bunny parts of the presentation were very entertaining and informative, and all in all it left me with a very good impression about Weblogs Inc. I met Calacanis later, and he was surprisingly down-to-earth. I’m not as optimistic as he is about making money with weblogs, but I make enough money on Web advertising to find Nick Denton’s pessimism hard to believe.