There's a great interview in Willamette Week about my friend Matt Haughey, who has turned MetaFilter into a successful small business that employs around 3-5 people and gets 25 million hits a month. Haughey, who was one of the founders of Blogger, left Silicon Valley for McMinnville, Ore., several years ago. The interviewer does a nice job of picking up on the phrase "lifestyle business," which is used in the dot-com world to insult startups that make a sustainable amount of money for their staff but don't get ... read more

I'm in Washington D.C. as part of the Long Tail Fly-In, a group of around 60 small web publishers assembled by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media. I attended this event last year and met aides for Reps. Diane DeGette (D-Colo.), Michael Castle (R-Del.), Bill Young (D-Fl.), Charlie Melancon (D-La.) and ... read more

Good news: The social bookmarking site Delicious has been saved from Yahoo's wrecking ball. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired the site for an undisclosed sum. Delicious was founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, an entrepreneur I got to know as a contributor to his early group blog Memepool. Delicious is a free service to organize web bookmarks and share them with others. This was briefly a phenomenon before Facebook and Twitter devoured all other forms of link sharing. New owners Hurley ... read more

I keep comments open forever on Workbench because the old blog entries here occasionally attract some interesting comments in the deluge of spam. A debt collector searching Google on Tuesday for the phrase debt collector sued for doing their job found my story on the $8.1 million judgment against a collector and posted an epic rant. The rant, which I've reprinted in full below, shows that debtor anger and the threat of being sued are getting to these bottom feeders. If you're bothered by calls from debt ... read more

The small comic book publisher Bluewater Productions keeps getting an enormous amount of mainstream media attention for publishing cheezy comics about celebrities and other public figures, like its upcoming biographical book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg: Bluewater Productions Inc. is doing a "giant-sized" 48-page bio-comic that will explore the question, "Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?" The company said it had good success with comics like its "Female Force" series featuring women like Hillary ... read more

On Tuesday I visited five Congressional offices in the Capitol to make the case for small publishers who rely on targeted Internet ads for revenue, an event that rated a story in Politico. The Interactive Advertising Bureau invited web entrepreneurs to come to DC and meet members of Congress and their aides, hoping to make the point that thousands of Americans are running businesses powered by these ads. We're one of the only sectors of the economy that's been growing during this recession. Although I had to ... read more

I'm in Woodbridge, Va., this morning about to head out to the Long Tail Alliance Fly-In, a gathering of small web publishers organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google. As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to come to DC and meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has concerns that Congress is working on regulations that would kick ... read more