Paul Miller, a blogger who covers tech for The Verge, is quitting the Internet for a year. He'll continue to file stories for the site by pioneering a revolutionary new technique in online journalism: Calling people on the phone. Here's how Miller imagines the phone-driven journalism process working: "I'm going to try to use the six degrees of separation a little bit," he said on Tuesday afternoon in an interview -- by phone, of course. "I have a lot of co-workers and they know a lot of people and so anybody ... read more

"We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch." -- AOL chief executive officer Tim Armstrong Around five years ago, Microsoft fueled a controversy by giving $4,000 Acer Ferrari 1000 laptop computers running Windows Vista Ultimate to some popular tech bloggers. A lot of bloggers -- particularly those who did not receive incredibly overpriced luxury branded laptops -- raised such a ruckus that Microsoft eventually asked for them back. Bloggers who wouldn't give them up were ... read more

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

A lot of the commentary about AOL's purchase of Huffington Post is coming from people who don't appear to have ever visited the site. Huffington Post is not a liberal news and opinion site, though that was founder Arianna Huffington's stated goal when it began in 2005. It's a massive search engine optimized pile of junk content with a little original news and commentary sprinkled in -- and most of that was written for free with no editorial oversight or quality control. On Saturday, an unnamed Huffington Post ... 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

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz began a new blog three weeks ago called What I Couldn't Say to "put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun," now that he's free from the corporate obligations to watch his words. Schwartz writes today about tech company patent wars, revealing a 2003 meeting where Apple's Steve Jobs threatened Sun over patents: In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects ... read more

In a post bragging about how great Gawker Media is doing, company marketing strategist Erin Pettigrew takes shots at a few bloggers who were skeptical seven years ago that a professional weblog network would make money: ... when the controversial Gizmodo launched (laying the foundation for Gawker Media), the self-important digital punditocracy debated this 'commercial experiment' in blogging as a viable, interesting, useful, or scalable business: Dave Winer: It's such a stale idea. The Web is distributed. Try ... read more