Gawker Media has had a good year so far, with ad revenue up 35% when the industry is suffering. The network clocked 334 million pageviews in June, and Nick Denton is happy. He is, in fact, so happy that he’s bringing pageviews to the table again, with bonuses for writers reaching their individual targets. This from an internal memo published on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

Don’t all get excited: the levels will be modest; aimed at the writers who aren’t paid as much as their traffic would warrant; and we’re only committing to bonuses for the second half of this year. Chris Batty’s sales and creative services teams have done an impressive job in bucking the advertising slump; but we have no idea how long we can continue to out-perform competitors.

He’s also mentioning the new commenting system and policy change, further outlined in a Jezebel post. Skipping that, the memo actually gives some insight in how Denton & Co. thinks about comments. read more

Someone asked me the other day why I write about personal stuff, what is the appeal of diaries, journals, personal blogs, and the like? I have been talking a lot about Posterous and life streams lately so perhaps this is a good opportunity to explain … read more

There’s no formal announcement as I’m writing this, but WordPress 2.8.1 is out now and should ping in everyone’s admin interfaces, asking you to upgrade. You can get it from wordpress.org as always. Update: Here’s the wordpress.org post!

I fully understand the appeal of reading blogs on the morning commute: it often beats what’s printed in newspapers. What I can’t quite get my head around is The Printed Blog recently started by Joshua Karp.

In a world of iPhones, BlackBerrys, Kindles and 3G-enabled notebook PCs, why would I want to pick up and pay to read only moderately recent blog entries over which I have no control and no immediate way of communicating back with them or seeing the ongoing conversation?

“I thought maybe this would translate into a new, venture-funded model for newspapers, but no one believes print news will survive. If I had a penny left, I would bet newspapers will survive in printed form,” Karp said. read more

The fact that TMZ not only broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death, but also proved to be the main source of information for a lot of traditional publishing outlets makes you think. There’s no doubt that the blogs were first, and old media stumbled to verify and catch up in the wake.

In the words of Jason Preston, you can do something First, or you can do it Well.

The reasoning is interesting. If you do it first you get cited, seen, credit, traffic, readers, and so on. But if you do it well you can provide “real analysis” and “be interesting”. read more

Unpublished author (magician and comedian) John Lenahan faced the scenario typical for many unknown writers: rejections from publishers and no-one to sell his book.

Yet when he started to record instalments from his “Shadowmagic” book on the podcasting service PodioBooks.com, he built up a loyal following of some 20,000 listeners and was soon beating back excited publishers with a big stick.

He had bought some good quality recording equipment and practised before committing his voice to the online service (“I wanted it to be good from the start and not starting to sound good by chapter six,” he said). read more

That didn’t take long. The forum software bbPress, which is related to WordPress, recently went out in its first sharp release, being 1.0 of course. Now the first bug fix release is out. The announcement blog post doesn’t outline what was fixed but there’s details in a forum post. Users of bbPress 1.0 is advised to update.

Chris Anderson’s book Free! is now available for free in online as well as audio book form. read more

Technorati wants to be in the middle of the traditional blogosphere, and Twitter. Hence they launch Twittorati, a Muck Rack powered Twitter mash of whatever the Technorati Top 100 blog’s bloggers twitter about.

We say this is where the Blogosphere meets the Twittersphere, but what does that mean? Twittorati shows what top bloggers are tweeting about, and how these trends compare to Blogosphere trends. You’ll be able to filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading Blogosphere and twitter trends.

The site lets you “follow the highest authority bloggers”. More is to come, but for now, check it out. If nothing else, it helps cement the Technorati Top 100 blogs even further.

The ever appealing hosted blogging platform Posterous now supports posting to Facebook. You might remember that Steve Rubel moved to the platform recently. The addition of Facebook support surely is another reason for switching to Posterous. On the other hand, you can sync just about any blog with a RSS feed to Facebook, so it might not be the big Hosted Blog Killer feature after all.