Gdgt Launches, Goes Down (But Comes Right Back Up)

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gdgt.gifThe gadget startup gdgt, with Peter Rojas and Ryan Block at the helm, has launched. It is something of a gadget-focused community, mixing in traditional editorial content and reviews, with user generated content and a wiki-like gadget database. That wiki is the killer app, is my bet, although gdgt could do just as well with just its content. After all, they clocked in 4.7 million pageviews with their liveblog from WWDC, pre launch. The power of Rojas and Block is not to underestimated.

And gdgt might very well be an interesting site, surely one to follow. It is not like the predecessors, Engadget or Gizmodo, but more of a social beast, which is interesting. [Read more…]

Blogger.com Dominates U.K. Blogosphere

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A ComScore study shows that Google’s hosted blog servicer, Blogger.com, is dominating the blogosphere in the U.K. The study anticipates that there were 14,456,000 unique visitors to blogs in August, with Blogger.com getting 9,019,000 of them. That’s more than half of all blog readers in the U.K. WordPress is a distant second with 4,807,000, with Six Apart’s services at about half of that.

Another interesting note is that Engadget is the largest individual blog in the U.K.

Read the press release for more.

Engadget Scored 14 Million Pageviews on the Apple Notebook Event

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The Apple Tuesday notebook event, where new MacBooks were announced, and drove traffic to a lot of gadget focused sites and blogs. One of those are Engadget, which got a mammoth 14 million pageviews on that particluar day, according to a leaked internal mail reposted by TechCrunch. They reported 1.3 million uniques, so that’s almost 11 pageviews per person. That’s a record for the site.

Weblogs Inc. as a whole served 23.9 million pageviews, and 3.4 million uniques, another all-time high according to the internal email.

Engadget to be the Official CES Blog Partner

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Gadget blog Engadget, a part of AOL’s portfolio under the Weblogs Inc. brand, is apparently going to be the official CES blog, according to TechCrunch. The obvious contender for the partnership, which is a first for CES, would be Gizmodo, but after Richard Blakeley’s stunt last year, where he used TV-B-Gone to turn off exhibitor’s TV sets, I reckon the CES people would rather not have said Gawker Media blog there at all…

This is a great recognition for Engadget, so congratulations to them! CES is due on January 8-11, 2009.

AOL Cuts Blog Budgets, Signs of Things to Come?

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aol.gifTechCrunch reports that AOL has been making big budget cuts across its blogs. We’re not talking small stuff here, serious cuts up to 25%, which will almost certainly effect the writers the most.

The cuts range up to 25% of each properties total budget, which falls mostly on personnel costs – bloggers are simply being told to take a couple of weeks off for now, and there may or may not be work for them later in August.

The tech blogs, with Engadget being the most prominent one, is not affected, the sources say.

While this should be treated as a rumor for now, it is something that will and should rattle the blogosphere.
[Read more…]

Weblogs Inc blogs suffer major outage

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A highly unusual occurrence, the entire Weblogs Inc blog network is down, and has been for several hours. I noticed it first thing this morning UK time, when I tried to check in to Engadget, but it seems it’s affecting the entire Weblogs empire.

It’s uncommon for an entire network to go down for so long, though individual sites (usually on smaller networks) do have problems from time to time, either due to spikes in traffic (Steve Jobs keynote, anyone?) or technical problems.

I haven’t looked far, but I haven’t seen any gloating about the situation — though I’m sure some are capitalising on the situation and benefiting from it, if not publicly. Echoing Pete Cashmore’s words, if it had to happen at all, then a West Coast Sunday night isn’t a disastrous time for it to go down — that is, unless all of AOL’s web engineers are tucked up in bed? Perhaps they’re reading Chris’s post on what do do when your blog goes down.

At time of writing, a number of sites are behaving erratically. Engadget came and went, so the problems may not be fully solved yet. At least the news is still being written, even if we can’t read it.

(Via Mashable)