Posted 11:51 PM by Blah blah

The Lafayette Project. Gawker. (Blogging)

Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, and Gabriela Giacoman have started a blog media project called the Lafayette Project (see this link for a description).

Meg: "The more weblogs there are, the harder it is to keep track of them all. That's the problem we're addressing: turning the weblog network into accessible media."

Nick: "The Lafayette Project, a service which will automatically aggregate the best of weblog writing."

Gabriela: It's "a web service which indexes weblogs and shows readers a directory of their favorite authors."

Gabriela emailed me Friday, saying that my blog was selected to be one of the "essential weblogs" of the Lafayette Project. "As yours is one of the essential weblogs, we want to make sure we're preserving the association of your brand with your content in the directory, by using small image thumbnails of your logo or photo on your profile page and elsewhere. The thumbnail images would be small, roughly 32x32 pixels in dimension, and need to look good at that size."

What an honor, I thought. Meg and Nick are gods in the blog world. Meg was the co-creator (with Evan Williams) of Blogger. She also co-founded, with Evan, the company that made Blogger---Pyra. Nick is the president of Gawker Media, which writes the blogs Gawker and Gizmodo.

"Gizmodo (a blog for the gadget-obsessed) and Gawker (a New York blog [or web magazine] that covers celeb gossip, the publishing community, real estate, and other stimulation for water-cooler chit-chat) are driving serious traffic primarily on a word-of-mouth basis."

Gawker, written by Elizabeth Spiers, is very hot now, getting 20,000 readers daily. "Gawker readers include key reporters with the established press, and online influencers, giving marketing messages on Gawker a broader impact."

"Gawker is dedicated exclusively to frivolity and excess." From the New York Times: Gawker is "a voyeuristic, media-obsessed, gossipy and occasionally creepy blog that chronicles what Elizabeth Spiers calls 'the darker Manhattan-centric themes: class warfare as recreational sport; pathological status obsession; and the complete, total, and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence.' "

Sites like Blogdex, Technorati, and Popdex already track zillions of blogs and their links daily. As of today, Technorati tracks 410,000 blogs! But still there's something missing in the blogiverse. I can't wait to see what Meg, Nick, and Gabriela have up their sleeves!

Here's the photo I'm submitting for the Lafayette Project. Look for me when it goes online in the second half of this year!