To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women's magazine we'd want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don't much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag. Women deserve some of the blame here: if men ever bought $2000 handbags, Esquire and GQ might be as bad -- and profitable -- as Glamour and Vogue.

Back in November, Denton was rumored to have hired Eurotrash's Geraldine "Delly" Hayward as editor, a fact that he refused to confirm—with good reason. The blog, under the codename "Girlie Gawker," has finally resurfaced with a different editor, whispers of a not-too-distant but still unspecified launch date, and a mission: capturing a female audience in the flyover states, sources say.

At the helm of the lady-centric site will be Anna Holmes, a former In Style editor and Entertainment Weekly scribe who is solidly entrenched in the chick-lit world. In 2003, she edited Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters From the End of the Affair, a historical survey of scorned and bitter femmes that O Magazine called "cathartic."

YouTube, Bankrate.com (RATE), eHarmony, and Gawker are on a list of candidates for buyouts shown by an investment banker at a presentation to the Online Publishers Association this morning.

Tolman Geffs, managing director of Jordan, Edmiston Group, said the number of deals for online consumer media companies has nearly doubled in the last three months. There have been 91 in the last nine months compared to 47 in the three previous quarters.

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, doesn't believe there's really been a big rush of VC money or Big Media interest in blog publishing. He told me Gawker's blogs would cease doing what they do best if they were bought by a mainstream media company.

"Put the Gawker titles in a media conglomerate and they would spontaneously combust," Denton said via e-mail. "Imagine, for instance, how AOL Time Warner would handle the X-rated party photos in yesterday's Fleshbot, or a snide report on Defamer about the latest dross from Warner Brothers, or Gawker's borderline libelous mockery of [Time Warner CEO] Dick Parsons. Without media conglomerates as targets, the Gawker titles would have no purpose. Gawker is not for sale but it is, more importantly, and in a deeper sense, unacquirable.

Suddenly bored of the whole operation, the editors demanded that Gawker sell the site to the lowest bidder. Various suitors came a-courtin' -- including one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world (not the one that bought MySpace) -- and at one point the entire staff had been "hired" by a giant corporation while lawyers "worked out the details," "dotted the i's" and ran or knocked various things up flagpoles and around ballparks.

Needless to say, they pussed out at the last minute.

Thank you for reading Sploid, sending tips, blogging about us, and linking our stories on Fark or Metafilter or Digg or wherever. And thanks to Gawker, the archives will remain here for your enjoyment until somebody really buys the site just to get all this trash off the Google search results.

We're letting our content partnership with Yahoo lapse. The bald truth is that the deal, which we announced in November, garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic. A few new readers probably discovered Gawker, or one of the other four sites that we syndicated to Yahoo. I doubt many of them stayed. Yahoo has a mass audience; Gawker appeals to a peculiarly coastal, geeky and freaky demographic. And these people are more likely to come to our sites through word of mouth, or blog links, or search engine results, or Digg, not because of a traditional content syndication deal.

One of the overlords of the blogosphere with 15 sites and enough buzz to arm every doorbell in the nation, Mr. Denton has watched page views at his sites double in the last year; Gawker Media and Nielsen/NetRatings put monthly unique visitors at 4.2 million. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Mr. Denton celebrated a very upbeat stretch in the blogging industry by putting two of his sites on the block, reorganizing others and laying off several people.

Laying off journalists? How very old media.

"Better to sober up now, before the end of the party," he said in announcing the realignment. As of last Friday, Sploid, a tabloid-infested site built on screen shots, and Screenhead, an aggregator of video clips, were put up for sale. Editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper were moved or replaced. At a time when mainstream media companies are madly baking their own piece of blog pie, Mr. Denton was summarily executing underperformers.

"There is a simple way to render these guys useless," Clooney advised in an e-mail his publicist sent out to various other show-business publicists. "Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That's the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride. Thanks, George."

In the name of privacy and completely invading it comes Gawker Stalker Maps! Brought to you from gawker.com, the site has people send in celebrity sightings which are then posted immediately on a map. So basically, if you have no shame or conscience whatsoever, you can pinpoint the location of a celeb and then go follow them around like a lovestruck teenager.

I never believed Nick when he told me he wouldn't sell Gawker (especially not after all my pals at the big portals told me that he was meeting with them). However, watching Valleywag alienate 90% of the industry over the past couple of days in such a personal and vicious way, Nick's convinced me that he could really care less.

Not only did Nick start this publication up, he's getting personal in the comments. Take a look, Nick is not only talking about the dynamics of Lloyd Braun's business relationships, but he's commenting on the CEO of Google love life!

Because we all like to watch, Gawker is looking to develop some original video content. Think mini-documentaries on crack: watching the media wanks slide in and out of Michael's, screwing with the Conde security desk, or going undercover to document the horror of a book party.

As such, we're looking to hire some guerilla video filmmakers. You MUST have your own DV equipment. And while the pay is meager, the exposure will be fantastic. Or, at least, better than that of Current.

A.J. Daulerio, the editor, is a trooper, and an amusing writer, but the audience was never there. Gawker traffic stats are public, so that's been pretty obvious to anyone who checks the numbers. Gamblers want to gamble; it seems they don't particularly want to read about gambling, however.

So we're closing down Oddjack by the end of the month. We'd rather concentrate our energies on sites such as Deadspin, which have buzz and a growing audience, and new launches, which have equal potential. The moral of the story: it's easy to launch sites; much harder to make them popular.

"We've said all along, we're always going to rely on the content we get from our partners," said Yahoo! spokesman Brian Nelson.

Nelson added Gawker's content, frequently laced with profanities, will pass through a language filter before appearing on the news portal. "The content isn't for everyone... Of course, all of it will be in line with our editorial policies," he said. "There won't be profanity running on our site."

Eventually, the other Gawker blogs will be included and the distribution will spread to other Yahoo sites. For instance, Defamer will show up on Yahoo Entertainment. Terms aren't being disclosed but a lot of emphasis is placed on the amount of traffic Yahoo can drive back to Gawker Media.

Blog acquisitions. The acquisition of WIN by AOL is exhilirating news, in many respects, most of which I shouldn't list here. For what it's worth, Gawker isn't for sale. The whole point about blogs is that they're not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It's way too early.

At a time when media conferences like "Les Blogs" in Paris two weeks ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares, as it did on its May 2 cover, that "Blogs Will Change Your Business," Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down -- people, careers, brands -- than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: "Give me a break."

"The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe," he said. "They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed."