The Local, a new Times blog, has two reporters and an editor covering two neighborhoods in Brooklyn and three New Jersey towns. Jim Schachter, the Times's editor for "digital initiatives," tells the Nieman Journalism Lab that the site will never make money on its own:

If every single person who lives in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Maplewood, Millburn, and South Orange came to these sites every day and made one impression, that would be about 120,000 impressions a day. It is barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.... If you, for each site, have one full-time New York Times reporter and half of a editor, I don't think there is any way that this could ever pencil out as profitable.

But that's not the point, Schachter says: The Times is trialing the sites in order to build a software platform for other community sites, which local bloggers, possibly unaffiliated with the Times, will run. (It's worth noting that the New York Times Co. is an investor in Automattic, the San Francisco-based maker of WordPress, which Times blogs like The Local run on.)

That explains why the Times is targeting the exact same towns that Patch, a local-blogging startup backed by Google sales executive Tim Armstrong, chose for its debut. Impossibly vain Maplewood bloggers think that the interest reflects the unique qualities of their hometown. Nonsense. The Times wants to squeeze out a startup before it gets established on its home turf.

Both Patch and the Times are really aiming to be a platform for blogging — because, honestly, who wants to pay writers these days?

Of course, the hyperlocal hypercompetition will likely end up killing everyone, leading people to give up on making money from the "placeblogosphere," as Schachter neologizes it, for good. The only person who wins: Noisome media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who is simultaneously advising the Times and Patch.

The company, founded by white male Matt Mullenweg, has just increased its white maleness with the acquisition of PollDaddy, a two-white-males Irish firm.

Are we being too harsh on Automattic? Should we give it credit for not being 100 percent white and male? After all, Google prides itself that 32 percent of its employees are women; that it views that level as an achievement shows how imbalanced Silicon Valley's scales of equity are. Still, look at the Automattic company photograph, taken at a staff retreat in Breckenridge, Colo. If I were a woman or a minority working at this company, I'd hide in the corner, too.

• 0:40: WordPress.com has 140 million unique visitors a month, generating 600 million to 700 million pageviews.
• 2:30:
Mullenweg is bearish on advertising on social networks: "I like our position because it's around content. It's not around photos, or people trying to connect with each other."
• 3:30: And yet, he hasn't really thought about how his company's going to make money: "Monetization is something we think about, but I don't think we've had any brilliant ideas."

Strikeout! Mullenweg showed up at the last minute. One wonders: Was the recently minted millionaire dealing with fallout from his nasty Twitter fight with Six Apart's Anil Dash? Or was he just calling his broker? (Mullenweg later told me he just went to the wrong green room.)

Flickr's Cal Henderson says "fuck" a lot, which would seem to come with his job. "I'm Cal Henderson from Flickr, the kitten-sharing website" is how he introduces himself. He admits that one Flickr breakdown came about when he failed to use a basic Linux utility, df, to measure if he had enough storage available — a problem when you serve terabytes of photos. Still, it's a good problem to have. "A lot of people can ignore scale forever," he notes — because they never get enough users to bring their site down. "We serve 32,000 photos a second," says Henderson.

"One of the things I don't like about Web 2.0 is you as users want your data to be available, to stay up forever," says Digg architect Joe Stump. "As an engineer, I hate that."

Most of the panelists favor open-source software and cheap hardware. "Buying enterprise means they don't put their prices on the Web," says Mullenweg, the creator of blogging software WordPress. "It means you have to talk to someone with slick-backed hair for 30 minutes. It's uncomfortable."

If you can get over that, says Henderson, "the easiest way to solve scaling problems is to throw money at it. When you're a startup and you don't pay your engineers, then engineering is cheap and hardware is expensive. If you're paying for engineering time, that's expensive."

Stump takes a question from Pownce creator Leah Culver: "Where do you find your bottlenecks?" Stump's answer: "Bottlenecks never have to do with your [programming] language." Henderson instantly retorts: "Unless you're using Ruby." (Ruby is the language used by Twitter, among others, and some blame it for Twitter's outages.) Stump's comeback: "It's always your database or your file system."

StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp suggests testing new features on a small set of your audience, rather than everyone at once, so you test under real conditions but don't afflict buggy code on all of your users at once.

"When we look at the site, we ask, 'What don't we have to do right now?'" says Digg's Stump. Avoiding real-time updates helps avoid bottlenecks. Henderson says Flickr sometimes shows photo pages that are a minute old — again, to minimize load on the site.

That's a rare moment of agreement between Henderson and Stump. The two are back to sparring in minutes. Henderson's comeback to an obscure point Stump makes: "I don't want to work at Digg." Stump then ribs him: "So, Cal, you're moving over to Microsoft technology soon, right?" "Yes, we're moving over to .NET and SQL Server," is Henderson's deadpan response. That's the last zinger before the show wraps up.

Specifically, Mullenweg's money. Automattic recently raised $29.5 million in venture capital — bringing its total raised past Six Apart. The Automattic deal was unusual: Some of the money went directly to Mullenweg, and a handful of other employees, instead of to his company. Automattic's investors, in other words, partially bought him out. A failed bidder for Automattic has been going around saying that Mullenweg's personal take was around $20 million.

Why buy Mullenweg out? VCs normally like to keep founders' incentives in line with their own, so everyone's shooting for a big payday. One might think showering a founder with cash ahead of an IPO or acquisition might be a sign that he's valued. Actually, it's the opposite: Making Mullenweg rich before eveyrone else is his investors' way of saying they don't care if he takes a hike.

Mullenweg surely realizes this. As satisfying as it might be to check his bank account, it has to be frustrating to realize he's not deemed relevant to Automattic's future. And that, more than anything, is what must prompt him to lash out at his chief rival.

On January 4, he wrote in a Twitter, "Heading out to bank to initiate purchase, beginning of a life change." What kind of a purchase requires a bank visit? Usually one involving a wire transfer. I'm thinking a house, a very expensive car, perhaps an extravagant rock to put on longtime girlfriend Glenda Bautista's finger. One thing's for sure: Mullenweg looks very good in fancy suits. (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Several Valleywag readers have noted that Mullenweg has been going steady for a year with his girlfriend, who is both undeniably comely, and if friends' reports are accurate, likely to "string him up and gut him" if he were to stray. Harde, too, is known to take her professional image very seriously, and therefore, confidants believe, unlikely to put herself in a situation where one might perceive even a glimmer of something amiss. All of which makes the very rumor of a dalliance at The Lobby more eyebrow-raising.

Mullenweg commented below and also emailed Valleywag to deny that he was alone in the bar with Harde: "I was no 'closer" to Ms. Harde than to Garrett Camp or Erika Arone or Chris Sacca." (Our sources never said, nor did we report, that he and Harde were alone.)

If you ask Mullenweg, in other words, his answer to the question posed in this item's headline is an unequivocal "no." An eyewitness source, however, insists he saw Mullenweg "all over" Harde. At 1:30 a.m.

(Photo by True Ventures)

Arrington, of course, is famous for his bitchiness and his long memory. But his recent post about Feedlounge was over the top, and readers called him on it. Arrington has a long-running dispute with software company 37signals, which makes, and charges for, Web-based software. 37signals' founders loudly advocate for the paid model, while Arrington believes Web companies should give away their services.

In his post, Arrington blames 37signals' evangelism of charging for Feedlounge's shutdown. One small problem with that: Feedlounge's founder announced in April that he was shutting down the service, not because the subscription model had failed, but because an injury in his family required his attention. That's pretty cold, even for Arrington — bringing someone's injured family member into an argument just to score academic points.

Less personally cutting, but equally puzzling, is the timing of Mullenweg's post about the shutdown of SplashBlog, a mobile-blogging service acquired last year by Six Apart. The shutdown, however, happened a week ago. Six Apart's Movable Type, of course, fiercely competes with Mullenweg's WordPress. And Six Apart just released a new version of Movable Type. Coincidence? Or the motivation for Mullenweg to post a negative item about his competition? You decide.

Oh, and while we're at it, it's worth noting that a source says SplashBlog had "literally dozens" of users before Six Apart shut it down, something Mullenweg failed to note — and something which makes the value of his blog post all the more questionable.

No matter. Bloggers everywhere, take notes from Arrington and Mullenweg, masters of the art. If you're looking to score points, it doesn't matter how stale, or small, the news is. All that matters is that you channel your pettiness into prose, and spin a tempest in a teapot into a full-on gale. Go forth and blog.

Check out who's coming — Canadian Flockstar Will Pate, Digg hottie Kevin Rose, media maven Irina Slutsky of GETV, and so many more! Sign up or just stumble in!

And thanks to the $100 sloshcon sponsors — which now include WordPress.com owner Automattic, Mena Trott of Six Apart, Gabriel Venture Partners, Digg, STIRR Network, and Laughing Squid. Silver $250 sponsors are Topix.net and Valleywag owner Gawker Media.

Booze! Shouting! TV coverage (no seriously)! Get ready to get drunk and argue about the Internet (and those damn humanity-killing robots) this Thursday night at San Francisco's House of Shields!

Web Infinity Plus One: The SloshCon [Upcoming]

No joke, we're holding a Web Infinity Plus One Conference at the House of Shields a week from today! The top room's reserved and the sponsors are ponying up for the bar tab. The deets:

• Where: San Francisco bar House of Shields
• When: Thursday, 8 June, 9ish PM
• What: Live GETV interview by Irina Slutsky; impromptu drunk speeches; OPEN BAR
• Why: To make a paper trail so Valleywag can pull an O'Reilly.
• $100 Sponsors: Automattic; Mena Trott of Six Apart; STIRR Network; Gawker Media ($250)

Oh boy there's more! Watch Valleywag every day til then for updates on the Best Night This Side of the Singularity!

Web Infinity Plus One: The SloshCon [RSVP on Upcoming.org]
HoS photo: Web 1.0 Summit [Scott Beale on Flickr]

• The Guardian confirms: Bloggers are loudmouths, and Glenn Reynolds has an opinion. [Guardian]
• Blog platform Automattic bypasses the usual startup interview question: "But how will you make any money?" [Business 2.0]
• Sick of dumb corporate names? Salon is old-school sick of dumb corporate names. [Salon, 90s]
• Slate performs a mental autopsy of Stefan Eriksson's crashed Ferrari (half-pictured). [Slate]
• Use Firefox, get banned from LiveJournal: The site's new terms of service give them the right to kill your account if you use a pop-up an ad blocker. UPDATE: The lawyers snuck that in, and LiveJournal's gonna fix it. [Slashdot and LiveJournal Support]

We are not seeking funding.

Matt blogs about Automattic, April 12:

We took a small amount of capital.

When Auttomatic started, well, seeking funding: October 2005. (Matt wasn't hiding it, he just forgot to update the company site. For six months.)

Photo: Matt Mullenweg [Tantek on Flickr]
Earlier: Yep, he took funding [Valleywag]

Matt's announcement, made today, doesn't refer to earlier persistent rumors, or the October 2005 date on Automattic's SEC filing. Oh, he didn't mean to hide it, he was probably busy making WordPress widgets.

A little funding [Photo Matt]
Earlier: Did WordPress take funding? [Valleywag]

But WordPress has never announced any funding — and, well, they seem too bright and innocent to try hiding income from the volunteers at WordPress.org. Could someone with, you know, any sort of business knowledge explain what this "registration of sale of securities" means?

Profit [WordPress.com forum]
Registration of sale of securities [SEC.gov]