After the Guardian Media Group announced it had bought Ali's company, ContentNext Media, for a reported $30 million last stummer, Ali became a hero to the ranks of bloggers hoping to turn their blathering into bucks. In announcing the sale, he thanked his wife, Najmia Manjoo-Ali, "who hardly ever saw me for the last four years."

But if anything, she's seen less of him since the acquisition, as he's traveled around the world trying to make the collection of media-business blogs pay off for his new owners. Far from clearing millions, Ali saw an initial payout from the deal that was in the six-figure range, we hear — and he has ambitious targets to meet to realize the full value of the acquisition.

Even over that reduced sum, there are rumors of financial shenanigans between the two. One tale had Manjoo-Ali clearing out the couple's joint bank account. But a source close to Manjoo-Ali says that she only took half of the money — and that was after Ali had moved to take her name off the account. Ali and Manjoo-Ali did not respond to emails requesting comment.

So much for the fairy tale of blogging for dollars: One doesn't start a blog, flip it, get the girl, and live happily ever after. At the end of the story, our hero has the blog. And the blog has him.

(Photo by Rafat Ali)

Aside from that small triumph, the sale is odd in many ways. Ali had showed every signs of trying to bulk up PaidContent's parent company, ContentNext Media, with a CEO and venture-capital financing. The Guardian group, which runs successful websites for its newspapers, may bring some U.K. media savvy, but has very little U.S. infraastructure to help PaidContent's ad sales or operations.

But it does resolve one thing: PaidContent's odd domain name. Insiders have long been quizzical about the ".org", supposedly reserved for nonprofits, on a plainly capitalist blog. Guardian Media Group is owned by a nonprofit trust. Blogging not-for-profit? An apt description of the enterprise for the vast majority of its players.

I emailed my old boss Om Malik and he demurred, "Hah, sure... i can only hope to do a good job one day at a time." As for Arrington? While the TechCrunch editor laments that "it's getting lonely as an independent blogging startup," I overheard him fantasize about cashing out and moving to Hawaii at a cloud computing discussion put on by Malik. However, the list of potential buyers is dwindling — CBS bought CNET, the Wall Street Journal already has its hands on AllThingsD, the Washington Post is syndicating TechCrunch for free or nearly so, but the New York Times could use some help covering technology, even if they won't admit it. (Photo by )

Swisher, aggrieved at the lack of recognition for her scoop, accused BusinessWeek and the Times of running "hand-fed" stories, a charge Lacy and Stone's editor denied. (Lacy told me she'd known since the previous Sunday, but had held the information for her column; Stone's editor told Swisher his meeting with Slide that morning was previously scheduled.)

PaidContent.org clearly felt left out. After one of its writers filed a me-too post, editor Rafat Ali skewered Lacy in a followup post, calling her a "doting, in-awe poseur."

On Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget, Lacy's cohost on Yahoo's soon-to-be-launched TechTicker finance show, came to her defense, dismissing PaidContent as an "aging, LA-based digital news blog."

Oh, and somewhere along the way, I managed to write a story on the subject without calling anyone names.

All of which shows how petty bloggers can be, and none of which answers the question of whether this matters to readers. My suspicion: Only to the extent that they may pass over a story they feel they've read elsewhere first. Google News actively punishes scoops, presenting news on a given subject by the most recent article written, a practice which encourages follow-on news articles and blog posts — and, for that matter, makes it hard to discover who actually broke a given story. Techmeme tends to favor the person who writes with most authority, drawing links from other blogs.