John Battelle owns the Internet

So Google counts over 23 billion pages on the Internet — who cares? Nothing's really online until it's been "Dugg," "Farked," and "Boing Boinged." And when your new quirky blog post ("Meta-Katamari George Bush MacBook Pro Naked") gets passed around the memepool, it'll be surrounded by John Battelle's ads.

Media mogul Battelle owns Federated Media Publishing, the rapidly expanding ad network that's signing up every coolhunting site. Among his culture-shaping properties:

• Boing Boing, the four-writer blog approaching 1 million pageviews a day (not much smaller than the audience of the Colbert Report)
• Digg, the newer sexier Slashdot rumored to have declined a $40 million offer from Yahoo
• Fark, the giant trashy amusement park of the Internet
• Metafilter, incubator for trendy A-list bloggers
• Newsvine, where molehills become news headlines
• PopURLs, a new addition collecting popular links from Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl
• PSFK, the trend-spotting blog by coolhunting consultant Piers Fawkes
• Reddit, a general-interest Digg-like site with even more instant voting gratification

As Valleywag friend and blogebrity watcher Kyle Bunch puts it, "Now an item can get run on BoingBoing, then dugg, then re-seen on popurls" — and Boing-Boinged, Newsvined, and Farked — and Battelle gets a cut each time.

Federated Media Authors Index [Federated Media Publishing]
Photo: John Battelle [JD Lasica on Flickr]

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