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Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, the owner of this site and my worthy predecessor as its editor, has weighed in triumphantly on the battle of the gadget blogs, declaring his Gizmodo site the winner in its heated competition with Engadget, the rival site started by founding Gizmodo editor Peter Rojas and now owned by AOL. The last time I covered this fight, I was working at Business 2.0, and an ostensibly neutral party. And so I got a fusillade from all sides. Scarred from that experience, and hardly neutral now, I'm not going to comment, save to observe that in the days to come, you're sure to hear an elaborate, exhausting point-counterpoint from Gizmodo and Engadget about international licensees, traffic-counting methodologies, and so on and so forth. Trust me, you won't want to hear it. And anyway, I'm more interested in my boss's obvious, embarrassing gaffe.

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To prove Gizmodo's ascendancy, Denton cites numbers from Compete.com, an increasingly popular Web traffic-research firm. But he also claims that both Gizmodo and Engadget "have grown at the expense of established tech sites like CNET." Really, Nick? Because if you had bothered to consult Compete.com on the matter, you'd have seen that the research firm believes CNET has outgrown Engadget. While there's been a dip in CNET's readership since the spring, in the past year, CNET has added 3 million visitors — the equivalent of two Gizmodos. Some expense.