Battle of the Blog Designs: The Guest of a Guest vs. Gawker Design War
Today's Page Six had an especially glorious item, pitting the designs of two gossip blog networks against each other, with chatter that someone's totally biting our shit off: the socialite chronicling Guest of a Guest, and Gawker Media. That's us.
Whenever I get to bust out the #SelfReferential tag, the sun is shining down especially bright on God's Bloggy Children, and today is no exception.
See, we kind of look like one thing, and Guest of Guest kind of looked like another thing. And then one day, someone who works for us noted that this one thing (Guest of a Guest's design) looks like the other (our design) a little too much. And we're going to leave it up to you, the people, to decide if it does!
The timeline goes like this:
On Thursday, someone who works here pointed out some similarities between the two websites. Then, the guy who pays me pointed it out. Like this!
As they say in the "rap game," SHOTS FIRED. Take a look:
Cameron Winklevoss—in short, a shiny Ivy League-educated Olympic rower with an entrepreneurial streak, stellar last name, and twin brother—did in fact claim to invent Facebook, and you can read about that stuff here. Whatever, because later that evening:
BANG. More shots. The link was to a Tumblr account presumably opened up by design people Hard Candy Shell, with one post on it:
And here I'd compare this to Biggie and Tupac except, well, they were both thugged out rappers whose art will stand the test of time, and, uh, this is about two blog networks. Ha. So, anyway, on Friday, a Guest of a Guest Tumblr post asks the world if my boss is going "batshit." And Guest of a Guest's Rachelle Hruska fired back with her own allegation of noting that our company's recent blog acquisition, CityFile, looks like Guest of a Guest. Take a look, decide for yourself:
Rachelle also noted that her redesign party was four months ago. For the record, that Tips box you see at the top of the screen launched for us back in October about a month and two days before Hruska's redesign party. Whatever. Now, if you have yet to open your motion sickness bags, we'll come back around to today's Page Six item, hysterically titled BLOG FIGHT, in which this goes down:
"It's a bit silly," said one blogger. Asked to comment, Denton told us, "Cameron Winklevoss claimed he invented Facebook," and noted that Winklevoss settled a lawsuit against [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg "for millions of dollars. So it's surprising he has neither the cre ativity nor the funds to come up with his own Web design." Said Hruska: "Who is Nick Denton?"
Me-yow, sister. I reached out to Rachelle Hruska and Cameron Winklevoss for quote because I know I'd get a screamy email if I didn't, and Rachelle returned to me with this:
"You know what they say, punch a bully in the eye and watch him cry. This has nothing to do with our site (which has been in steady state for months), rather Denton's bruised ego after we described his "acquisition" of cityfile a lackquisition and pointed to how New York media sheepishly lapped it up.
Since then Denton has been squealing like a stuck pig on twitter and working to plant a piece in page six. Who would have thought the custodian of negativity's cesspool and king of ad hominem attacks would take such offense to tempered skepticism? The fact that Page Six ran with this is confirmation of our original thesis and that Stockholm Syndrome is rampant in New York Media.
Hopefully Los Angeles Media puts up slightly more resistance when Denton comes looking for their lunch money. We launch our LA site tomorrow."
Haha, is "lackquisition" a real word? I don't care. Also, nice plug. Whee! I'd reach out to Gawker Media Overlord Nick Denton for comment but honestly he's probably annoyed that I spent any time on this at all. Also, if in fact he actually cares about this, the publicity that was a byproduct of this post for Guest of a Guest is pretty undeniable! Finally, if he has anything to say, he'll probably drop in the comments, or write me a terrifying email. So I'm leaving it up to you, the people! One more look-see:
And you decide!