Joel Johnson Has Him a Blog

It's not exactly officially launched yet, but I don't mind giving anyone who actually graces this blog with readership a sneak preview of my new blog, Nextbrick.net. It's a blog about construction toys, with a heavy emphasis on Lego.

It needs a better logo, but it's basically ready to go, infrastructure-wise. Now it's time to start linking up the most interesting Lego and block news I can find.

Take the time to read (yet another) Wired piece about Jason Calacanis, the man who had the balls to accuse me of being a "sell out" to Siemens while I was the editor of Gizmodo, but not the good graces to accuse me directly, instead taking it as an opportunity to put himself on a level with Nick Denton.

It's been almost a year since he made that post on his own Weblog (one of many personal blogs counted towards the Weblogs, Inc. claimed number of blogs), after which Jason deleted almost every response from fellow journalists defending my (and Gizmodo's) integrity.

Here's the part of the story that Calacanis left out: Siemens approached Engadget with a junket before they approached Gizmodo. Engadget refused the free flight and hotel—not because of a strong 'anti-junket' policy, but because Siemens refused to purchase a large ad buy on Engadget, as recommended by Engadget/Weblogs, Inc. so that they could hide the expenses of the flight and hotel in the money they earned from the ad buy while still claiming journalistic integrity. I know this because Siemens employees and clients told me as much after reading Calacanis's blog post about Gizmodo.

There was a good debate to be had about whether or not blog writers should accept junkets (even if they publicly and clearly disclaim the terms), but that wasn't the debate Calacanis wanted to have. Instead, he decided it would be better to attack Gizmodo for taking the junket that Engadget would only have taken with an additional ad buy—and by proxy, me.

I still haven't gotten an apology from Calacanis and I expect I never will. (I would imagine that he's been too busy rooting through his own pubic mane looking for something to fellate to realize that he actually did anything wrong.) But until that time, it's always my pleasure to see that others can see through his back-stabbing bluster and expose him for the piss-ant, ego-drunk ankle biter that he is.

I'll be at CES, Calacanis. Feel free to buy me a drink and tell me you're sorry for publicly accusing me of the very thing that Engadget tried to pull off without their readers' knowledge.