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If the answer to that question is “no”, then do scan-read that interesting New York Times story about bloggers and blogging.

Yes, that NYT story was written by… a blogger (who usually blogs at ValleyWag) —if you were wondering.

Yes, many blogs are “opinionated” —as you can see in the picture below.

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Explainer: Michael Arrington is Ducan Riley’s boss —and Michael Arrington’s post (which prompted the 2 comments you see above) happened to contradict Ducan Riley’s previous take on the issue. (See Robert Scoble’s take, for more info on the general issue, if you need. More by the same Scobble. See also Fred Wilson. And Ducan Riley. Mark Cuban. Mike Arrington.)

Lloyd Grove: I ran into Nick Denton [the owner of Gawker Media, parent company of the Silicon Valley blog ValleyWag.com] last night. What do you think of him?

Michael Arrington: I think he’s a total dick.

Lloyd Grove: Would you care to elaborate?

Michael Arrington: I think he’s amoral. I don’t think he has any sense of right and wrong, and he’ll do anything he can to make money and have a successful blog. So I just don’t associate with him.

Lloyd Grove: I have to say, when he invited me to be his friend on Facebook, I had to think about it a long time. Because here in New York, when I had a gossip column at the New York Daily News, Gawker particularly attempted to make my life less pleasant than it ought to have been.

Michael Arrington: Yeah, I know what that’s all about. By the way, Valleywag competes with TechCrunch on some stories, and it doesn’t matter. If they get a tip or think something’s funny, they’ll write it about me. And it’s not just me, they do it to everyone. But I just try to ignore it.

Lloyd Grove: Uh huh. Tell me, obviously the big challenge for traditional print journalism organizations like the Washington Post or Time magazine or New York magazine, and even Condé Nast Portfolio, is to figure out how to monetize the internet and make their businesses viable on the internet. Do people in those businesses ever consult you since you seem to have a very successful journalistic operation?

Michael Arrington: Not so much. I mean, we’re able to monetize because we have a very high-end audience and it’s very niche and very specific. We’re lucky, but it’s not magic. If you can get an audience like ours, it’s pretty easy to generate revenue.

Lloyd Grove: How do you describe your audience to advertisers?

Michael Arrington: You know, they’re early adopters. They’re people that want to try new products. A significant portion of my audience, for instance, would’ve bought the Kindle when Amazon released it last year, immediately. And they’re a lot of entrepreneurs, so a lot of them need service providers, they need designers, they need accountants, and then they need to buy software. So Microsoft, Adobe, and others are always advertising on the site as well. So that’s it, and sometimes, you have other things as well, but it’s a high-end high-income sort of audience. We did a survey a while back, and the average was like $100,000 a year.

Lloyd Grove: You’re only two years old, right?

Michael Arrington: This is going to be our third year.

TechCrunch

CrunchNotes

More Info

[...] Of course, Arrington’s success is about more than partying like a frat boy and schmoozing like a Hollywood agent at a cast party. With the exception of a three-week vacation (during which he worked half-time) at the end of 2006, he says he has worked every day for two years straight. He gets up at about 10 or 11 am, is at his desk 10 seconds later, and tends to the business side of his operation until early evening, seeing entrepreneurs, doing phone interviews, tracking the news of the day, and writing posts. He’s often at parties or other events until 10. It’s typically not until 10 or 11 pm, when things quiet down, that he has time to think and write more thoughtful, analytical blog entries. “I’ve actually cut back,” he says. “In the beginning, I got up every day and worked until I passed out. I’ve always been like that. It’s probably why I’m not married yet.” Arrington relishes the rough-and-tumble of online feuds, comment wars, and one-upmanship. And as an A-list blogger, he’s obliged to wade into controversy most every day. [...] Arrington readily admits that he’s prone to excess and uncontrolled outbursts — of temper, partying, and work. But it’s that very quality that has helped make him one of the most compelling Silicon Valley heavyweights in a long time. He doesn’t deny that some of the fits of anger are for show, but he also insists that he’s just a passionate, emotional guy. “I’m human. I’ve put my entire life into this blog, and when I’m attacked, it’s emotional,” he says. “I’m going to react sometimes — that’s just me. Does that mean I’m flawed? Yeah. Does that mean I’m not being 100 percent efficient about business? Yeah. But it really hurts when people attack me, and I think people who don’t respond aren’t very human or very interesting.” [...]

This profile of Mike Arrington bears some resemblance with Chris Masse of Midas Oracle —except that I get up much, much earlier.

As for the profitability aspect of the Midas Oracle enterprise, I’m working on it and will update you, dear readers, in the coming weeks.

Previous: Is a blog really a blog if there are no reader comments?

Most of the popular blogs, all of which started out as one-person shops, have now hired separate sales staff to handle sales. We have, Om has, etc. Hell, that’s the main reason we are working with FM Publishing, so that we don’t have to talk to advertisers directly. They turned out to be the wrong choice – throwing us under a bus as soon as the found it convenient, but it doesn’t change our position on the matter. We’re a small operation, we work 24 hours a day to break stories and write interesting content, and we’re trying to earn enough money to keep these things growing. Something Cooper would never understand. [CNET's Charles Cooper is] a paid journalist who has the luxury of sitting back and opining on others, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s what too many mainstream media journalists do – write about things they don’t know and don’t care about. And that’s why blogs are stealing their page views at an alarming rate. Based on my estimates, the average A-List blogger generates 10x the page views that the average journalist does. Why? Because we’re running our own businesses, because we support each other with linking, and because we care, deeply, about what we are writing about.

Mike Arrington says, in another paragraph, that he doesn’t care about being linked to by CNET News (a news website devoted to the business of the information technology) because it generates small traffic compared to what some IT bloggers (like Om) can deliver. Entirely true. Midas Oracle was linked to by CNET News in May 2007, and we received a fistful of visitors only, compared to thousands of people coming from the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

NEXT: Google Search, the New York Times, and the blogs

Mike Arrington takes a US-centric view that, because internet betting and gambling is forbidden in the U.S., and because the multinational Internet firm Yahoo! originates from the U.S., then the British users of Yahoo! U.K. & Ireland should be barred from playing poker online with Yahoo!. Makes no sense at all, since Mike Arrington also reports that American residents connecting from the U.S.A. are indeed prevented from paying the online game.

–> Michael Arrington has a screw lose. Judge by yourself:

Yahoo! has launched a new “for cash” poker website on their UK & Ireland property. Users can play against others via a Flash interface, and are offered $1,000 in credit when they make their first deposit into the account. Registration is allowed from most countries, although the U.S. and Gibraltar, where online gambling are prohibited, are blocked (I tried). The service is provided through a partner, St Minver, but the game play occurs on the Yahoo! site. The introductory video says “Congratulations on choosing Yahoo! Poker,use your skills and try your luck at winning the pot.” Players have maximum loss limits – they cannot withdraw more than GBP1000 from their bank account every ten days. In 2004, Yahoo! and Google announced that they were removing gambling advertising from their sites. This launch seems to contradict their position on Internet gambling. [*] This is an extremely controversial move, and one that Yahoo! may not be equipped to handle. Yahoo! does provide a “responsible gaming” tutorial, but the Press will be quick to jump on any tales of woe from players who’ve lost a lot of money from the site. Broken marriages and lost homes will only make the stories juicer. [Punctuation slightly edited.]

[*] The contradiction is brewed by Mike Arrington’s hyper fertile imagination, only.

Should Americans tell the other world’s citizens (in Ireland) and “subjects” (in Great Britain) what should or should not make it in their merchant economy? Go fugging yourself, Mike Arrington!!!