The weeks subject of “The Sunday Morning Post” was not an easy subject to profile. A ProBlogger in every sense of the word, Michael Arrington has seen a variety of successes on the Internet. It would appear that he is one of those individual’s with the midas touch. He is Technorati’s Number 2 most popular Blog.

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Orange, California) is the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. Wired magazine also included him in a flowchart of “internet blowhards” citing his obsession with “Web 2.0″.

Arrington grew up in California, USA and Surrey, England and graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a major in economics. He went on to Stanford Law School and graduated in 1995. He practiced corporate and securities law at O’Melveny & Myers, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Arrington was co-founder of Achex, an internet payments company, which was sold to First Data Corp for $32 million and is now the back-end of Western Union online. His other entrepreneurial endeavors include co-founding Zip.ca and Pool.com, acting as chief operating officer for Razorgator, and founding Edgeio. He was also more recently on the board of directors for the startup Foldera which was designing a software as a service organizational tool.

Arrington rose to internet prominence with his Silicon Valley blog, TechCrunch. TechCrunch covers Internet startups and news, and has been the origin of several startup news scoops and exclusives.

While thinking of a subject for this post, there are literally hundreds of subjects to choose from in the area of social media where it benefits Bloggers. However, I can only think of three that have a “killer app” kind of impact on the Blogger’s destiny. I would venture to guess that Twitter is one, with MySpace and Linkedin as the others. I have covered the founders of Twitter and Facebook; now meet Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He attended high school at The Putney School. He graduated from Stanford University (where he won a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award) with a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems, and from Oxford University with a master’s degree in philosophy.

Hoffman says he saw academia as an opportunity to make an “impact”, but later realized that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a bigger platform. “When I graduated from Stanford my plan was to become a professor and public intellectual. That is not about quoting Kant. It’s about holding up a lens to society and asking ‘who are we?’ and ‘who should we be, as individuals and a society?’ But I realized academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact.”

His first job was a summer internship with Inglenook, a Napa Valley winery. After working at Apple Computer and Fujitsu, Hoffman co-founded his first company, SocialNet.com. While at Socialnet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service, and later joined the firm as a full-time employee. At the time of PayPal’s acquisition by eBay in 2002, he was Executive Vice President of PayPal in charge of business and corporate development. His entire professional career can be found on his LinkedIn profile.

Reid was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his role as Chairman and President of Products in February 2007. LinkedIn is a business-oriented Internet-based social network service. He has been called the “most connected man in all of Silicon Valley”. He has strong relationships with many of the central players in Web 2.0, especially entrepreneurs, executives, and investors. He invented the term for his people as the new “Second Generation Web Entrepreneurs”. He leads as a board director of a variety of Silicon Valley businesses, mostly in the social network domain, including Mozilla, Burger King, Vendio, Six Apart, Kiva.org, Tagged, and Zynga. He is an investor in Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Grockit, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Zynga and several other firms. Reid is currently executive chairman of Linkedin and partner at Greylock Partners.

He currently lives in Silicon Valley, California with his wife.

When starting this section of Bloggers Market, I had hoped to highlight some of the new talent of “The New Media”, but as I got further into the understanding of the Internet, I couldn’t help but be drawn to those that are responsible for the building of this dynamic medium. All playing a part in the intricate construction of what we have come to rely on for our daily information fix. None plays a bigger role in this new way of life and social interaction than Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York to a Jewish family and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. As a young lad Mark had an interest in computer programming, working of programs for communications applications & tools and, as one might imagine, games. He attended high school at Ardsley High School before he transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy where he studied Latin.

Mark built a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits, and was courted by Microsoft and AOL when both tried to purchase Synapse. Mark decided to head to Harvard instead, where he started “Facebook” from his dorm room on February 4, 2004. Mark originally had intended for Facebook to be used by his Harvard group, but soon enlisted the help of Dustin Moskovitz to spread the idea to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale. Obviously wanting to keep it an Ivy League thing.

Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz decided to move to Palo Alto, California during the summer of 2004, where they leased a small house that would serve as their first office. Over the summer Dustin met Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who co-founded Pay-Pal and provided an early opportunity to Peter Thiel to invest in Facebook.

As Facebook went through it’s growing pains with the likes of “News Feed”, “Connect”, and “Beacon” it was able to pitch Microsoft on a 1.6% stake of the company for $240 million. On that formula, it is said that at least Microsoft believes that Facebook is worth in the neighborhood of 15 Billion, which is a pretty good neighborhood.

And what is Mark Zuckerberg Tweeting about? I kid you not ………. Facebook, man,…….. you just can’t think this stuff up. Go configure!
Here it is as of March 13, 2009: “Also just created a public page on FB: www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg”. Think you can give us an update there Mark!!!

When looking for a subject for this week’s “The Sunday Morning Post” the choice was an easy one; however, once again it would seem that I have stumbled upon a subject that is hard to define, yet has made a huge contribution to this and many fellow Bloggers. No birth-dates, no children, no wife, no working on a family farm….. just cold, hard facts. Dave Sifry is all about the cold, hard facts. I’m not sure this post will make for a warm and fuzzy read, but it’s sure to be educational.

Dave Sifry is an entrepreneur with over 20 years experience in the I.T industry. Most recently, he founded Technorati, the largest blog search engine in the world. He is Chairman of Technorati’s Board of Directors and served as CEO from 2002 to 2007. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave lived and worked in Kobe, Japan for Mitsubishi Electric, and speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. While he now lives in foggy San Francisco, he has an interest in the outdoors and is drawn to Yosemite, in his hometown state of California.

Dave was a co-founder and the CTO of Sputnik. Prior to Sputnik, he was co-founder, CTO, and Vice President of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc, having built Linuxcare’s services infrastructure.

Dave is a recognized expert on leadership development, blogs and the massive changes in the digital media environment, Open Source development, and the Linux operating system.

He is also the creator of Projectdocs, an online document management and collaboration service, and Hoosgot, a lazyweb service. He served on the founding Board of Directors of Linux International, the Advisory Board of the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Technical Advisory Board of the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement.

Like so many of my subjects, Dave no longer keeps a regular Blog, which is truly our loss; his last entry at Sifry.com was on April 19, 2009 and titled: Great Kids Afternoon Project: Claymation! He does, however, leave in his absence a hard-earned understanding of the Blogging Process with his train of thought. React quickly, make your post easy to read, link, optimize for the search engines and don’t forget to post! Now, those are cold hard facts!

Jason Kottke is an American Blogger with a degree in physics from Coe College and was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” as a Blogger in 2003.

Kottke, a pioneering Blogger, began his Blog in March, 1998. On February 22, 2005, Kottke announced that he had left his job in web design to work on kottke.org full-time within a “micropatronage” model (subscription blogging). Exactly one year later, Kottke announced that only 1450 micro-patrons had contributed $39,900 and that he would not attempt a second year. As of May 2006, the Blog was and is supported by paid advertisements. He is married to Meg Hourihan who cofounded Pyra Labs with Evan Williams, the company that launched “Blogger” later sold to Google.
His latest post, “Secret Restaurant Menus” was posted on March 10, 2010. He holds an Alexa rating of 19,137 as of March 10, 2010 which is an 11% improvement over the previous month.

While digging into the archives for this story I couldn’t help but notice the footer of kottke.org which shows a measure of personality and reads: “You’re visiting kottke.org. All content by Jason Kottke (contact me) unless otherwise noted, with some restrictions on its use. Good luck will come to those who dig around in the archives. If you’ve reached this point by accident, I suggest panic. In memory of DFW, rest in peace. Thanks for everything.”

I couldn’t ignore his footer to his resume’ either (here’s the link): “My mom thinks I’m really great, but more appropriate references are available upon request”.

While finishing up on this post, I thought I would take a look at what Jason was Tweeting about today. Guess that was unusual timing!

“kottke.org is 12 years old today. Land sakes, where’s the time gone?”

If you’d like to know what is hidden below, highlight the redacted text below:

And catch this trick, pretty cool huh? This is from one of Jason’s Post. It’s called redacted text. Thanks Jason!!! Ya gotta love those Pro-Blogger tricks!

Meg Hourihan is the co-founder, along with Evan Williams, of Pyra Labs, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was acquired by Google. She published weblogs at Megnut.com and meg.hourihan.com. She co-founded Kinja along with Nick Denton of Gawker Media.

She is the co-author of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, and a frequent speaker at technical conferences concerning online journalism and the role of women in technology. Hourihan was named a Young Innovator Who Will Create the Future in 2003 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. PC Magazine named Evan Williams, Paul Bausch, and Hourihan (the Blogger team) as People of the Year in 2004. She was a member of the RSS Advisory Board from 2006 to 2007.

Hourihan married fellow blogger Jason Kottke on March 25, 2006. Their son, Ollie, was born on July 3, 2007. Their daughter, Minna, was born September 21, 2009.

At this point, I’m going to take a spot of “Literary License”, which I am normally reluctant to do with the posts found in “The Sunday Morning Post”. I’ve always thought that I would let the facts just stand for themselves. However with Meg Hourihan, I have to stray from that intent just a bit, as there is so little hard information on her technical career. In fact, Meg Hourihan has had a fragmented, if not colorful career. With so little known, and the absence of an interview to fall back on, one has to be careful in filling in the blanks. So I offer these observations with trepidation.

Meg is “the” pioneering Pro-Blogger, maybe the best. While doing my research for this very small piece about an otherwise complex personality, it is easy to see how she naturally rose to high levels in technology. As her prominence increased, from the obscure and quaint, to the spotlight of popularity, Meg Hourihan has slowly faded into the background of New York and the privacy of Family Life. By all appearances, it looks like something between “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally”.

Her two Blogs that are named above have fallen into a quiet neglect. Meg.Hourihan.com celebrates the birthday of a popular Blog on May 2, 2006 only to post three more times before falling silent on June 2, 2006. Her most active Blog, Megnut.com, began to fade somewhere between the births of Ollie and Minna, dropping off in October 2007, dormant in 2008 and only active in June, July, and August of 2009. Her last post was this past February 17 with the post “No Favorite Food For A Toddler.”

I like to drop-in on my subject’s Twitter accounts to see what they are doing the very day that I post their articles. A quick view of Meg Hourihan’s day shows her response to her husband’s Tweet that “Kottke.org” (Jason Kotte’s Blog) is 12 years old today, Her response: @jkottke Golly!

What a perfect ending to this post!

Evan Williams was born on March 31, 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska. Raised on the family farm, Williams, when not in school helped out with the irrigation chores. He attended the University of Nebraska for a year and a half, and following tradition left to purse a career in technology.

Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, co-founded Pyra Labs to provide Project Management Software. A note-taking feature of the software was spun off into the now popular Google app., Blogger.

Google acquired Pyra Labs on February 13, 2003. Williams left Google in October 2004 to co-found Odeo, a podcasting company. In late 2006, Williams co-founded Obvious with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees. In April 2007, Odeo was acquired by Sonic Mountain.

In 2007, Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey hooked-up to start “Twitter”. In October 2008, Williams became CEO of Twitter, displacing Jack Dorsey who became chairman of the board.

Evan Williams lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with wife, Sara Morishige, and son, Miles born on August 11, 2009.

If your feeling like the following information on Williams represents “Cliffs Notes” instead of a journalistic post, there’s good reason. While in the course of doing research for this post, there just was not much information on Williams himself. He has done plenty of interviews, but rarely talks about himself. It’s pretty much Twitter this and that.

Williams like Biz Stone still manages his own Blog, though he also, like Stone has not been active for some time, since December 28, 2009 where his last post was titled “They’re not talking to you”.

And what is Evan Tweeting about today? OH: “My face awaits you.” ……….. Very Strange!

Biz Stone, 35, was born Christopher Isaac Stone in Boston on March 10, 1974, grew up in Wellesley, Mass., and lives with his wife, Livia in Berkeley. He attended Northeastern University on a scholarship and majored in English studies also attending the University of Massachusetts on a theater arts scholarship before dropping out to work for a designer of Book Jackets.

When the company decided to move its design division to New York in 1995, Stone decided to stay in Mass and four years later he and Marc Ginsburg started the website “Xanga.com” you know “The Blogging Community” in 2000.

In 2004, Stone moved to California to help Even Williams re-launch “Blogger” that Google had purchased from Evan Williams company “Pyra Labs” in 2003. In 2005 both Stone and Williams left Google to form Odeo, a podcast company.

In 2007, Stone, Williams and Jack Dorsey hooked-up to start “Twitter”. And if all that was not enough to keep one busy, Biz Stone has penned two books on Blogging. The first “Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (New Riders, 2002) and Who Let The Blogs Out? (St Martins, 2004). Stone has his own Blog, but has not posted to it since April 23, 2008 when he was worried about insects and telephones ……….. Ahhh, Twitter for Zenomorphs, Cool !!!

And what is Biz tweeting about today? “Walking the dogs around the secret pond http://yfrog.com/1du1rbj” ………. I think he meant to say “Walking the Blogs around the secret pond!” Don’t fall in Biz!!!

Jack Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri on November 19, 1976. By the age of 14 he had developed an interest in “Dispatch Routing” of all things. I guess we all have our passions, Jack’s just happened to be Dispatch Routing and Computer Programming. He attended “Missouri University of Science and Technology” however I failed to find where he had graduated. Considering that most of the Computer Brainiacs that went to college never bothered to finish, this is not really surprising.

In 2000, Dorsey started a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. He had several other business ventures at about the same time. However, it was his interest in dispatch and possibly AOL instant messaging that got he and Biz Stone, his co-founder in business, thinking about SMS texting. They approached a company by the name of Odeo, which has had a colorful history to say the least, and an idea was born. Soon after, a chap by the name of Evan Williams join in the fun and a company named Obvious was founded. On October 16, 2008 Williams took over the position of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.

On that October day in 2008 it is rumored that Evan Williams forced Dorsey from his offices. We will never really know what did happen, but one thing is sure, Dorsey has moved on to other projects. Presumably, he is presently holed up in San Francisco working on a service to rival Paypal by providing person-to-person electronic payments via iPhone ( and you can bet; BlackBerry, iPad and a dozen other platforms). However that was four months ago and no word about progress has been forthcoming.

I thought I would hit Jack over at Twitter to see what he was doing on the day, maybe I could grab a tidbit or two about his future plans. So, …… Here it is in all its glory, his latest Tweet: “Huge. RT @digiphile “With tutelage from @jack, eBay CEO John Donahoe signs up on Twitter as @tallboy6″-@edyson: http://flic.kr/p/7EB7PF”. Geek speak for sure, but I think he is telling the world that eBay’s CEO just signed up for an account for Twitter! You see, Jack gave the world Twitter!!! God Bless ya, Jack! Some habits die hard!

I thought I would re-visit an old subject this week for “The Sunday Morning Post:” Arianna Huffington. When I first started Bloggers Market, I thought I would take a shot at “Arianna Huffington” as a keyword and suggested in my post that “Arianna Huffingtosn should visit my Blog”. Man, …….. in a word ZOOM! Really one of the few times I owned Google!

I don’t really know Arianna Huffington personally of course, so I can’t bring anything else to bear on this post that hasn’t already been written, and I doubt that I will be receiving any kind of granted interview, so ……… I fall back on my Blog building skills and present “Pillar Content” on Arianna Huffington. I am always challenged on the Blogs that I sell, with the potential buyer of my Blogs wanting to know if the content is unique. My response is usually the same, I’m a geek, not a wizard. The new owner who buys the Blog has to provide the new content, not me! I digress ……….

Let me present to you Arianna Huffington as seen through open source Wikipedia. Go ahead and read, you will certainly learn something. Enjoy.

Huffington was born Arianna Stassinopoulos in Athens, Greece, the daughter of Konstantinos (a journalist and management consultant) and Elli (née Georgiadi) Stassinopoulos, and is the sister of Agapi (an author, speaker and performer). To this day, she speaks with a marked Greek accent. She moved to England at the age of 16 and attended Girton College at Cambridge University where in 1971 she was President of the Cambridge Union Society, the third woman to hold the position, and graduated with a BA (later to become an MA in accordance with Cambridge’s practice) in economics in 1972.

After graduation, she moved to London and lived with the journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin, whom she had met while the two were panelists on the TV show Face the Music. In 1980 she left Levin and moved to the United States, after he refused to marry her. Both were, at around this time, disciples of the meditation teacher Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). After Levin’s death in 2004, she called him “the big love of my life, a mentor as a writer, and a role model as a thinker”. During these years and around the time of her involvement with John-Roger‘s religious group, she was involved with Democratic politician and then-governor (currently Attorney General) of California, Jerry Brown. It was during this time that Huffington was first known as a liberal Democrat.

She met oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a family friend of the Bushes, at a 1985 party hosted by Ann Getty in San Francisco. The couple was married in 1986 at a wedding paid for by Getty, who had declared that she needed to find Arianna a husband. They moved to Washington, D.C., when he was appointed to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy. They later established residency in Santa Barbara, California, in order for him to run in 1992 as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won by a significant margin. He was a political conservative on most issues. Arianna campaigned for her husband, courting religious conservatives, arguing for smaller government and a reduction in welfare. In 1994 he narrowly lost the race for the U.S. Senate seat from California to incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

The couple divorced in 1997. The financial terms of their divorce agreement remain undisclosed. Arianna Huffington chose to retain her former husband’s surname, although she had been known as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington during the period of her marriage.

The Huffington Post (often referred to as HuffPo) is an American news website and aggregated blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring various news sources and columnists. The site offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement, world news, and comedy, and is a top destination for news, blogs, and original content. The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a commentary outlet and liberal and progressive alternative to conservative news aggregators like the Drudge Report.

In 2008, the site launched its first local version, HuffPost Chicago; HuffPost New York launched in June, 2009, HuffPo Denver launched on September 15, 2009, and HuffPo Los Angeles launched on December 2, 2009. The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month.

The Huffington Post publishes scoops of current news stories, links to selected prominent news stories, and provides a liberal counterpoint to sites such as the Drudge Report. Compared to other left-wing blogs such as Znet or Daily Kos, The Huffington Post offers both news commentary and coverage. The comment section is home to discussions on politics, religion, and world affairs.

The Huffington Post’s OffTheBus is a citizen-powered online news organization that is a collaboration between The Huffington Post, New York University (NYU), and Jay Rosen‘s NewAssignment.Net. The Huffington Post’s FundRace is a website that tracks contributions to the presidential campaigns and includes a mapping feature that shows contributions broken down by city, neighborhood, and block.

A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its alphabetical Bloggers Index

According to Nielsen NetRatings, Huffington Post had 8.9 million unique visitors in February, 2009 (by way of comparison, the right-leaning Drudge Report had 3.4 million unique visitors).

The Huffington Post has 22 million unique users each month and is the most linked-to blog on the Internet.

I’m going to jump in here real quick and update this post with the current news that Arianna Hugffington has sold the Huffington Post to AOL on Friday, February 4, 2011 for $315 million with about $300 million of that being provided as cash.