Battle of the LA blogs

LAVoice.org resides now at its permanent home (www.lavoice.org), after a little hosting snafu. Recent postings include a critical open letter to Mayor Hahn by publisher Mack Reed and a blessing of Showtime's "The L Word" by contributor Yael Swerdlow, who says she has dated enough women for the characters to seem authentic to her.

The group blog seems to have stopped its tweaking of LA.COMfidential, the klutzily-named blog by the paid staff at LA.com. One of those writers reports on New Yorker editor David Remnick's talk with Ken Auletta on Tuesday night at the Hammer Museum.

In its short life, LA.COMfidential has apparently managed to ruffle some blogger feathers. There's a long exchange with many links at the group blog blogging.la over the question of whether LA.COMfidential should even call itself a blog -- and more importantly, since it has a staff and corporate money behind it, whether it really should be grabbing material for free from other Los Angeles-centric blogs. (It should be noted, the site insists it does nothing but quote-and-link as other blogs do.) It's all aired in a long comments thread at LABlogs.com, the first (and I assume biggest) of the local group blogs. One revelation is that the the main inspiration behind LA.COMfidential is playwright and longtime blogger Brian Flemming, a co-founder of Slumdance. Nonetheless, the upshot is that blogging.la asked that its material no longer be linked by LA.COMfidential.

We'll be discussing all this at the L.A. Observed staff lunch later today...

Edited 11:10 a.m.