The difference I see between CodeSchool and Codecademy is that Codecademy's front page is targeted to people with zero prior experience. CodeSchool on the other hand is pushing classes for learning CoffeeScript, jQuery, and Rails. People with no prior experience aren't going to know what the heck those are or why they should care. Codecademy's proposition on the other hand is straight forward, "Learn to code". Note there is no mention on their main page of what language. It's like they are doing for coding what Apple did for the PC marketing in the sense that Apple doesn't really focus on the processor memory details etc...

That's a great point. They seem to be the first to focus on the simplicity of the experience.

Curious to see what Resig does as well in this space with the Khan Acdemy's JS course.

Codecademy appears (for now) to be entirely free - which is not the case at all for Codeschool.com. To me, a free site is "way cooler" (to use your expression) than one that requires a fairly pricey monthly subscription.

Codeschool.com has some free courses, so they already have way more "free" content than codecademy. The paid courses are just great addons to that.

Does Codeschool have as many people signed up as codecademy? That could be one reason for the press. I would guess Codecademy has more users because it's free and you can start learning within 10 seconds of landing on their homepage.

Tryruby.org has been doing that for years, has it not?

tryruby.org is totally unrelated. It's not directed learning - it just drops you into an REPL, what good does that do people who have never coded before (the primary audience of codecademy)? It has a help feature, but it's clearly not the main point or call to action.

Codecademy instructs you immediately. Tryruby has a tutorial hidden as a "help" link among other identical-looking links. It is not a clear call to action.

yep, not to mention tryruby is currently a codeschool activity.