Josh Stein carved an original niche in the vast field of internet sociology: Figuring out exactly what drives the tools who comment on the New York Times website. Drawing, surely, on his own experience with an admittedly smarter batch of internet nano-pundits, and wisely selecting a random-as-all-hell Jennifer 8. Lee article as his test subject, the former Gawker writer discerned a rough ontology of Web news commenters, expressed in four types: smarter than you, more insanely random than you, boring and bored. Stein's study is sure to revolutionize community management at, like, Slate and a couple of other sites, but in the meantime he has already moved on to the next unconquered research frontier: ranking sites based on the sadness of their commenters. Hint: YouTube is near the bottom. [Joshua David Stein] (This headline stolen, by the way, from a commenter.)

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