Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions to caity.weaver@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."
Gasp! Village Voice Media abuses Digg. But ineffectively.
Forget hacking voting machines; our media brethren are, at this moment, most concerned with gaming Digg to get out the vote for their stories about Barack Obama's apparent victory in the electoral college. (Our sister site Gawker was late to the game; its headline submission for "Obama Wins!" was seventh in line, …
In "King of Digg," GangstaDawg4Life takes on FroggietheDestroyer! This is the future of media. Kevin Rose conceived Digg, his so-called social news site, as an experiment in democratizing the consumption of news. Rose's formula: Get rid of middleman editors. Replace them with the wisdom of crowds. Or so he says. But…
Three's a trend, right? Take the false report of Steve Jobs's heart attack, spread by a CNN website and Digg; a six-year-old report of United Airlines' bankruptcy, resuscitated by Google News; and a silly story about Oprah and Sarah Palin. And what do you get? Lies, lies, lies on the Internet! Some Web operations are…
Matt Harding, the guy who travels around the world taking videos of people dancing with him, knows how to work the system without doing much work. First, he got Stride gum to sponsor his video-making trip around the world. Since the result went viral, he's milked his fame on the speaking circuit. First he made yet…
CBS hired anchor Katie Couric to turn return its news division to ratings glory. Didn't happen. So like any good media organization in the 21st century, CBS has resorted to good old-fashioned Diggbaiting. Below a video of Couric in her office, sporting a Digg T-shirt and reading a script — "Oh, hi everybody! Nice to…
First Bare Naked Ladies, then Weezer, and now a hip-hop performer calling himself AC have marketed themselves by parodying Internet memes. AC takes on Apple's "New Soul" commercial in the video below. And since three's a trend, we feel obliged to report on it, allowing us to post the video and let it work its magic.…
Click to viewOf the 377 stories Digg founder Kevin Rose has submitted to his social news site, 367 went to the site's front page. When I read this, all I could think was: God, those 10 that didn't make it must have really sucked. Maybe he should have pretended to be a hot girl? We thought we'd help the spammers…
That article from Sunday Styles about hip librarians is still at the top of the NYT's Most Emailed list. [NYT]
Cosmo recently unveiled some video games on its website that it hopes will prove irresistible to the legions of young women who turn to them for advice about what to do when their vaginas get sparkly. But one of them, "Boy Toy," is so moronic that we think you would have to be mid-lobotomy to get any sort of…
