For the gays, the usefulness of any technology has always been measured on how it will help them get laid. Craigslist has slowed down cruising by forcing people to enter those stupid loopy words every time you want to respond to an m4m ad. Manhunt is about to roll out extensive changes. It's getting harder to find homo hookups online. Where should gays go to find sex so their not roaming the streets like a pack of cock-hungry zombies? Or should we just find the right girl, settle down, have some kids, move to Cobble Hill, and commit suicide 20 years later because we're unfulfilled?

Manhunt: The most popular virtual bathhouse, this is still the place to go for one-stop shopping for sloppy seconds. But remember how well the "new Facebook" went? Imagine similar (but even cattier) sentiments when they change their format later this month. We got an advanced look at it (thanks to a lonely night in a European capital—don't ask), and it's not amazing.
Who You'll Find Online: Just about every gay with an internet connection
Why It Will Catch On: The new design makes reading mail and seeing your friends easier. Also, it's where the boys are.
Why It Sucks: The searches are harder than ever. And this is it's first major overhaul since 2002 and basically all they did was change the color scheme, reorganized the homepage, and add "cock size" as a category. We expect more.
Celeb You Might Accidentally Cruise: Lance Bass

Craigslist: The "Penny Saver of dick" (as Margaret Cho calls it) has always been free and easy, if not full of trolls.
Who You'll Find Online: Trolls, meth addicts, and "Str8 guys."
Why It Will Catch On: It offers every insane fetish you could possibly imagine and a ton of anonymity.
Why It Sucks: Now, to respond to every ad, you have to answer one of those annoying questions that prevent spammers. It provides uneven returns. And, it's full of trolls.
Celeb You Might Accidentally Cruise: Larry Craig

Grindr: This iPhone app locates other users close to you so that you two can meet on a street corner before getting it on.
Who You'll Find Online: Urban gays with iPhones.
Why It Will Catch On: The gays are early adopters and love playing with gadgets. Also, it's easier to travel down the block to meet a guy than across town. Also, have you seen Guys with iPhones [NSFW]? If these are the 'mos using it, sign us up!
Why It Sucks: Not enough people yet. If it can't get the boys laid, they'll go back to Manhunt and Grindr will be as effective as a vibrator with dead batteries.
Celeb You Might Accidentally Cruise: Neil Patrick Harris

Adam4Adam: This is a burgeoning free service that survives on advertising (mostly of the porn variety) rather than subscriptions.
Who You'll Find Online: Those too cheap or poor to pay for a cruising website.
Why It Will Catch On: The economy has melted and no one has a job.
Why It Sucks: You get what you pay for, and in this case, you'll be paying a copay for that rash you have in the morning. Oh, and the orange and brown color-scheme looks like a 1970s kitchen gone awry.
Celeb You Might Accidentally Cruise: Bobby Trendy

Atomic Men: This West Coast-based site is pushing a big relaunch. Then again, so are some American car companies, and we're skeptical about that too.
Who You'll Find Online: Guys in LA who have worked through everyone on Manhunt.
Why It Will Catch On: Hmm...all the other hook up sites have died?
Why It Sucks: It's ugly, there aren't enough guys, it's confusing, and you have to pay for it. At least Adam4Adam is disgusting and free.
Celeb You Might Accidently Cruise: Perez Hilton

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

• 1. Julia Allison
• 2. Twitter
• 3. Jason Calacanis
• 4. Wikipedia
• 5. Henry Blodget
• 6. Dave Winer
• 7. Blogs
• 8. Dead newspapers everywhere
• 9. Congressman Jared Polis
• 10. Robert Scoble
• 11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
• 12. Digg
• 13. Perez Hilton
• 14. /b/
• 15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
• 16. Oversharing
• 17. Mark Zuckerberg
• 18. Chris Crocker
• 19. Internet commenters
• 20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

• The Palin technique: answer the question you wished you'd gotten. Actually, a lot of these rules are the same as the ones for political arguments. Barely-exaggerated example: Saturday Night Live's personal Palin, Tina Fey.
  
• Never defend yourself. Always attack first! (That's what Denton does.)
  
• Pull the "Bitter" card: a catch-all dismissal that works every time. Someone made a rude comment about you? They're just bitter, jealous. Bitter and jealous.
  
• The old no-fail adage, "Don't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the gallon," as Silicon Alley Insider reminded Roubini. Or buys bandwith by the pound or whatever.
  
• Related: Don't storm off the Internet in a huff. Also: "How to Handle Interview Requests on the Internet."
  
• Late night posts (Roubini's screeds began at 2:01 a.m.): bad idea. Drunk blogging: same.
  
• "Turn someone’s generality into an absolute. For example, if someone makes a general statement that Americans celebrate Christmas, point out that some people are Jewish and so anyone who thinks that ALL Americans celebrate Christmas is stupid. (Bonus points for accusing the person of being anti-Semitic.)" —From Scott Adams, Dilbert creator.
  
• Images count more than words. Or! A clever cartoon or video clip can be utterly devastating in the way that text is not. Like this video, which we've re-named "How to Shut Down an Internet Argument."
  
  
  
  
  

But imagine living your life under an Internet microscope, where total strangers are invited to criticize your life, your work, your romantic choices, and your psychology in front of a jeering audience of commenters. Gessen-bashing briefly replaced alcohol abuse as the favorite sport of NYC blog commenters, and in his zeal to respond, Keith did everything wrong...

The smarter you are, the less likely you are to respond appropriately when you are attacked on the Internet... Writers, academics, executives— successful people are more likely to handle this wrong because they have been trained, more or less, to expect rational behavior from their peers. [Lubbock Online]

Even though it's hard—so hard—and we don't always follow our own advice, the only way to deal with a blog-avalanche is to ignore blog commenters, bloggers, and blogs in general. Try avoiding the entire Internet if you have a book coming out, actually—the last thing you need to be wasting your time with is obsessively checking your Amazon rankings. Work on your next book, but don't be tempted for one second to make it include more than a cursory reference to Internet culture, Candace Bushnell.

Ohai, Ben! You have been fearing this day for a while, haven't you?

How does an auto-overexposed fameball gal go from being relationship kryptonite to having an actual relationship that has literally gone three complete months without being blogged? We're sure Leventhal came up with a long list of rules about them dating. Like, no being seen in public together, no being photographed in public together, no mentioning him on her all-inclusive Nonsociety blog, etc. That is so romantic.

Sadly, all this hush-hush secrecy and behaving like real celebs will only further inflate the self-importance of everybody involved. And thus, life will mimic art.

[Photo: Nick McGlynn for Random Night Out]

The latest (and well-researched) anti-snark missile comes from Geekcentric:

"Somewhere along the line we stopped using snark on the people who “deserved it” and started snarking at normal people. In fact, with the advent of email and open comment sections, many bloggers have discovered that the line between celebrities who are worthy of scorn and normal people who are just doing their jobs is a very thin line indeed.

I remember tearing into Ken Levine when he mocked my favorite television show on his blog. Ken is an Emmy-winning writer/producer/director — the creator of some of the most popular shows on television. Exactly the kind of elitist celebrity jerk that it’s safe to make fun of — until he shows up in your comment section and turns into a real human being.

Suddenly this Hollywood luminary, so famous I couldn’t really conceive him as a person, was addressing my comments and taking me seriously. He tried to be polite and respect my opinion, and it’s very hard to snark at somebody after that."

That's a good defensive strategy for the snarked-upon, actually!

NYU Local, on the other hand, is more of the opinion that some websites such as this one just aren't snarky enough anymore and have in fact "lost [their] edge":

"These days, it’s tough to imagine a world where Gawker, current media gossip mega-site and “flagship” of the Gawker Empire, had enough chutzpah to really piss people off."

You should see my inbox, sweetie!

"The internet was the happy place where smart people could finally scream “FUCK EVERY1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”—a sentiment I never thought I’d miss. But with Gawker now adding “Well, I guess some people are actually okay,” the sardonic are alone again in their silence."

The writer has an adorably overinflated idea of this and other snarky websites' importance. Let's take that down a notch: we'll begin by oversharing that some of us are working from home today and not wearing any pants. (It's hard to be sophisticated while not wearing pants—but it's so much easier to be snarky!)

If there was less snark, the world would maybe, possibly be a better place. But it would be way less fun. Snark is an essential social release mechanism, like blowing off steam at the bar and talking shit about everyone in your industry after work. Gossip is necessary as a way of exchanging vital social information.

Perhaps we'll begin by putting on some pants.

Update:

Goop.com. I know, sounds gross, right? Which bodily fluid does it remind you of? (Tagline: "Nourish the inner aspect.")

"While still minimal, the website includes a newsletter signup and a first person essay from Paltrow, a married mother of two, about what matters to her. It also features yet-to-be-filled sections called "Make," "Go," "Get," "Do," "Be," and "See."

[HuffPo]

In the end TNR retracted Beauchamp's columns in a hand-wringy 7,000-word piece called Fog Of War describing in painstaking (and also, gratuitous) detail their efforts to corroborate Beauchamp's claims of which Beauchamp's fact-checker-turned-wife Elspeth Reeve says: "That piece says, 'Pity me. I'm a victim of these two crazy kids.'" (She no longer works for them, duh!) (But Beauchamp is still in the Army!)

The big takeaway of the piece is that Beauchamp is an eminently decent, credible young who made a few mistakes — the infamous "mess hall incident" happened in Kuwait, for instance, not Iraq — in the execution of some of this war's most truly courageous journalism, only to get thrown under the bus (Bradley!) that rightfully ran over the careers of young TNR fabricator Stephen Glass and young TNR plagiarist Ruth Shalit. Because: conservatives are evil people with no interest in truth and TNR editor Frank Foer is fundamentally a pussy.

To be sure, that is the angle one would expect from Spencer "Attackerman" Ackerman who has not exactly been grinding his axe against the magazine that fired him in private. To be also sure, Beauchamp did a lot of caving under all the fact-checking pressure. (He was assigned backbreaking labor in 120-degree heat and Ackerman tells us he was hospitalized for a viral infection and the Army put a gag order on him but in any case, he disappeared.)

But motives aside the piece rings true. Because it most certainly has gotten to the point where internet skirmishes are as pointlessly vicious and traumatizing as real ones. I am not being melodramatic! You read that Times Magazine story about the internet trolls who wouldn't stop making fun of that poor sweet-faced 13-year-old kid who had already killed himself. (Also, if I am not mistaken you are reading Gawker!) Why would it surprise you that over in Iraq this same generation kicks around the corpses of Iraqi children or whatever? That is the cruel radiance of what is, friends, and laying it bare is the only purpose journalists can possibly serve.

But there's a dramatic disconnect — has been for awhile, but it's widening — between the guys who run lofty cash-strapped journalism outlets and the actual world they profess to strive to portray. For years those guys have lived in the world of prestige and peer esteem and talking points and ASME applications and panel discussions and correspondents dinners. But once there was a time when they didn't have that whole scene going on all day long on Bloggingheads and Memeorandum.

As long as this disconnect deepens amidst this backdrop of tightening news budgets, a nagging insecurity about the future of journalism combined with a hardening certainty among its younger generation of practitioners that success within it requires above all else a commitment to one's personal "brand"…well, guys like Frank Foer are going to take chances on hot young "voices." And those voices will invariably get silenced by mobs of angry haters in protracted, embarrassing sagas ending in tortured lamentations that "those young folks, all they care about is their personal brands!" but in the end only serve to expose how little anyone really gives a shit about the truth at this point.

Notes On A Scandal

It was found while some people were cleaning the beach, and they tracked him down. (No, he didn't find it on E-bay!) "Now aged 33, Mr Wylie said his mother had encouraged him to throw bottles into the sea as a child - something which he continues to do with his own children."

[BBC]

Quoth the FBI,

"But because of the overwhelming size of the collection and the complex and time-consuming nature of provenance investigations, we decided the best and most expeditious course of action was to publicize the art work to the general public... If you have information on the provenance, acquisition, or ownership of any work of art from the Kingsland collection shown here—or if you want to make a claim—please contact Agent Wynne at (718) 286-7302 or by e-mail at James.Wynne@ic.fbi.gov."

FBI

So this video is pretty dorky, and if you couldn't already tell from the bad acting, they weren't really there to witness it. It got over 500,000 views on YouTube, though, and that's what's important.

But when I was shooting heroin every day for seven years the last thing I wanted was a girlfriend in addition to my all-consuming vice. Junkies had expensive habits, rarely wanted to have sex and were an all-around reminder of why I hated myself. So I had a string of flings with straight girls that would last until my behaviors added up to something that—even if they couldn’t place—were impossible for them to ignore. The last of these relationships was with a tiny 19-year-old brunette who made me desperately want to kick dope...

We're sincerely glad he's clean now. The lesson here has nothing to do with drugs, however. The lesson is the "who?" you thought after "Matt Harvey." (Nothing against Matt—you're just the example here, dude.) Internet microfame is short and fleeting. But oh, how fun it is to elevate people to miniceleb status until it becomes theater of the absurd.

(It's not that absurd if you think about it, however—if the many blogs of the world are gonna insist on churning out content 24-7, we're going to all need some entertainers to provide us with freaking content. Microcelebs serve this purpose.)

Enjoy your fifteen minutes while it lasts, folks.

It's not really that riveting or particularly clever, but that's not the point: fake sex diaries are how you know you've made it as a micro-celeb (for a couple minutes.) Fake anything (Steve Jobs, Nick Denton) being created in your name is simply one of the Internet's strange customs.

[Fake Sex Diaries]

That's not to say that online commenters are any more or less accurate than their real live predecessors—civilians during previous wars often didn't have any insight or even eyewitness accounts of the situation they were escaping. Rumors, propaganda, and paranoia abounds in both the in-person and digital retelling of these stories, only now journalists don't even have to leave the house to get their quotes. Columbia Journalism Review calls the Russian blogosphere a "lively debate," but it reads more like a clusterfuck, much like the actual war itself.

On the other hand, who would've imagined that online-diary website LiveJournal would become the front lines for disseminating information for journalists and citizens blogging from the actual front lines? CJR also reports that while Georgia's access to Russian websites is getting shut down, LiveJournal—popular amongst young Russians—is "accessible because of its .com suffix, rather than the suddenly problematic .ru suffix."

"Hello! I'm Julia's intern and we're currently working on compiling some emails from readers. Julia loves part of your email (below), and we'd like to include your last name, age and where you live (city and state) along with it.

The email has only been read by Julia and myself. Currently, Julia is just using your email for her own personal collection, but I will update you if anything should change.

Thanks so much,

Samantha"

One more bit from Jules for the prospective new intern(s): "PS. Please let us know if you would be comfortable on camera. It’s TOTALLY okay if you’re not, we just need that info for planning purposes." Oh, right, for that imaginary TV show!