There's increasing hope for books that are born as or on blogs. Jeff Kinney, who originally serialized "Diary of A Wimpy Kid" on a website called Funbrain.com, has joined Julie "Julie and Julia" Powell, Frank "PostSecret" Warren and Tucker "That Horrible Asshole" Max in the ranks of authors who gave away the milk for free and whose cows were subsequently bought: "Diary" has sold 147,000 copies, according to Bookscan. "'There's nothing like holding the weight and smelling the paper," said one dad who bought the book after already having read it online. Mmm, paper! [NYT]

Um, someone started a blog inside our blog.

PageSix.com launched today with great fanfare, three Us Weekly staffers [Correction: 3 In Touch staffers, 2 Us staffers.], and millions of Murdoch dollars. This is what it looks like in Firefox. Look out, TMZ! Rape victim-slandering PR house RUBENSTEIN COMMUNICATIONS says, "Cyberspace just got sixed." The information superhighway just has just been emasculated! Dead people with misattributed photos have just been spotted in the blogosphere!

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is really really sorry that he hasn't updated his blog, guys! "Since my last post on the blog, a few months have passed. But this doesn't ‎mean that I have not been keeping my promise of spending fifteen minutes per week ‎on it. As a matter of fact, I have spent more than the allocated time on the blog. The ‎magnitude of the reception and acclamation from the viewers was beyond ‎expectations. So I had to decide how to spend the limited time that I have allocated ‎for the blog; should I write new notes or respect those viewers who kindly and ‎generously have shared their thoughts and opinions with me and sent messages and read ‎their numerous received messages." He'll have so much more time to update now that that Tehran nuclear conference is finally over, though expect posting to drop off again near finals week. [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos]

Have you seen the website "men who look like old lesbians"? Its genius lies in its simplicity. We have never been able to put our finger, before, on what exactly it is about Kyle MacLachlan and Psychedelic Furs singer Richard Butler and Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn (pictured) but: that's what it is.

OMG LOL NOES!!11! We are so totes losing the 2007 Weblog Awards competition in the category of "Best Blog" to like Michelle Malkin and the HuffPoors! (That is my new band name BTW!) Is it because... you're all apathetic voters? Don't you know we care and we crave internets validation??? [Weblog Awards]

"The journalistic culture in which columnists were the only ones allowed to have a personality, and everyone else's bylines were practically interchangeable, is practically gone," wrote Doree Shafrir in the New York Observer yesterday about how "personal branding" has infected even that holiest of holies, the New York Times. She uses the success of former 'TV Newser' turned Times blogger Brian Stelter as an example of the reversal of protocol that's recently taken place—reporters must now market themselves as specialists from the jump, instead of spending time working different beats until finding a comfortable "sincecure" later in life, in order to prevent themselves from being seen as interchangeable and therefore, redundant. The piece is exactly the kind of thinky, finger-on-pulse thing we've come to expect from Doree Shafrir, who also really likes 'The Hills'!

One of our new favorite blogs, Ephemerist, notes that "Guns & Ammo, 'the nation's leading gun and ammunition magazine,' also has a blog"! And it's amazing! It makes me want to shoot people right now! [Fully Loaded]

The New York Times launched their 500th blog today. This one's called "The Board" and it's written by the Editorial Board, those oft-imitated, oft-equaled authors of liberal conventional wisdom. "The Board" will be the first of the Times' dozen Opinion blogs without bylines, though you can always tell Associate Editor Robert Semple's posts by his use of adorable Japanese emoticons. America needed yet another place to read the thoughts of liberal old white people, and who else but the Times editorial board can provide the opinions of Paul Krugman without the passion, or the arguments of Bob Herbert without the hilarious, disarming wit? The commenters are thrilled! "This is the most exciting thing I've heard in weeks!"

The Internet is not an excuse to be boring, stupid, or cruel. Well, cruel's fine. So join me in taking the Pledge to Not Suck at the Internet. Those who pledge get no actual privilege or prize, and the false sense of superiority is a redundant prize for you, but you can maybe make a newsletter for yourselves.

"Ok, so you know how it's pretty typical that a blogger doesn't want to go outside—that they just want to stay indoors and blog all day long? Well when a blogger wants to get outside, they generally want to be able to get out. Unfortunately for me, that is not the case this morning. I AM LOCKED INSIDE MY APARTMENT. Yes, that's right—the door will NOT open, no matter how hard I try." This blog post, and its subsequent 8 updates, did not actually result in this blogger being freed from her apartment sooner than she otherwise would've been. [The Modern Age]

We have high hopes for this brand new website! They're just at the manifesto stage now, but we suspect the fun will begin soon. [Your Blog Blows]

Blogger Addy Fox, who is dating a Googler, took advantage of her beef's two allotted monthly visitor passes and checked up on the accuracy of our assessment of the Googleplex, which we'd found shockingly crappy. She discovered that we were wrong about some things—for instance, the cafeteria is on the 8th floor, not the 16th (I'm bad with numbers!). But we were right when we assumed that the cold chicken wings and tragicomic sushi weren't representative of usual Google fare: "They have an actual sushi chef in one of the cafeterias who made me a truly delicious spicy tuna roll ... then, as we took our trays out onto the terrace, we were greeted by a buffet of tasty 'Mexican Street Food,' complete with mango and tutifruiti soda." Yum yum. But you know what's not so delicious? RACISM.

This week, motorcycle enthusiast Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, said that his department is starting a new blog, "The Board." It'll join the paper's 14 other Opinion section blogs, including the Opinionator, which discusses the op-ed pages of other newspapers and will benefit from being freed from the Times now-dead paywall, TimesSelect. The Times looks to be the newspaper blog leader—they have 40 active blogs, not counting seasonal blogs like David Carr's movie awards season craziness, beating the Guardian with 18, the New York Daily News with 22, the Wall Street Journal with 16 active blogs, the Los Angeles Times with 27, the San Francisco Chronicle with 26, the Miami Herald with 31, and the Chicago Tribune with 33, for a random sampling. But. Do you read any of these blogs?

My friend Alice likes to say that we're living in the Too Much Information Age, and you don't have to look further than any breakup between any two people who both have blogs to understand what she means by that. And if those two people are both Internet-created pseudocelebrities, you have the voyeuristically fascinating, oddly revelatory theme park of narcissism that is the Julia Allison—Jakob Lodwick breakup.

We were recently discussing the wide array of porn that modern technology makes available to feckless youth, who are generally unappreciative of the struggles their predecessors endured in order to obtain a simple glimpse of breast or tuft of triangle. "In our day," moaned a friend, "you had to sneak down after midnight and turn on HBO very quietly. These kids have it so easy!" Now we've come across a website that operates as a time capsule for those who remember having to shoplift a copy of Oui if they wanted to explore themselves. Check it out. [True Beat Generation]

Copyranter thoughtfully assembles a collection of softcore American Apparel for your weekend masturbatory needs. Of course, seeing as you're already on the Internet, you can probably find something better, but it's still nice to have them all in one place. [Copyranter]

The New York Times has taken upon itself the responsibilities of in loco parentis. Or maybe, in loco retardis, because the New York tips they're publishing for new college arrivals are WOW IDIOTIC. "Don't try to swim in the rivers. Drownings are all too common" for one. There's a reason people die like this; it's called God's vengeance. Also: "Don't spend money on condoms. The city gives them away" for another. Yeah, at the gay bathhouse. But to the Metro section's credit, over on the Metro blog, all the Times commenters have much worse advice—except for one.

Tired of dealing with your ish all by yourself? Starting right now, you can ask Tionna Tee Smalls, the author of Girl, Get Your Mind Right, and of the blog Talk Dat Ish, about love, relationships, life, and who is the best contestant on 'Making The Band.' We finally found an advice columnist! (She was in Brooklyn.)

A while back, a friend of ours posted a list of "Blog Cheese" cliches like "Blogging drunk. Blogging drunk about how you shouldn't/never blog drunk. 'Cryptic' blogging to seem mysterious. 'Cryptic' blogging to send a secret message to someone. Introducing people at a party by their blog name." Today, Post dater Mandy Stadtmiller adds another item to that long and treasured list: After saying that you've taken a "hiatus" from posting on your blog, making an exception to "defend" yourself against someone who has "libeled" you on the Internet.