Slate drafts a helpful treatise on what not to name your blog. It's a helpful list. Some additional suggestions, off the top of our head: Sploid. Screenhead. Oddjack. Just a thought. [Slate]

The Times' new Freakonomics blog just launched today, and boy did it come in with a bang! Steven D. Levitt wants to know what you would do to maximize terror if you were a terrorist with limited resources. Don't worry, though: "Consider that posting them could be a form of public service: I presume that a lot more folks who oppose and fight terror read this blog than actual terrorists. So by getting these ideas out in the open, it gives terror fighters a chance to consider and plan for these scenarios before they occur." Okay, Steve! Hmm... we would start by making Maureen Dowd's content completely free to everyone on the Internet. That or just wait for a short yet intense rainstorm.

In a single blog post, Molly Lambert tears David Denby's latest half-baked column, the "Ur-Quarter-Life Crisis" text 'Garden State,' Ben Kunkel's Emosogynist bildungsroman 'Indecision'" and about ten million other deserving things an entirely new one. She also coins the term [Paul] "Ruddaiasance." We are in love. [This Recording]

"When a book has a high-concept hook like "FORREST GUMP meets Powerball," it's going to go to auction and land a six-figure deal." [Galleycat]

Today, the New Republic's Iraq soldier-blogger revealed his true identity—he's Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, of the Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division. (Questions had been raised as to whether the blogger was actually a soldier, and also whether the gruesome events he described were true.) So that's a huge relief for 'TNR' editor Frank Foer and his new online editor Ben Wasserstein, we're sure! But the Weekly Standard, those fun-loving conservative bastards, aren't letting TNR off the hook quite yet.

Former Minnesotan, total vegetarian, and current Google intern Eric Hielscher has been at his job for a couple weeks now, and he's been blogging about his experiences moving to New York and starting a new job. He met "a nice ex-Puerto Rican (lots of them in NY)" who helped him move! It's a familiar tale, to be sure, but one that is getting played out in the way that only an intern for one of the richest companies in the world, who grew up in an 800-person town in the Midwest, can play it.

The Times has deigned to notice that people are getting hired as bloggers. A very few, though. And in a trend that should be worrisome to English majors, most of those getting gigs seem to be geeky sorts like Robert Scoble, who are adept not just at writing blogs but at setting up the tech behind them. No matter. As anyone at Gawker Media could tell you, the tricky part isn't getting hired to run a blog - it's managing to not get fired.

Blogger confused his site only makes 18 bucks. Hello. It's all about the book deal. [GoWF]

Blogitis: The latest fake new disease. It's apparently diagnosed by a congdonoscopy. [NewsReleaseWire]

You have, by now, surely seen the world-famous video wherein a bunch of kids, using their pelvises, perplex an ottoman. Did you know that, thanks to the creativity of the Internet communities, there is a parody of that video, but about blogging? Hahahahah, it's true! It's this kind of thing that explains why we still haven't told our parents what we really do for a living. (Should you be one of the eight people who missed the original ottoman-fornicating clip, we've placed it after the jump.)

CONFONZ — Yes, cheezburgers have taken over the IntarWeb. Who are we to go against the grain? Bitching and moaning won't help. The Conference Fonzerelli is still here, though his reign of terror is coming to a rapid end. With the weekend, and the Sea Siren parade coming up, the Fonz needs to trade in his leather jacket for a Spongebob-colored cardboard box. In an effort to get him out the door faster, he's wrapped up a nicely flavored selection of little dots for your mastication. After the jump, the Reiser alibi gets stronger, Semel on a Cruise, the Ballminator gets with L. Ron, and did the WSJ change its story?

Can print book coverage and literary blogs ever find a way to get along? Book blogger Maud Newton thinks so: "I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger," she told Times book reporter Motoko Rich. "But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things." A good point, and one that's entirely lost on novelist Richard Ford.

Just now we learn that Ronn Torossian, the insanely successful founder, President & CEO of 5W Public Relations, filed for divorce from his wife Zhana over the winter. "We urge celebs to tell the truth, good or bad," Torossian has said, and while he hasn't yet publicly spoken about the suit, and the ensuing whatnots, he hasn't exactly been circumspect about lifestyle factors that may have precipitated it. For instance, Ronn works hard. Maybe too hard! At 4:16 on a recent Friday evening, he shared some deep thoughts about working hard on his blog, Thoughts From Ronn Torossian.

If you're bookish, you might've heard about the lit imbroglio swirling around the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In the wake of similar reorganizations at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, that paper has made a controversial decision to eliminate its book review section, along with the job of its books editor, Teresa Weaver. Maybe you got an email from a friend urging you to sign a petition to keep her employed, or someone hipped you to the read-in protest taking place in Atlanta this Thursday. Or maybe you read author Michael Connelly's impassioned essay about the important but foundering symbiosis between newspapers and reading culture. "My 10-year-old daughter's love of reading books is slowly leading her toward the newspaper sections that are spread every morning across the breakfast table," he says, asking, "Now where will new voices be discovered?" Well, Michael, maybe they'll be discovered by... blogs. Crazy, right?

You know what's becoming increasingly clear? The internet is going to put the psychotherapy industry out of business. While most civilians will have to rely on therapist-bot Eliza, if you're a celebrity—or a person with a blog, which is sort of the same thing!—you can always depend on the kindness, and unkindness, of strangers. Here are those strangers' hot tips for the most embattled actor of this week.

Habitu s of Section F of the New York Times will notice a couple of changes in today's Dining section layout. Most notably the Times' love of briefs have made the move from Styles to Dining. On F11, where one might expect to see Peter Meehan's weekly $25 and Under Column, one finds "Dining Briefs." It's notes 'n' news, updates and bits. The feature will alternate on a biweekly basis with Peter Meehan's usual $25 and Under. So not only is the Times' recognizing its own fallibility and tempering the overly weighted effect of a Frank Bruni review with the column, it's also picking up the pace. When Bruni reviewed Gilt, for instance, in 2006 (2 stars), the chef was still Paul Liebrandt. Now the place is run by the very different Christopher Lee, so it makes sense to revisit. Section editor Pete Wells explained it to us today: "I felt we weren't covering a lot of restaurants critically. I was looking for a way to help readers sort out what's new."

Every once in a while, we read something magnificent and we feel stunned. As if someone has lit our hat on fire, or punched us between the eyes. Sure, sometimes we like a thing, but sometimes it's more serious. This is one of those times. So forget, for a second, about questions of weekend geistiness and open your hearts to a blog that transcends our moment, and achieves, who knows how, a level of unparalleled virtuosity.

Rocketboom present (Andrew Baron) and past (Amanda Congdon) were there, as were Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine, creators of Ask A Ninja. I also got fleeting glimpses of Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV and Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps and This Week in Tech fame.
I say again. Where were the audio people?

A summit of angry internet types took place last night; it may have ended in a lasting peace. Not since Yalta have three leaders as large as Lockhart Steele (who is at least technically our boss) and Ben Leventhal from Eater and Abbe Diaz, the Koreshian mercurial leader of PXthis (the forum-land for nightlife, hospitality, and seedy underbellyness) been in the same place at the same time. Diaz, who bears a grudge against Gawker ranking somewhere between Mayweather v. De La Hoya and Red Sox v. Yankees, met the two for a late dinner at Balthazar. Later she triumphantly reported on the evening to her minions.

The annual shareholder meeting of the Times Co. is just next Tuesday, and in preparation we're all reading the company's annual report. What delicious secrets lurked within, we wondered? Well we enjoy the "Risk Factors" section, where we learned the following: The New York Times does not like that the odd idea that blogs are taking away their business. (They are? News to us.) Also, all those layoffs might result in an inferior product!