When you make words for a living, you will inevitably find yourself drawn into certain ruts of repetition. That's why you'll see the same tired clich

[Blogs] can't be a lesser standard than you would use for page 1 of The New York Times.

Are you sitting down? Good. We've got some news that's going to shock and awe you: Dead Horse Media, Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers' ever-growing stable of blogs, will tomorrow launch Supermogul.com, "another business site targeting C-level executives/management." (That's C-level as in CEO, CFO, CMO, which is a smart demo to target, since those are the people most likely to be surfing the web instead of doing real work.) Ms. Spiers says that the site will provide "more aggregation than gossip," and that, for the time being, she'll contribute items alongside the site's primary (and pseudonymous) author. Sounds good to us; who knows better than Liz what erratic, blog-reading company heads want to see on the Internet?

The Times, which has been pooping out blogs with the celerity of a contestant in a speed-shitting contest, farts out a new one today. It's The Lede, and here's what it's about:

Longtime Slate denizens Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus have begun a dueling videoblog site, offering — now suppress that gag reflex — "diavlogs" between two talking blog-heads. BloggingHeads.tv typically features largely good-natured political arguments between Wright and Kaus, plus a few other contributing heads. Why would you want to watch Wright and Kaus, instead of read them? Well, hold on to your hats:

In the same vein as — but much funnier than — the site that publishes censored BBC forum comments, the Wikipedia Knowledge Dump archives Wikipedia entries that are about to be purged. Most posts to date are amusingly bald-faced self-promotional entries, such as one about some business author or a would-be famous video blogger or sex furniture. Others are innocuous lists — songs about hair, or celebrities who've undergone LASIK treatment. Current personal favorites include drunk blogging and the "Hologram Theory" of 9/11, which proposes that the World Trade Center towers were struck not by planes, but by cruise missiles cloaked in sophisticated hologram technology.

Business 2.0 gets all Web 1.6 by vomiting forth 16 new blogs, each less required-reading than the last. They can be consumed individually or in best-of form, by way of a digest called "Business 2.0 Beta." Does that make any sense? Isn't Business 2.0 out of beta yet? Ah, nerd humor. Anyway, choose among a typical mix of biz-oriented blogs along with some highly tangential candidates, such as futurist trivia, or "humor," or the tamest vice industry blog you'll ever see, or ... water technology? Who cares, book deals for everyone!

There's something so adorable about the Intel Blogger Challenge. For Intel, the "challenge" seems to be figuring out what they gave six bloggers free laptops for, exactly. For the bloggers — among them, Jen Chung from "The Gothamist," whose Duo Centrino presumably came with panda wallpaper preinstalled — the challenge is writing pithy little essays about "why I blog" (oh god) and smiling semisincerely in their glamorshots. But awesome as all of that sounds, there's an even more special extra layer of wonder and joy that Intel has yet to reveal: there's actually a seventh blogger participating in the "challenge," a "mystery blogger" who, according to Rohit Bhargava's Influential Internet Marketing blog, is "a person who many have considered to have defined the genre of blogging itself and continues to innovate and remain an inspiration to many other bloggers." OMG who IS IT?? We're scanning the room, and frankly, all of the laptops look kinda dinged up. We'll just have to wait until November 15 at noon EST, but frankly, we're not sure we can hold our breath that long.

The release of the newspaper circulation number has been a revelation, and it's not just the kids over at News Corp who are giving each other fives. James Boyce of the Huffington Post does a little dancing on the grave, picking on his hometown Boston Globe, whose circulation fell 6.7%, and touts the emergence of blogs, sounding much like the G.O.P with its "mandate" about two years ago.

Ever since the Google/YouTube buyout was at its rumor stages, Mark Cuban wouldn't shut up about how it was going to be a legal land mine, and while we have yet to see a lawsuit against Google, he has been kinda right as takedown requests are happening more frequently than pre-buyout.

One of the main benefits of blogging is that one can take potshots at celebrities from the anonymity of the interwebs. But what happens when the blogger is as famous as the celebrities they mock (oh, who are we kidding, we're thinking 1/100th as famous and we're still being generous)? Well, this.

If you'd any doubts about the sixth borough's inferiority issues, take note: Philadelphia bloggers have resorted to teacup-sized dramatics in what can only be interpreted as a desperate attempt to assert their place in the primarily New York-based pantheon of bitchy bloggers. As reported by Philly's Daily News, the collaboraters behind Philly media-gossip-culture-catch-all blog Philebrity, Joey Sweeney and Jonathan Valania, have ended their blogationship. Yep, this is the stuff Philly media gossip is made of:

After weeks of ads touting the newest New York blog, Title T/K, we've been aquiver in anticipation for the site. Well, 10.02.06 has finally arrived, and the whole damn thing is T/K. We're hearing that the reason for the failure to launch has something to do with the blog's editor, Gawker alum Jesse Oxfeld, who refuses to work on Yom Kippur. (Hope all you Jews are enjoying your atonement, by the way. Just focus on the couple of pounds you're going to lose by sundown!) It's nice to know that, series of announcement ads or not, you don't say no to the Sandy Koufax of blogging. Still, our understanding is that the thing will start up next Monday, i.e., Columbus Day. Will no one speak for the wops?

• Maggie Gyllenhaaaaaal and Peter Sarsgaaaaard buy a $1.75 million townhouse in Park Slope, crushing the dreams of one silly civilian who'd been dying for a shot at the property. Alas, famous people always win. [NYO]
• Blogging for Rolling Stone requires biting one's tongue, even if it's on the matter of Fergie's prune face. [Idolator]
• A new Page Six writer learns that freebies really don't fly, especially when you gloat about your trappings in a mass email sent to half the city. [Radar]
• Our socialist brother taunts Edelman PR. [Consumerist]
• If you're excited about the Spy book, you'll likely enjoy Radar's homage to how it came to be. One thought: poor Kurt Andersen. [Radar]

The Boston Herald ran a story this weekend on the profits (or lack thereof) from blogger book deals; basically, big advances for blog-to-book deals are unwise bets, as spitting out 200 pithy words doesn't necessarily mean one can spit out 200 brilliant pages. Nevertheless, publishers are still throwing money at the blogosphere, as demonstrated by the mind-boggling number of deals stemming from blogs. Granted, there are two types of blog-book (blook?) deals: former or current bloggers who sell work unrelated to their online ramblings, or books purely based on blogs (like Stephanie Klein's Straight Up and Dirty). The former isn't any less likely to succeed than anything else hitting the shelves, but the latter is just a bad idea.

• It would seem that people are actually willing to live in that big blue thing on the LES, despite its obvious aesthetic misfortune. [Curbed]
• In instances of mass emergencies and dizzying hysteria, be sure to sign on to your computer and click these links. [New Yorkology]
• Do not talk to people on subways, unless you want them to blog 10,000 words on why you shouldn't have talked to them. [This Place Is Dead Anyway]
• Snow leopard momentarily distracts Gothamist from panda-oriented issues. [Gothamist]

The Boston Herald reports that book deals given to bloggers tend to result in lackluster sales; though anyone with Wordpress can likely score themselves a nominal deal, it certainly doesn't mean the book is going to make any money. And the big blog-to-book deals — such as those of Stephanie Klein (Greek Tragedy), Gawker Media alum Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) and Jessica Cutler (Washingtonienne) — are almost guaranteed to disappoint publishers when the titles finally hit the stands. Says one agent: "Paying $500,000-plus for that Greek Tragedy blogger was pretty dumb."

We respectfully requested you join us in objecting to a tired media trope — bloggers awkwardly posed with laptops in a way meant to communicate the essence of blogginess — and we received many amens. Plenty of forgotten classics out there, each more grating than the last. Tighten up your angry-gland and journey after the jump for an annotated voyage through this vale of irritation. We'd like to stress again that we're not so much mocking the subjects of these photos, as we are protesting this tired, dorky setup. Beware one small bit of NSFWness in the traditional sense.

A series of news-search accidents lead us to this article and accompanying photo of "[h]ome improvement blogger, Bill Chapman, and his wife, Gay." Nothing against the Chapmans, or homes, or improvements, but this photo is really the last straw. Torturously posed photos of bloggers with laptops have become so common, so de rigueur, that we just roll over and accept them now. Bill Chapman is bloggin' right from that sawhorse! Lookit, he's bloggin' about drywall now. No more complacency. We want to assemble a gallery of these photos for public ridicule. Maybe we'll run a poll, or a contest, or just a hall of shame. Regardless, send your major media bloggers-with-laptops photos to nolaptop@gmail.com. Remember, we're looking for pose. Bloggers at conferences don't count, nor any other situation when the subject might actually be blogging. We want photos that bleed artifice, and we only want them from consequential media organizations or blogs associated with same. A few examples after the jump.

We've had some issues with New York in the past, but we've got to say we're loving Grub Street, the new food blog written by Josh Ozersky. It's one of the first launches in the mag's incipient blog explosion; here's hoping the rest are just as good. Also, the picture above? It speaks to us for some reason.