Look, yet another good fact has emerged about Rachel Maddow, already the favorite news anchor of elitist coastal liberals simply by virtue of being a normal person (funny how that works!). Whereas most television news personalities are only "engaged" in the internet in the sense that they occasionally glance over their ghost-written blog posts before an underling posts them, Maddow actually made the following statement: "I care about Nielsen ratings, but I also care about Technorati searches.” Is she the future of news media people? Yes she is, and we'll tell you why. Could it be that part of the reason that the online world has so much love for Maddow is that she loves the online world back? It's crazy, but it just might be true! For example, she Tweets. Presumably with her own hands! And you have to figure that her 6,000 Twitter followers include at least several thousand bloggers, some of whom run blogs that are actually influential. Since internet memes often grow out of groupthink, her mere twitterings may have had an outrageously large impact on her positive reputation in the blogosphere, which is now equally influential, in ideas at least, to the mainstream media. Crazy! Further:

Justine Ezarik is a pretty blond girl who calls herself "iJustine" and gets hundreds of thousands of hits on her YouTube videos of her doing completely irrelevant bullshit like shopping or telling boring stories to the camera, because of the fact that young men will generally watch pretty blond girls do anything, which then makes said girl popular, which then attracts young female viewers, who will watch popular girls do anything. Mindless lemmings drawn to reflections of our own vapid selves, we all are. For a more thoughtful exploration of this issue, let's see what former Gawker ed. Emily Gould has to say:

Here's what you can expect in the coming year, internet lovers: lots of young internet companies going broke. The ones you love! Including, but not limited to, user-generated video sites, ad networks, fringe social media sites, and companies that make all those sweet apps. Why? Because in our brave new economy, companies are slower to buy bullshit ads of questionable efficacy on every random "Web 2.0" site. How bad will it get? We'll tell you: Ad Age predicts a small amount of growth:

So, have you been keeping up with these two laid-off 20-something investment bankers who are now giving you their unfiltered perspective online at Bankergonebroke.com? With their newfound free time, they turn up hidden gems about life in the gritty city: "Trader Joe’s at 14th St and 3rd Ave is an oasis in the desert of the Manhattan eating scene," they discover. "At TJ’s, you can find natural organic snacks along with delicious easy to prepare frozen meals. Surprisingly, these meals are also relatively healthy and best of all, cheap." Just goes to show that the best and the brightest can thrive in any environment.

BREAKING: Permalinks for Slate blogger Mickey Kaus? After all these years? Sort of.

Newspapers have always been selfish when it comes to giving credit to anybody else for anything. Good reporters are always conscientious about noting when someone else broke a story, but as a rule of thumb, the more self-important a news outlet is, the less likely they are to credit a competitor (or anyone else) for a scoop. But everything has changed now! Thanks to the internet and how it is beating the shit out of newspapers. Are you ready for a revolution in how you consume your news? Click through for a glimpse of the future of information! Newspapers—the forward-thinking beacons of journalism—have invented something totally new. Imagine this: you read the New York Times' website, and, abracadabra, you see a "link." This "link" sends you to a site that is not owned by the New York Times, where you can read information on a certain topic. NBC and the Washington Post are about to start doing it too! This could be big!

Just in time for the collapse of America's housing market, a blog called Keepin' It Realtor has taken on the important job of chronicling the "best" of real estate ads—the ones consisting of desperate-looking realtors who plaster their own faces on billboards and bus stops and, apparently, write their own ad copy. How many ways are there to make awkward puns involving the word "Sold?" At least four, so far:

"Like some serialized telenovella, the story arc of each day is like a replay of the last decade in miniature, the slight distance affording us a look at how devastating our silent complicity was, though it seemed so natural at the time." [Mattababy]

Once again, the internet is causing humanity to be beaten up. A high school (on Long Island, strangely enough) organized its five-year reunion using dangerous internet site Facebook. But when Adam Lynn, a derivative trader (ha) from Hoboken (ha) arrived at the bar where it was being held, he was attacked by two of his fellow classmates! The dispute was traced back to "a hotly contested gym-class handball game during their junior year." When will the internet stop being so dangerous that the press has to issue ominous warnings whenever anything vaguely internet-related happens? It's not just this latest "PUNCH IN 'FACE BOOK,'" as the Post eloquently puts it. The media has been warning us of internet dangers forever!

Andrew Sullivan, wow. Just wow. The gay British conservative who over the course of a decade went from proud publisher of racist pseudo-science just for a larf to virulent Obama supporter has spent a month obsessing over everything Sarah Palin has ever said and done and even maybe done. So. He's written some stuff on the bizarre circumstances of the birth of Trig Palin. He defends it (reasonably in our estimation) by arguing that Palin's pro-life position and the politicization of her familial circumstances (special needs kids, son in Iraq, family on stage at convention) makes inquiry into her pregnancy relevant. Sullivan sent this crazy email to the McCain campaign, asking for comment:

Do you like microblogging, but always found Twitter to be too full of godless heathens? Well rejoice, because Gospelr is here! It's the Christian version of Twitter, and do we need to explain anything further? Praise god no. The founder says he hopes it will be "effectual in regards to sharing the Gospel," but then admits "I have no idea how Gospelr might eventually be used." Hopefully not by Julia Allison! Let's take a look at the holy activity going on at Gospelr right now:

[NYDN. Click to enlarge]

The top story at Gawker alumni-infested Radaronline.com right now is called "Coming to America," written by regular Radar Fresh Intelligence writer Jessica Ford. It's a feature all about the new HBO show Little Britain, and, as a tagline on the story notes, is also sponsored by the new HBO show Little Britain. Meaning it's a fancy version of an ad, made more interesting with editorial content. Tacky? A sign of desperation? Or just how things work these days in the wild internet computer blogosphere?! On one hand, the story is clearly marked as a sponsored item, so it's not deceptive. On the other hand, all the rest of the story's presentation, and its placement on the site, is identical to that of a normal Radaronline.com feature. On the third hand, we here at Gawker run "sponsored" blog posts from time to time, which are (clearly marked) ads that go up with our other posts (but aren't usually written by staff writers). The same tactic is also practiced by print media, and raises grumbles sometimes when items are too similar to standard editorial stories. But as long as there's disclosure, it's generally recognized as a matter of taste more than ethics. On the fourth hand, we now have a post about Radar's blog, and Radar's blog currently has a post up about Gawker! In this way, the whole blog world is one big clusterfuck of editorial cross-promotion, even when it's coincidental (and sometimes catty!). In the end readers will decide how much the ads on any site affect the credibility they give to it. If they get the feeling your site is shilling too relentlessly, you lose. Is model-loving billionaire Ron Burkle's role in funding Radar worth mentioning here? Probably not.

Ashton Kutcher, celebrated comic genius and grave robber, has his own celebrity gossip site now called Blahgirls (do you get it?). And it hurts one's face even more than A Lot Like Love. [Blah via Portfolio]

In nature, introducing an invasive species into an ecosystem has a domino effect. A new insect predator eats all the bugs, which are food for all the birds, which flock elsewhere, forcing the predators of the birds to migrate themselves, etc, etc. Also the beating of a butterfly's wing can cause a hurricane halfway across the world, I hear. So too goes the media industry! That's why you can thank the internet for driving all the rarefied magazines you love straight to the edge of a big big cliff. Why else would there already be an Us Weekly spinoff? The magazine industry is far more insulated from the economic pressures of blogs and news aggregators than newspapers are. But! High-end papers like the NYT and the WSJ, watching the internet eat away at their business model, are desperate to make up some of their revenue loss. So they start fancy weekend magazines—T and WSJ., respectively—to cater to luxury advertisers and bring in money to subsidize their real news operations, which are increasingly unprofitable. Both T and WSJ. have thus far done a good job of drawing in upscale advertisers. But guess who that hurts? Every other magazine that would like to draw in upscale advertisers. Which means all your favorites! So while newspapers are sprawling enough to extend their brands in a different direction, standalone magazines are not always so privileged. (Unless they have no fear of ridicule, like Us). In this way the internet screws newspapers, and newspapers screw magazines. And magazines screw... ?

How did we miss this? The New Republic gave a blog to Howard Wolfson! Wolfson is Hillary Clinton's reviled old flack. He's known for his terrible sweaters, terrible NPR-schmindie taste in white people music, and for being a big loser like everyone else who is blamed for the mismanaged Clinton campaign. TNR editor (and big pussy loser, JUST LIKE HOWARD WOLFSON) Franklin Foer says: "The Flack aims to pull back the curtain on the dark art of the political operative. As Howard dishes out his punditry, he'll try to explain how the likes of Axelrod and Schmidt might work through their calculations." Yes, he'll pull back the curtain and then spew patent nonsense about what we can all plainly see behind this curtain. Then he will cry and listen to The Mountain Goats. [The Flack/TNR]

Finally, a place where Hollywood conservatives can have their say. Andrew Breitbart, the friendly half of the Drudge Report link machine, is about to launch what we can only describe as "Sort of the conservative mirror of the original idea for Huffington Post, the one what was quickly abandoned." His new venture will supposedly become a destination site for Hollywood conservatives (like Jean-Claude Van Damme!) to speak out, and have their musing published on the World Wide Web. And, you know, good luck with that. But why does anybody care? Who is this awesomely powerful (but liked!) online agenda-setter? It's not like the man has to start something new. His own news site, Breitbart.com, does huge traffic because it's where all of Drudge's wire report items link to. He also has a video site, and he worked on the launch of the now-successful Huffington Post (though he's since divested—he's a true conservative believer). Breitbart works the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report. The two have remarkably seamless editorial styles, though some feel Breitbart has a lighter touch. More importantly, while Matt Drudge himself rarely speaks to the press or flits about in public settings, Breitbart is actually popular, and even a bit of a real-life schmoozer:

Exciting news from Martha Stewart HQ: She has a brand new webmaster named Terrance, who is going to be helping her upgrade her blog and add "exciting" new features like photo galleries and search. Oh, and for nerdy bloggers out there who care, she'd also like you to know that she's switching from Typepad to Wordpress. [MarthaStewart.com]

Oh look, the celebrity PR flack continues to die. Well, for some. Actress Lindsay Lohan's shiftless mook of a father recently lashed out at Linds' bff (or gf), deejay Samantha Ronson, who was rumored to be writing some kind of tell-all book. He called her fame hungry and accused her of using Lindsay and blah blah blah pot kettle blah blah. Both LiLo and SamRo publicly reacted to the news, pioneering into relatively uncharted territory. Lindsay ran squealing to gossip show Access Hollywood, calling her father "out of control" and just sorta, you know, defeating the purpose of telling someone else to rein it in. But later on, Lindsay decided to close the barn door herself and write a "sensible" and thorough blog post, perhaps not realizing that a whole Assateague Island's worth of horses had already escaped. Samantha demurely (as far as "demurely" goes in this festering hellhole of a world) circumvented all the conventional channels and went right to the people first. Via her MySpace blog of course! Lindsay and Sam are not the first people of note to do this, but they are embroiled in some pretty high profile antics, unlike other MySpace celebrity bloggers like the low-profile, dim and withered Courtney Love. Which is to say, right now these girls are pretty famous and wouldn't it be interesting to see someone huge like, say, Katie Holmes, respond to scandal with a humble blog entry? While it's debatable just how modest and un-self-possessed a blog entry, aimed at the public, about oneself, really is, it's certainly less middlemany and corporate and hungry than going on a television show to air one's delicates. Plus you have control over your own words! (Though, you do run the risk of drunk-blogging.) It may seem suicidal, but it would be fascinating to watch the celebrity-to-civilian relationship develop into a one-on-one internet relationship, completely strangling the gossip industry, which would be forced to just repurpose blog entries that everyone had already read. I mean cause that's totes not what we do already.

The Huffington Post is decidedly not for sale, site founder Arianna Huffington announced yesterday in Denver. That means, most likely, that they still can't find any buyer willing to pony up anything close to that $200 million figure that got leaked to the Times. This year, the hard-working HuffPoors broke a couple political stories that decidedly altered the campaign, expanded into another city, and launched lifestyle sections with great fanfare, but let's be honest with ourselves: despite their fantastic skill with PR (thanks to Arianna's charm and moneyman Ken Lerer's experience working the press), the HuffPo is still not worth the paper it's not printed on. Click to viewHere are the two interpretations of The Huffington Post that Arianna and company would like you to forget: "left-wing Drudge Report" and "unedited celebrity Livejournal." The increasingly bloated HuffPo still is mostly an unhealthy mixture of those two things, of course, but their ambitions are higher. They have to be, to justify that ridiculous internal valuation. Hence HuffPo Chicago! And, more importantly, HuffPo Living, full of bullshit local-news quality health stories, "how to beat workplace stress" listicles (or often worse: links to those listicles posted elsewhere), alternative medicine quack-bloggers, and other "grab the apolitical old women" content. (To be fair, this shit does fit in well with Arianna's moony guru-filled California lifestyle, just as the media and political sections compliment her strident populism and personal hatred of the establishment press.) And with entertainment and style sections, HuffPo now calls itself "The Internet Newspaper." Real newspapers across the nation spiral into bankruptcy, but HuffPo's overhead costs are much lower, what with not paying most of their contributors. And also what with not having any original reporting. The site is still another damn aggregator, curating and linking real work done by traditional newsgatherers. With insane raving commenters, of course. And "blogs" from Nora Ephron. [Three years later and they still call each "post" a "blog." This still drives us insane.] This is the point L.A. Times media writer James Rainey makes in his slightly bitter piece on Arianna and the site. "I confess I'm as charmed and amused by the beguiling Ms. H as anyone," he says, "but also slightly queasy about whether her Huffington Post will ever offer original content and reporting that lives up to the hype and pretty packaging." What, you're not happy with featured content like "One Millenial Speaks Out: Why I'm Enrolling in Culinary School"? [Ed. note: we wuz wrong.] But, you know, they're still working on that whole original content that will make their site actually worth what they'd like to cash out thing!