In one of those hilariously ponderous technology-meets-society stories for which the New York Times exists today, fabled internet thinker Clay Shirky (pictured) makes the following declaration: "Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted." This is false.

The founder of Wikileaks said he'd voluntarily meet with police in London on Swedish sexual assault charges. In the meantime he's raising bail money. Also, Columbia University disowned some anti-Wikileaks statements and AP will stop calling Wikileaks "whistle blowers."

In your sizzling Tuesday media column: Michael Hastings has a war book coming, talking about Howie Kurtz is more important than anything, The Upshot finally launches, Clay Shirky says print is dead, and Emily Brill's back in action.

In your workmanlike Wednesday media column: Ed Henry comes out in favor of the competition, Clark Hoyt sums up his dramatic tenure, Newsweek gets a new bidder and beef with Howie Kurtz, and Clay Shirky, man of mystery no more.

As if the journalism job landscape weren't terrifying enough, now you've got to think about learning to code. It's yet another new media skill you'll need to stay ahead of competitors. And make no mistake: they're stockpiling O'Reilly books.

Our favorite fake answer is tech investor Peter Thiel's theory that the interent is a harmless network of FAX machines. Always running PR for our future robot overlords, that one.

Ben Huh ate spoiled mayonaisse; KFC inspired a foodie; and MC Hammer knows more about social media than some MBA students. The Twitterati displayed questionable taste.

Now that it appears that last weekend's Amazon-banning gay-books Twitter storm was much ado about nothing, Clay Shirky has an insightful essay, "The Failure of #amazonfail," about why it's hard to let the outrage go.

Victoria Blake told NPR today that she started her own publishing company when she realized she was just wasting her free time reading Gawker. Have trashy websites like ours killed literature? Au contraire, yall!

Former blog queen Emily Gould suggests the rest of us delete, unfollow, cancel, and block ourselves from the Web. This is notable chiefly because Gould's last big appearance in print was an excessively detailed confessional of her online misadventures for the New York Times Magazine. The social media age is complicated, she complains in a writeup of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody for MIT's Tech Review. Someone stop us before we blog again!Gould, a former Gawker editor who institutionalized oversharing as an element of blog style, now plays the penitent. As a writer, she revealed details of her love life in the course of contributing to a gossip site, one that eventually used her exit as more gossip for the mill. Today, though, Gould can't resist the temptation to revisit her past:

Now, for some reason, Fox schedule hole-plugger Greg Gutfeld is picking a fight with harmless tech author Clay Shirky. Gutfeld is upset that Shirky said something bad about television. Also, Wikipedia is for nerrrrds! This is scarcely worth anyone's time or attention, sorry. [Daily Gut]

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing is already set to be 2008's Gladwellian The Long Tailing Point Web 2.0 trend book of the year (especially after every blogger in Manhattan went to its release party). Former Gawker Mascot Andrew Krucoff is totally in the book! Because he was an early adopter of phone-based OG social networking gizmo Dodgeball, you see. Everyone else in the New York media scene signed up for it too, but only to write about it. The Krucoff excerpt, via noted music blog Young Manhattanite, is below, accompanied by a comment from mysterious YM contributer 99 that saves us the trouble of making fun of it.

CLAY SHIRKY — Second Life released a bunch of figures last Friday, including the cumulative number of users, as part of their "effort to drive toward complete transparency and openness", as they put it. I've been critical of Linden Lab's population figures in the past. And it turns out I was right, about all of it.

Now that Linden is publishing actual user numbers, we can see that the Residents figure, as expected, is a big overcount over actual people (about 50% inflation, in fact, accounting for over a million ersatz users). Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority — something like 5 out of 6 — bailed in the first month. What we don't know is what the other sixth are up to, but after Friday's post, we can guess the answer is "Not much." As John Zdanowski, the Linden employee who posted the figures, notes, "Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more."

He doesn't caveat this — it isn't current users, or 40 hours per month. The plain meaning of that sentence is that fewer than 200,000 people have given Second Life even a cumulative work week of their time, over the history of the platform. (After revealing this figure, Zdanowski immediately offers two separate rationales for having so few committed users, and two separate analogies for why poor adoption is no big deal, in a single paragraph.)

As any illusionist will tell you, the trick is mainly in getting the audience to look at the wrong thing. In Linden's case, they want you to think that cumulative users matters when it doesn't. A new user won't care one whit that, as of last year, 1,422,846 people had tried Second Life. What they want to know is how many of those people will still be around to interact with now?

This is the question the press should be asking — "How many of those users from 2006 have logged in recently?" Linden won't answer, of course, but it might be interesting to hear how they square the invisibility of the one population number that actually affects user experience with their stated goal of transparency and openness.