As Nas famously proclaimed, hip hop is dead. And last night, we found the murder weapon. Behold the Ford commercial from Wednesday's American Idol. It features your final nine American Idol hopefuls rapping. Not singing, mind you, but rapping.

Our trip yesterday into the Harvey Levin Conscientiousness Archives suggested to us that there is a pure, classy heart sequestered somewhere the yapping-asshole exterior that will even exploit someone's dead mother for the greater TMZ good. A late-night tip from a curiously minded YouTube devotee, however, allays our doubts about Levin's character once and for all, assuring us that only a true paragon of taste and justice would ask citizen jurors of The People's Court if they want to "go inside the cunt." Are you kidding, Harvey? We'd follow you anywhere. [YouTube]

Your dreams finally came true. In TV form, at least. In a love letter to the same internet that often parodies/steals from them, last night's South Park depicted many of those viral YouTube sensations that you so love, from dramatic look gopher to Tay Zonday to that Numa Numa kid (the soundtrack to my senior year of college, sadly), all meeting grim ends in a web celebrity on web celebrity melee. In the episode, the South Park boys try to collect on their "YouToob" fame (they made a video with Butters called "What What In The Butt") by going to a DMV-esque bureaucratic office and waiting for cash. All of the other internet fameballs are there, hoping to finally receive some of their theoretical riches. A fight breaks out over, what else, how many views everyone has and then Tay Zonday pulls out a gun and everyone dies. It's wonderful! [Complex] Episode clip after the jump, plus Butters' lovely ditty.

Jessica Rose, the actress who played LonelyGirl15 in a series of Web videos, is back on YouTube. The new show is called Blood Cell and judging by the trailer below, it has all the elements your looking for: shaky handheld camera work, a bedroom set, and Bree Rose in a tank top and boxer shorts. No P. Monkey, though.

Gary Vaynerchuk, host of WineLibraryTV, thinks the tech world of 2008 has a lot of similarities to the hip-hop world of 1985. I'm not sure if his comparison of Robert Scoble to Russell Simmons is quite right, but he does make an interesting point: "This is the National Anthem in a 18-inning baseball game." As today's tech-savvy tweens and teenagers grow up, tech and new ways to communicate will be embraced more and more by the mainstream. Just as SMS messaging, social networks and video sharing have exploded in recent years, there will be new technologies that we haven't thought up yet. Will Scoble be at the forefront? I doubt it. Will the live, mobile video broadcasts that Scoble is boring us with become much more mainstream? Absolutely — and just like Google figured out search, someone will figure out how to make money from it. Have a look at Vaynerchuk's video after the jump.

Oh cruel fate, to learn today that Ellen Page was one deleted musical scene away from certain Oscar victory. Thankfully, the kind people at Amazon have righted the sitch (man, we're getting Diablo'd just thinking about it), offering the Cafe Triste "Jub Jub" (not to be confused with the Ewok's "Yub Nub") song as a sneak peek at Juno's DVD special content.

In a moment so genuinely awkward that adorably awkward Michael Cera looks almost uncomfortably awkward living it, our knocked-up heroine sings the grrl power anthem about baby batter, dances, and tic tacs to an empty coffeehouse. Watch and we think you'll agree: had the Academy gotten their hands on this one, we would have been treated to a deadpan Page acceptance speech (did she mean there are truly angels in this city, or was that ironic?) and an unearthed interview on her refusal to believe in the Teapot Dome scandal.

Remember when you were in high school and used to dreamily stare at the sexy magazine spreads (pun intended) of whomever your crush of the moment was? Well, apparently The View's Sherri Shepherd still does this, but she takes the whole process a bit too far. After Jay Leno introduced her as the second slot guest after David Beckham on The Tonight Show last night, Sherri proceeded to spend the next four or so minutes crushing on Becks like she was a nine-year-old schoolgirl with a serious Man U fetish. Not only was there talk of Sherri putting her advanced scrapbooking techniques to work on that infamous Posh 'n Becks photoshoot but, even more disturbingly, she waxed poetically her ladyparts doing what Tracy Morgan would call "a high-five" to a visibly nervous David's manparts. That's one view we'd prefer never to see. [NBC]

It wasn't bad enough that the almost willfully unfunny trailer for Mike Myers' comeback vehicle, The Love Guru (which you can watch after the jump), had Defamer HQ wailing with laments for the comic's lost Canadian soul. The metaphor has officially entered the literal realm this week, as nervous Hindu spiritual leader Rajan Zed — who coaxed a full viewing of the comedy out of Paramount — is on the PR offensive with his Christian and Jewish friends close behind:

Mahalo Daily host Veronica Belmont — the videoblogger whom Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis once dubbed a "Rojas-level hire" , in a comparison to Engadget cofounder Peter Rojas — has announced she's "moving on to new projects." She'll host the show for a few more weeks and then later contribute as a correspondent. "This came out of nowhere," a Mahalo source tells us. Considering Belmont's working conditions, it shouldn't have been a surprise. Interviewed in the video clip below, Belmont — who lives in San Francisco — says she spends two weeks each month in Santa Monica. How did Belmont like the commute? "It's not optimal, but it gets the job done." Not anymore. But there is a winner here.

Sunnyvale computer-chip manufacturer AMD has strained ties between the United States and Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. In 2005, AMD chips were discovered inside unexploded roadside bombs similar to the kind depicted in the propaganda clip below. An anonymous American official told the New York Times that no deaths are "known" to have been linked to bombs with AMD inside.

The two artists who turned Autotune from an embarrassing musical crutch into an embarrassing musical technique meet for lunch in this cartoon with a rewarding third act.

Ha ha, your medium is dying! Financial-news print outlets seeking relevance have added video to their web sites. But their work is pretty much the opposite of YouTube gold. Brett Erlich, apparently just this guy who loves web videos, makes fun of the work of the Journal, Forbes, and Fortune on this criminally underwatched Current TV segment.

Robert Scoble and Mashable's Pete Cashmore sat down to discuss tabloid and traditional journalism in old media and new. Scoble: "Yellow journalism wasn't invented in the last ten years... College students... want to read Perez Hilton, they don't want to read about the war in Iraq... This has been a fight in newsrooms for years." Even better? We find at the end that Cashmore's most read feed in his Google Reader is Valleywag. The crush is mutual!

Please join us for our latest installment of The Hills: Words of Wisdom. As we learned last week, the cast is very gifted when it comes to doling out life lessons, and last night's back-to-back episodes contained no shortage of incredibly valuable tips and advice when it comes to just, you know, living life and stuff. Among the topics briefed in today's feature are the benefits of quitting smoking ("the whole no-cancer thing!"), why computers are just silly (they're "hard"), and one very profound discover made on behalf of Mr. Spencer Pratt: "There's no bright side." Spencer, were we in your position of bleachy dumpdom, relying on Sister Methanie for advice, we couldn't agree more. Watch, and as always, learn.

Even without going to the stunt casting well, last night's How I Met Your Mother managed to rate. Take a gander at the throwback tag that reunited Neil Patrick Harris with the giant-cursored royal blue diary screen and plonky soundtrack that made him famous in the first place. After an episode in which Harris' Barney revisits all the schemes he's employed to get women into bed, he thoughtfully types the evening's lesson:

When I'm tired of looking for redeemable videos on YouTube, I visit Vimeo. The only complaint you could give about this site is that it's too pretty. This week's best Vimeo clips include a slow-mo Colonial birthday music video, a streak of light in a forest, and a tight little episode of the two-man show Jake and Amir.

What do you do when your friend Nicholas "Nicky" Digital offers to take you out for a tour of the NYC nightlife on a Tuesday night? After you finish asking yourself where it all went wrong, you might wonder exactly how great the Tuesday night party scene could actually be. Gawker videographer-about-town Alex Goldberg decided to check it out, as he doesn't have a "real job", and it was a good opportunity to meet and greet the 24-hour weeknight party people. So off he went to 3 different ragers—marginally NSFW results of the evening are attached.

Mashable founder Pete Cashmore isn't dating Julia Allison. Still. But he is moving to San Francisco today. In this clip he sounds like he's lived here for years. Mahalo's Sean Percival asks Cashmore: "How long do you think its going to take before classic American greed and venture capitalists corrupt you?" Cashmore's swoon-inducing answer: "I think it's happening. I'm completely corruptible." Jump into our arms again, big boy — we think we're in love.

Megan Meier was a Missouri teenager who hanged herself after bullying from a neighbor girl, abetted by the neighbor's mother. Because most of the bullying took place online, on MySpace, the story has a special appeal to the newsmedia—it's not just bullying, it's cyber-bullying. Good Morning America weighed in on the tragedy in a segment this morning. An excerpt appears above. It illustrates not only the importance of being careful "what you say online," but also the dangers of speaking extemporaneously on live television. Was "hanging on your every word" really the best choice of language there? CLIP »

When someone from YouTube showed me this yesterday, I swore it was a fake, or at least the elephant is just repeating a pattern learned by rote, because no way can that animal represent itself so abstractly. But apparently it was on 60 Minutes? But if it's real, why do they zoom in when it's painting so it looks like they could have used a fake trunk? What are we supposed to do when the elephants throw off the shackles of the humans? Like half the Internet is debating this right now, so I thought you ought to know.