Ina Fried, the veteran technology reporter and a regular source of good Microsoft dish, is very open about her status as a transgender woman — her CNET blog is titled "Beyond Binary." She knows she's female. But some users of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia any bigot can edit, aren't convinced. An anonymous Wikipedia user in Knoxville, Tenn. however, refuses to accept hers as the last word on the subject, and has been changing pronouns from "she" to "he" on Fried's listing with repeated edits in the last six weeks. The justification offered:

Unfashionable as it is, we have to admit to loving the Celebrity Right for its candor, combativeness and diligence throughout this year's election cycle. George Clooney can fire off as many "c u L8R, prez" texts to Barack Obama as his mobile plan will allow, but we're far more impressed by the texture of the ideology espoused by the likes of Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, and now — at last! — SNL alum Victoria Jackson. And by "texture" (at least in Jackson's case), we basically mean the fine, aromatic quality of fresh batshit:

Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Click to viewAfter word emerged yesterday that MTV was planning an extreme dieting beauty pageant, we knew it was time to ask ourselves, "Do we still want our MTV?" Many of us grew up in a time where the network was perceived as alternative, cutting-edge, and cool, though it's hard to picture the stars who made it that way getting a foot through the door of the modern-day MTV casting office. Here, then, are seven iconic MTV personalities who would have no place on a network that now fills its programming with multiple iterations of the "spoiled rich girl" reality genre:

Jodie Foster really has gotten off exceptionally easy so far in her dizzying, delicate miracle of new love with homewrecking writer/producer Cynthia Mort, with her most significant cash outlays being that always-steep first date and the extravagant "My Condolences" balloon bouquet sent Mort's way after HBO canceled her show Tell Me You Love Me. Foster had fared even better with ex Cydney Bernard, who, after 14 years of cohabitative bliss, spared the Oscar-winner the ugliness of custody squabbles, L Word box-set splits and other public indignities. Her typically low public profile escalated for what felt like mere minutes, soon returning to its subtle, cultivated ebb of lesbian quietude — just the way she likes it. Oh, but for the good old days, we're learning as the all-knowing National Enquirer — your trusted (and print-only in this case, we're afraid) oracle for anonymously sourced Foster's Splitsville drama — now reports that the actress's romantic reboot may cost her a quarter of her fortune. Or, adjusted roughly for inflation, $25 million:

The Internet has left us not quite ourselves. Half of San Francisco and Brooklyn, it suddenly seems, wishes they were high school students in the '50s. The other half would rather be in a Japanese manga graphic novel. This urge to be someone slightly different has been capitalized on by two websites: FaceYourManga and Yearbook Yourself. The market need is obvious: For every social network you join, you need a profile pic, lest you be marked as an outcast with an anonymous default image. Drunken party snapshots do the trick for MySpace. But the pressure to find the perfect photo has led some down rather odd roads in an idealized quest for a better, cuter self. These profile pictures say, "This is me, but not really me."Jason Kottke, a popular blogger, wrote about the Yearbook Yourself site on Sunday. Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter, soon adopted an Eisenhower-era look on his site, even as he complained about the trendiness of FaceYourManga. His colleague at Twitter, Biz Stone, was an early adopter of the manga look last week. A Twitter user, Vishy Venugopalan, notes that it's too late to go manga, and has followed Williams on the Yearbook trend. This is fashion, of course, nothing more and nothing less. Countless startups have sprung up around the idea of blinging your "avatar," the fancy word entrepreneurs like to use for one's online depiction of self. But no one seems to be making money off this trend. Yearbook Yourself, improbably, was offered up by a chain of shopping centers, which advertises some of the apparel chains in its malls on the site. FaceYourManga only says that it is "property of Pixelheads," which appears to be some kind of Web design operation. The profile-pic generator is nothing new. A Simpsons avatar generator was popular last year. Nintendo's Wii uses "Mii" avatars, whose manga-lite stylings became popular even off the videogame console. But the two new sites show that demand is spreading. There may not be a market in this, but there is a mania. What we lose is any sense of who we're dealing with online. Unreal avatars serve to further the breakdown of online manners, and personal boundaries. It's easier to flirt with, or insult, a manga character or a black-and-white Photoshop job than a real person. Of course, our online friends never really were our friends, were they? Look at them: They're just funny pictures, acquaintances as trading cards. Collect them all. (Profile pics by ev, biz, caroline, and midtownninja)

Look, we're old. Not "old" old, but more like "the Olympics were so much better in Los Angeles" old. And definitely not "Beatlemania" old, but old enough to wonder if the Jonas Brothers phenomenon is anything like what we've heard about Beatlemania. We honestly don't know — before today we'd never listened to a Jonas Brothers song, we've never seen them perform, we don't even know which is which, only that the moppiest-headed one occasionally receives photos of Miley Cyrus eating her skivvies. But this week's seismic release of the new Jonas Brothers album A Little Bit Longer — and the ensuing tear-streaked, hair-gnawing tween bedlam (best evinced by the accompanying snapshot from the group's recent TRL appearance) — has us taking the Jonases' impact much more seriously. After all, today's young pop heroes are tomorrow's clinically wasted reality TV icons; on that basis alone their soaring stars deserve a closer look and deeper understanding — or at least a handy Defamer fact sheet for your water-cooler convenience. Everything you need to know is after the jump.I. KNOW YOUR JONASES

The wee free newspapers of nutty Christian entrepreneur Philip Anschutz (the DC, Baltimore, and San Francisco Examiners) have announced an exciting new method of paying content-providers: based on the page views those content-providers accumulate! The Examiner umbrella brand has launched what looks like 1,000 new blogs based on every possible topic one could blog about (with plenty of overlap), written by, who knows, hobos and bored high school students, and all of them will be paid between $2.50 and $10 for every 1,000 views they attract to their pages. Do you want to be an Examiner? Here's how!

There was a time in Hollywood history when getting inside a madame's little black registry—the most ferociously guarded record on Earth—required iron-clad court subpoenas. Even then it was often too late, with elite squads from the L.A. Johns Recovery Unit prying their way inside whorehouse attic safe-rooms, only to discover the frantic proprietor cowering inside like a cornered racoon as she gulped down its last crumpled pages. Anything it took, really, to prevent those precious mogul and sitcom star names from entering the public sphere. Today, of course, things have changed considerably—all it takes is one accidental click of the Reply All function, and your entire client list is bounced from Hollywood inbox to inbox in a matter of nanoseconds. Scandalist.com reports:

They're one of Hollywood's most glorious odd couples: pixie dream girl Natalie Portman and Manson-resembling folk singer Devendra Banhart. Still, despite the fact that Portman was game enough to appear as an octopus in one of Banhart's videos, she still can't seem to shake those naysayers clucking, "Is she really going out with him?" She is — and she's hardly the first fresh-scrubbed starlet to fall for a charming, soap-eschewing bohemian. With the help of Molly McAleer, we've put together a Top Ten list of the world's most loved-up hippie womanizers. Is it their devil-may-care facial hair, their free love attitudes, or their penchant for sharing necklaces that draws in Hollywood's most beautiful ingenues? Burn some incense and meditate on the subject — we'll be out back crafting a swingset made of hemp and spit.

Click to viewWe're romantics at heart here at Valleywag — don't you know that's why we're so bitter? — but even we can't get behind Google employee Michael Weiss-Malik's marriage proposal, pictured above. It's not because we don't appreciate how clever it was of him to make a sign and wait for the Google Street View car to drive by — as smooth a move as you'll ever get from an engineer. It's because Weiss-Malik had to go and ruin it all by slapping a "2.0" on his proposal. What is this, a marriage proposal, or free marketing for Tim O'Reilly?

In browsing What Would Don Draper Do? yesterday —your one-stop Tumblr shop for tips, advice, and musings from everyone's favorite Sterling Cooper jr. partner/secret whore-child—it suddenly occurred to us that there are few people, fictional or real, whose loafers we'd more rather slip into. You know—just to see how it felt to be Donald Draper, shtupping his Jewess department-store-heiress mistress on the side. Which got us further thinking—what other iconic TV characters would we like to be, or do, or maybe both be and do? We left it to the capable hands of Defamer videosmith Molly McAleer to compile this ultimate Top Ten Countdown of TVs Coolest Cats. We're sure you'll agree that each in his own way demonstrated consistent grace under fire, panty-moistening sex appeal, and more cool that a seal hunt in December. And yes, we're well-aware that we left off many of your favorites; that was intentional, as this is the definitive Cool Cat list. Feel free to contribute your own nominees and clips in the comments. In the meantime, take it away, Parker Lewis!

• Is Eurotrash social networking site ASmallWorld.net running low on cash? It seems employees weren't paid on time last week. [Gawker]

Hey everyone, just a brief note about the summer version of Gawker Weekend. Tomorrow through Labor Day it's going to be mini-Gawker Weekend. The vom the papers and magazines-and all of media-seek to make us consume on weekends in the dead of summer is all rehash, trashy speculation, crappy political senselessness, and essays by people who have not yet earned the right express opinion or who should have STFU centuries ago. It's nothing anyone should read. It's certainly nothing I should read. So I won't read it. Well, I will, sadly, read it, but I refuse to post most of it. Wow, this is getting long. The rest after the jump.

Just watch—next week Joel Stein is going to write a column thanking Chelsea Art Museum, Crunch, Dotspotter, Eve Online, AMC's Mad Men, Mighty Leaf Tea, Nextbook, Peter Cooper Village, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, SOAPNet, Sobieski, Starwood Hotels, Stoli Blueberry, and TNT's Saving Grace. We got here first, Joel! Oh hey, would you like to advertise on Gawker while you're stealing our material? Click here!

A reader is upset with Gawker for wholeheartedly embracing The New Yorker's terribly offensive cartoon about how Barack Obama is a terrorist. She writes:

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer came by the Gawker offices last night. Late last night. After Blakeley's Media Meshing party, while various of our peers were back in the office playing beer pong. We don't know why he was there. We weren't there! Though Rex Sorgatz, who does not work for Gawker, was! Comment Guru Kaila was there too, and she shares this Scott Kidder photograph of the odd event along with her own recounting of the details:

"The only answer, from the company's perspective? To keep getting more traffic-but to pay the producers of that traffic less for each pageview. So for the first two quarters of 2008-and now the third, according to a new memo regarding the pay rate for the quarter that began this week-the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview." [Radar]

Yesterday, a grown man threw a tantrum and stormed off the internet. Because we bullied him. It wasn't pretty. Are we proud? Well, it's a living. We spent today mulling over some wise advice we received. And, of course, it's true. We should be constructive! In the spirit of friendship, we'll explain how to survive the Internet without letting the bastards get you down. Heed our words, and you'll never have to shut down another blog. Or quit a message board, or ban yourself from a comments section. Never again will you hear the sirens of the waaaahmbulance.

Toby Young became famous long, long ago, when he was fired from Vanity Fair and then wrote a book about being fired from Vanity Fair. The book was also about how VF editor Graydon Carter is a bit of a tool. No one liked the book that much [Update! Besides Nick Denton and most of the UK!] but it was kind of funny and the media stuff was fun back in the early days of Gawker. But now! Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada we're finally getting the film of the book about getting fired from Vanity Fair. Toby Young's publicity campaign begins with an interview with Young Manhattanite, in which he says this: "[Gawker] has turned New York into what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called a Panopticon — a type of prison in which all the prisoners are capable of being observed 24/7." And then he says this: "Who's Nick Denton?" Hah. [YM]