Pity poor Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times, tasked with explaining the phenomenon of teen social networking sites in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

• Tradey mag-man Keith Fox will be the president of your Business Week. Headshots with suspicious head cropping always make us wonder how bald a fella is. That's okay. [Ad Age]
  

When I find myself in times of trouble, Alpha Kitty comes to me, speaking words of wisdom:

Often—okay, always—former Seventeen EIC Atoosa Rubenstein finds herself pondering the time when she came to a crossroads in her life and decided to free herself from her "corporate sugar daddy" and strike out on her own to start her fabulous new [TK]. Today she wanders down memory lane again and realizes what really inspired her to leave her cushy job: German poet Rainer Maria Rilke!

NICK DOUGLAS — You were qualified, they could afford you, and they needed you. So why didn't they hire you? They didn't want to tell you, but your boss-to-be rejected you because of the best kegger of your senior year. She saw the photo with the sorority girl with — is that a tattoo or a third nipple? — straddling you as you spray Heineken all over her. A new study summarized by CNET says that one in five employers look up job candidates online. In your industry, you'd best bet everyone at the company is not only googling you, but digging up your MySpace and your blog as well. That doesn't mean you have to stop having fun; it just means you have to take the following steps to keep what's none of their business out of their business.

One of Atoosa Rubenstein's MySpace friends has received a couple of vaguely menacing messages from the former Seventeen editor! Well, actually, only this one is menacing. The other one is only menacing if you think that free-Starbucks spam is menacing. (So, yes, it's menacing). It's after the jump. Looks like the 'Toos has been hax0r3d! "LOL Change your password!" 21 year old ~*~Ale~*~ suggests. Sage counsel.

Former Seventeen editor and current MySpace queen Atoosa Rubenstein is going to the prom! Okay, not really—but she is going on a television program to discuss the prom. And she wants to include some tips from YOU. Yes: YOU. "Do YOU have any advice for parents about prom? Think about a parent who is terrified that their kid is going to get super drunk, do drugs, have sex or whatever. Is there anything sneaky that parent can do to protect their kid and feel more at ease on prom night?" Trans: "Please sell out your fellow teenagers." Guess what? Atoosa's tribe doesn't immediately get behind her on this one, for some reason!

Sure, you know that Nick Kristof is a Pulitzer-winning Times Op-Ed columnist. You probably also know that he used to be associate managing editor of that newspaper. And maybe you were even dimly aware that he has a TimesSelect blog, 'On The Ground,' where he posts dispatches from his exotic visits to various underprivileged peoples. And you might recall that he picks a lucky gal (or guy! maybe) to accompany him to Africa each summer. But did you know that he is all up on The MySpace?

That's exactly who we thought it... wait. Who the fuck is Richard Grayson? Well, he's a 55-year-old Gemini who's in a relationship, per his MySpace. And he's a helpful sort: without very much prodding, he sent us his receipt for the Craigslist ad in which he expressed a desire to find an intern who would help him keep up with his Karen O.-esque neighbors, so that he can write about them for money. What else has he written? Some books and things, but we'd like to concentrate on a poem published today by Internet magazine 3:AM. It's about being a 55-year-old who's on MySpace.

The Guardian reports that Reuters plans to launch a subscriber-only Myspace-like social media construct aimed at the financial industry. Perhaps I radically underestimate the desires of fund managers to add each other as friends and play obscure emo tracks on their homepage, but this seems like needlessly reinventing the wheel. If Reuters wanted to court financial folk, why not just brand and customize an existing social media space? A Reuters Financial Facebook, or something. The newscorp isn't giving out many details, so perhaps that's exactly what they're doing. One Myspace is enough (and more than enough) already.

New York State kids Saverio Mondelli and Shaun Harrison pled out on charges of extorting $150,000 from Myspace by way of a program they wrote to surreptitiously collect e-mail and IP addresses from Myspace users. Mondelli and Harrison demanded a "consulting fee" of $150,000 in exchange for ceasing to distribute their program (for which they charged users $30). The best part of the case, though, is that the pair were duped into flying to Los Angeles to meet with Myspace bagmen and collect their cash. Of course, the only people waiting for them in LA were the Secret Service and district attorney. If you're trying to squeeze money out of Rupert Murdoch, best be a little more circumspect.

• Maer Roshan, the "battle-scarred veteran" of the "buzz-intensive media hothouses" that are New York and L.A. is back, and this time "the buzz seems to be moving back in his favor." That picture can't hurt. [WSJ]
  

Our stomachs clenched the moment we read these out-of-place words on former Seventeen editor Atoosa Rubenstein's MySpace: "current mood: sad." Huh? It turns out that Atoosa's cat Thurston—who was to star in "Psychic Kitty, a series of psychedelicized videos on her MySpace page"—is suffering from inoperable cancer. We have to be honest with you: we are genuinely bummed. We're sort of crazy cat ladies ourselves, and also, death is sad! Everyone, let's all take a moment to cherish the cats, dads, and over the top media-ish personalities in our lives, okay?

We hadn't heard from Big Momma in a while, so we decided to see what was a poppin' on her MySpace. A new blog?? Wheee! We have to admit, we had been sort of lost without her advice. But first, let's recap as to why she's sharing her wisdom with us here and not in, you know, Seventeen. Yeah, here's that "truth":

We're too cool to watch American Idol (not being ironic — we're not too cool for a lot of dumb shit, but we have to draw the line somewhere), but we know that a lot of people watched the debut episode of season six last night. So we wanted to draw your attention to the hard work of Eric at Death by Camera: he not only watched, he then hunted around on MySpace to find all the rejected famewhores' profiles, posting the cream of the crop. We especially like Jessica Rhode, right, who's a cosmetologist at Glamour Shots (no!!!) when she's not butchering Jewel songs. Maybe she should have attempted to warble a tune by one of her other favorite recording artists: the Google Dolls.

Scribes of dead-tree media, beware! Your days of carelessly printing alleged falsehoods about vestigial celebrities are over. Now, the unfairly maligned can strike back with that mighty tool known as MySpace. Kendra Wilkinson, the "Young Dumb One" from The Girls Next Door (the cringefest where wizened mummy Hugh Hefner oversees his trio of nubile concubines), got a brief mention in a recent Page Six. The small bit simply mentioned a tipster who confirmed the worst-kept secret in Hefnerdom, i.e. that his sweet young things might live in his mansion as part of some commercial arrangement. Today, Kendra respondeth:

Also, MySpace is gay. Friendster? SO gay. We've said it for years, and now we have science on our side:

Amazonian comedienne/Dick-licked Post scribe Mandy Stadtmiller has a lengthy piece in the paper today predicated on a MySpace-related stunt where,

This is Mike. Right now, Mike is standing in Union Square holding up a sign that says "I Want A Girlfriend." We sent our intrepid man-on-the-street reporter, Bennett Madison, to find out what qualifies Mike for romance, and we got some answers. Ladies, you might want to bum-rush Union Square right now: not only will Mike buy you more gum if you drop yours in a puddle, but he has not seen Britney's privates on the internet!

As Page Six reported today, our very most favorite coochie-flashing divorcee has a new man in her life: one Jonathan "J.R." Rotem. He's a music producer — a clip of him producing (cough) music (cough cough!) is after the jump. Also, that picture to the right is either his MySpace glamorshot or an NKOTB poster we had on our wall in fourth grade, take your pick.