• The Valley job market is booming — as long as you have an insanely strong CV and can kick butt at billiards. [Mercury News]

The New York Times (they are so loveable today!) features Orkut, Google's you're-nobody-til-somebody-loves-you social network invaded by Brazilians in 2004. Over 2 of every 3 Orkut users are registered as Brazilians, and if you trust some massaged numbers, nearly every regular Internet user in Brazil has a profile.

Hey, MySpacers! It's Puppet Tom, the dummy who's everyone's buddy! And in his first vlog post, he's giving Friendster founder Jon Abrams (poor guy can't get a break today) a beatdown.

Per usual, we have no idea if the following is real or not, and we ever-so-slightly hate ourselves for pondering the matter for more than two seconds, but we've been cursed with a link to Lindsay Lohan's alleged MySpace page. While we've seen more than a few fakes, this one strikes us as at least the best imposter we've come across — so much so that, despite our desire to be mature and reasonable, we can't help but entertain a glimmer of hope that this might actually be legit.

In the wonderfully titled piece "Digital Divide Closing as Blacks Turn to Internet," Michel Marriott says the Internet's not just for white people and Asians any more.

They use MySpace!

"How geeky are you," asks Newsweek, ruining a perfectly good cover story with an awkward quiz. Bad enough that half of it is desert-island questions; even worse that the "desert-island book" options don't include the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Flickr's Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, king and queen of the digital photo, take Polaroids. Caterina: "What is this primitive paper-making box you handed me?"

BusinessWeek writer Steve Rosenbush is the latest sipper of the Facebook Kool-Aid, putting a positive spin on its "sell for $2 billion" plan in his latest article. (Tuesday morning drinking game: take a shot every time he follows a doubt with a "but" — as in, "Facebook doesn't match the scale of MySpace, but...")

We owe you an apology. Friday came and went without a single moment of Blue States Lose, and we failed to provide an explanation. As it turns out, resident hipster hater Joey Arak was in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest music festival. We're sure that a few days' worth of total immersion amongst the indiest of indie folks (and assorted bloggers) will provide him with endless inspiration for his next BSL installment, which dutifully returns to form this Friday.

From across the pond, news that The Sun plans to "give its website a massive boost by tying it to the recently acquired and hugely popular MySpace.com community and networking site to create a "MySun" online readers' network.

We should've known: Despite all the obvious dangers, Seventeen has an official MySpace account. According to the profile, the magazine is single, a Libra, and enjoys watching MTV's Miss Seventeen reality show. Totally normal for a teen. But?

Predators in the Bedroom

Yesterday we declared our love for Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir, who is so utterly gay and flamboyant and inappropriate that we had no choice but to make him an honorary New Yorker. Sensing our need for more, a reader sends along a MySpace profile purportedly belonging Weir. We've no idea if it's authentic but, judging from Christina Aguilera references alone, the page certainly seems to be created by the man himself. With that in mind, we're thrilled with the information presented in "Johnny's Details:" he's Jewish and bisexual. Everybody wins!

Silicon Valley schools are blocking kids from MySpace after finding profiles with booze, cleavage, and (oh noes!) flame wars. The Valley is going through the same social-site backlash as the rest of the nation: teens want to be loud and dirty in public, and parents think their kids should keep quiet. Guess these people have never walked down Haight Street.

Yahoo may buy Odeo. Seems destined, no? [TWiT via Unofficial Yahoo Weblog]
Google may buy Friendster. Main difference between Friendster and Orkut? At least Orkut has Brazilians. [SiliconBeat]
The NYT already bought news aggregator/annotator BlogRunner. So now writing the Times will cost you too. [PaidContent]
Man and machine may merge. Give it 40 years. [KurzweilAI.net]
Draper Fisher Jurvetson is funding Tagworld, another pretty-faced Myspace wannabe. [TechCrunch]

You gotta hand it to the old man. NewsCorp numen Rupert Murdoch wouldn't go and buy some internet company if he weren't already very familiar with it, now would he? Of course not. So we don't understand why everyone's assuming that Murdoch's profile for his newly-acquired online network MySpace is just the work of some prankster. From his profile: