Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis made the call yesterday to speculate and crowdsource about the Boston bombings—"'Shut up and let the cops do their job’ in the case of a terrorist attack is EXACTLY wrong"—but he needn't worry, Reddit is all over it. They have a spreadsheet even! So let's find out how the nice folks at /findbostonbombers are doing.

• "I hate to even bring up this point, but when I have seen videos of radical Islamists yelling 'allahu akbar' in the past, I seem to recall seeing them make something like the pinched thumb and forefingers gesture he is making in the second picture."

• "also could it [...]

Sometimes it's hard to tell if you are on the Internet or not. For example you are almost always typing into a box on a series of screens on your computer. Because of this, there are whole sections of the Internet that are pretty sure they are not on the Internet, because, they are just boxes, right? You could be typing into anything, who knows if it's public. This was true about LiveJournal for a long time. When you would link to a posting on LiveJournal, back in the day, you would get outraged emails about invasion of privacy. Because in their minds, they were just typing in their diary. [...]

As a member of a class of French aristocrats that most Americans would mistake for characters in a faintly Francophobic Monty Python sketch, Christine de Védrines should be forgiven for making unusual choices. An anxious heiress to a centuries-old fortune, she, along with much of her immediate and extended family, entrusted their fortunes and fates to a charismatic gentleman with a penchant for conspiracy theories. The result? For Christine, routine, cultish beatings; for the others, brainwashing, isolation and bankruptcy. It's an uncomfortably fascinating story; vivid and salacious to the point of doubt, and so incredibly specific that it can barely be considered cautionary.

Barely. Somewhere in [...]

Emily Witt's great piece today on the nofap movement-thing—all about the subreddit where men get together to talk about not masturbating!—points out that it's mostly all about men trying to get their "alpha" back. Or get it for the first time.

When you look at the subreddit, the themes come up again and again: "I relapsed less than a month away from my one year milestone." "Skeptic hooks up with chick he's been trying to bag for months. THANK YOU NOFAP!" "At Day 39, first 'Super Power.'" Magical self-realization!

And then the rest of their talk is couched in the language of 12-step recovery: relapse, shame, triggers, [...]

"Yes it has been a successful transition. Despite of Sheen’s great talent on the set, his life-style off the screen ultimately caught up to him. I look froward to Ashton having a long and equally complex character, because of his fine acting and of course the writing that transcends both stars. I liken this to the transition that have occurred from Sean Connery all the way to Daniel Craig." —Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, believes that "Two and a Half Men" has survived the transition from Charlie Sheen to Ashton Kutcher. [Via]

Of the three main drivers of internet culture-blogs, social networking sites and forums-most people in the media and in the general Internet-using public only understand two. Blogs work in a very obvious way: they're like magazines or newspapers, but light. Information spreads from blog to blog up and down the food chain, but it's pretty traceable. Social networks work in a different but equally obvious way: they're like real-world word of mouth, but easier to track, though still much tougher to control or predict than blogs.

But forums can be inscrutable to outsiders. And they get far less attention than the other two culture-drivers. "Everyone" uses Facebook and Twitter, [...]

Yakkin' About The Internet is an ongoing series by Whitney Phillips and Kate Miltner. Whitney recently completed her PhD dissertation on trolls; Kate wrote her Masters thesis on LOLCats—yep! Up for discussion today: William Shatner's visit to Reddit, community moderation, and the complexities of "free speech" on the internet.

Whitney: Two weeks ago, William Shatner tweeted with Chris Hadfield, an astronaut stationed at the International Space Station. This resulted in the ENTIRE INTERNET BEING WON by Shatner, at least according to this Reddit thread. Apparently the 81-year-old Shatner got wind of the thread, and promptly created an account. He then proceeded to spend the next [...]

The internet hive mind is scary. Geeks operating together as one Voltron-like force of good or evil is an intimidating kind of deal—and leaving the house, for some Internet people, is equally scary. But getting drunk and hanging out with members of the hive mind isn't actually that bad! Saturday was World Reddit Meetup day, and, to observe, members of the Internet forum Reddit—a wholly owned subsidiary of Condé Nast Digital!—met up at 160 or so locations around the world, including d.b.a. in the East Village.

As cover, I went with my friend Nicole—she's an actual Redditor. We were met by the event's organizer, a burly New Jersey [...]