If you read just one piece of hysterical overheated lunacy today, although I certainly hope you read many of them, definitely make it third-generation rich man and Harper's magazine funder John R. MacArthur's rant about the Internet. The dot com bust didn't end my Internet travails. It wasn't so long ago—maybe eight years—that I found myself trapped in a corridor at Harper's, surrounded by a small mob of what I can't help but refer to as "young people." These youthful members of my editorial staff—one of them now the co-editor of Mother Jones Magazine—were imploring me, demanding even, that I meet the Internet revolution head on by posting [...]

Jeff Jarvis' Public Parts, released September 27th and currently 12,098 in "books" on Amazon, has come under review by Evgeny Morozov. It is a rather singularly vicious review. From early on: "Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates—'there is money to be made in privacy'—who are paid to mislead the 'netizens,' that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is 'howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret.' [...]

There are only two answers, and neither of them are good. Either "Help a Reporter"—a lazyweb service that broadcasts "reporter requests" for sources—is a terrible piece of performance art, or there are a lot of people lazily writing total garbage stories. OH WAIT: there's a third option: someone's messing with the system, man. Hilarious! It starts subtle…

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URGHARO: moyemail@cox.net needs to speak to a camel expert.less than a minute ago via web [...]

Color, the app that makes location-based photo sharing possible, that launched with $41 million in investment three weeks ago, is… well, it's still in business! But the day comes in every business where you send the employees into isolation to "hack" new schemes to pivot the business….

10. It could be like Shazam, which "listens" to music and tells you what it is! Except for colors: you point your camera at something and it names it. ("So that's what chartreuse is!")

9 Visual learning tools for pre-tweens and toddlers. ("Color: We Learn Together!") Point and match shapes! Has great sponsorship opportunities.

8. Totally kicky Latina lady iPad mag. [...]

Over the course of 2010, the digital advertising revenues for the New York Times News Media Group—that's largely the papers' websites, like the Globe and the Times—were $212.2 million. That's $581,369 a day. Continuing the trending, print revenues were down and Internet revenues were up—all told, digital income was 16.2% of the Times Company's revenue throughout 2010. Total debt and "capital lease obligations" stand at about $996 million; operating profit for the year was $384.3 million.

Here's Nick Dentons's memo on today's top Gawker story, an anonymous first-person account of a date with politician Christine O'Donnell, celebrating its "brilliant packaging" and other fine qualities. His advice for journalists: "it's better to get out of the way of the pictures."

A couple of times in the last month, Gawker Media sites have been all, "Hey that piece on your site was great, can we syndicate it?" Now, I am old. And for us olds, "syndication" is a term of art in the world of publishing things. In this scheme, people who are self-employed make a living by selling their work, for usually small fees, to a number of different publishers. It's how things called "comics" used to work in newspapers (and currently "don't work" most likely). And columnists, and such. Not a bad system for all involved. And now there is a new kind of syndication, as explained [...]

Awl pal Simon Dumenco has put together a group called the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation, which will promulgate standards about how to credit, quote and synthesize the writing of others. "The group will have neither carrot nor stick, but could end up with a kind of Good Housekeeping seal," as David Carr puts it today in the Times. Dumenco himself suggests that the group will work their way towards "a set of perhaps a dozen-ish common-sense guidelines" about how one should blog. I was invited to join the list of signatories, and declined, but solely on the principle that any club that would have us as [...]

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Time to unfollow Arby's :( RT @alltwtr: If You Follow A Brand On Twitter, You’ll Be Seeing More Ads From Them Soon http://t.co/SKbqTjyMon Jul 11 13:56:49 via Twitter for AndroidMike Byhoffmbyhoff

When web guy Mike Byhoff decided it was time to maybe disengage on Twitter with a brand that sells roast beef sandwiches, due to Twitter about to get super-monetized with forced viewing of ads by all, Arby's had a feeling. This is how it all begins and/or ends.

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It seems too obvious to even say, but what with the celebrations about Glenn Beck leaving Fox News… well, yes: "Essentially, he's leaping from venue to venue and using each to get richer, more famous, and more validated. Now he's a free agent with millions of dollars at his disposal and more than two million loyal fans." Hi, Sarah Palin quit her job as a governor because it restrained her and her income potential. Why wouldn't Glenn Beck do the same thing? (Besides, he's been gaming this out for ages.) You don't want to be the talent: you want to be the owner. And he doesn't need [...]

Today a person was totally annoyed by some minor downtime on a free Internet service, and immediately took to another free Internet service to complain about it. "Ugh, OMG, I'm so annoyed, this stupid thing suuuucks!!!!" the person typed to all their online friends and acquaintances.

The free service had reported 99.7% uptime in the last quarter, spending $91,000 a month on more than 100 servers, with two engineers on payroll to deal with uptime and service issues.

Let us add to our modern vocabulary of new concepts (both serious and silly) of "the outrage economy" "the currency of attention" and "metafilm" and "mansplaining" and "metaenabling" and the like yet one more: "story torture": "Story torture is the media strategy of taking a news item and torturing every possible angle out of it. Like real torture, the key is not letting the story die, instead slowly beating it from every last possible angle."

Here's Tina Brown, from January, 2009: "For a while last year, the downsized people I know went around pretending they enjoyed the 'freedom' and 'variety' of doing 'a whole lot of interesting things.' Twelve months later, nobody bothers with that cover story anymore. Everyone knows what it actually feels like, this penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you're lucky) or a lot less (if you're not). Minus benefits, of course…. The managers of all these disintegrating companies tend to be mesmerized by the notion that everyone can now be hired cheap-that everyone is slave labor." And then there's Tina [...]

My smart brother-in-law says you must reserve your children's Twitter handle before they can chew their food. Anyone else doing this?

— Jason Hirschhorn (@JasonHirschhorn) January 23, 2012

That's the briefly temporary co-CEO of MySpace, Jason Hirschhorn, explaining The Way We Parent Now.

Last week, 50-some people were murdered in the torching of a building in Mexico, in Monterrey. (People were trapped in the casino after gunmen stormed the building; they were ordered out but many panicked and ran to the second floor.) Here's a look at the amount of front-page web real estate given to the event by English-speaking news organizations, as expressed in the formula of pixel-per-victim. (What the analysis doesn't take into account is the depth or complexity of coverage, and also the amount of play, as measured in time, of that coverage.) For instance, the Times gave up 0.27% of its digital "front page," though it should be [...]

Entitled PBS web visitors are upset about sponsorship messages on online video. Oh no, someone is paying for you to freely consume things you want! How awful for youuuuu. These sponsored messages are totally scary, of course, because PBS consumers are apparently weak-minded prey and might start suddenly shopping at Goldman Sachs or Chevron. And yet you don't hear them complaining about the constant sponsorship of PBS by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is the gift of a profiteering insurance man, banker and aggressive real estate developer, whose grandson is rabidly anti-union.

As you know if you have been near the Internet, everyone is discussing The Daily, the Rupert Murdoch iPad publication that launched yesterday. You can meet the man who runs it, much-beloved of the Murdochs! The reviews are… all over the place. There is love! There is hate! I have not yet truly indulged but I have been reading some of their web-published stories, such as this very unusual feature: "AMISH SMUGGLERS' SHADY MILK RUN"! It's very bizarre stylistically. It has the short paragraphs and quirks of the Post—it opens with an "intriguing" and cloudy scene: a mysterious man delivers "contraband" to Manhattan! Oh gosh! But [...]

The New Yorker's "Dec. 6 issue wasn’t available on the iPad for more than 36 hours, which led several people within the ranks at Conde Nast to speculate that Apple was holding the issue hostage. But why?" Good morning! First Steve Jobs came for the weeklies, but I said nothing, because I was a monthly….

In an absolutely shocking survey that will forever alter the way human beings relate to each other, USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism's 2010 Digital Future Study discovered that a whopping zero percent of participants would consider paying for a service like Twitter. And that's just one of the many kick in the balls to "new media" brought to light by the survey. It also found that 70% of participants find online advertisements annoying and 50% never click on advertisements. Good luck making money now, social media dweebs!