• eWeek lists ten effects of AOL's search records leak. Effect #11: Journalists everywhere goad each other to stalk AOL users. [eWeek]

Thanks to the internal AOL e-mails leaked on Mercury News's blog, Good Morning Silicon Valley, we now know that CTO Maureen Govern did not quit but "decided to resign," according to CEO/Chairman Jon Miller.

The Journal:

AOL fired Chief Technology Officer Maureen Govern, according the Wall Street Journal. The paper's source says the bumbling company was responding to the outcry against its records-releasing fiasco, in which millions of user search records were released to the public.

Pardon us for posting this a bit late — we've been following Stephen Colbert's tips for protecting our privacy on the Internet.

• Tired of pedophiles? Reader Margaret finds User 1030784, who's got the hots for "sexy old feet" and "old granny footjobs." Heel, boy! [AOL Stalker]

In its latest update on the 36 million search records released by AOL, the Washington Post explores the ethical dilemma of those who were against these records being released but had such a need to sift through them:

Once in a lifetime, two events beautifully coincide and make us think we're living in a Douglas Adams novel. Today, that is AOL's plan to dig up gold from a spammer's backyard, one month before AOL has its users hunt for gold bullion in the AOL Gold Rush.

This is another story that defies commentary. The Boston Herald reports:

• Slate lets AOL User 16006693's search record speak for itself, so we'll write the critical analysis: Pay close attention to the play of meaning, by which User 16006693 moves from "places like crawford but without cindy sheehan" to "crawford the town not cindy crawford" to "like crawford tx but not so hot" before subverting the previous terms' meanings with "cindy crawford hot." See the same thing happen with "rice hot not recipes." [Slate. It's fake, by the way.]

Let's catch up with the wide world of AOL privacy invasion news, the regular update on the private user records that AOL revealed to the public!

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs decides to actually be funny, writing a scathing review of last weekend's debaucherous Yelp party. Aw, Steve, let 'em have their fun. Weren't you ever young and loaded with millions in funding? [Fake Steve]

Yes, it's the eleventh volume of "AOL Creepy User Watch"! Since last edition, we've found new freaks:

Continuing Valleywag's tireless coverage of the AOL users whose search records were exposed to the world last weekend:

Yesterday, I wrote that from the outside, Jason Calacanis looks as likely to head AOL as anyone else. But a reader who's seen him in action disagrees. "Calacanis the next AOL CEO? No way."

• Congress seeks to stop companies like AOL from logging customer data. (The last government interaction with this data was when the FBI ordered a big pile of it from AOL.) [CNET]

• AOL's Netscape team explains its process of preventing users from gaming the site. Meanwhile, AOL's Weblogs, Inc. team games Netscape competitor Digg. (One Weblogs, Inc. writer tells me that Weblogs, Inc.'s internal mailing list is clogged with requests for Digg/Netscape/Reddit/Del.icio.us votes.) All's fair in love and war, right? [Netscape and Diggforlife]

Steve Case was not the soul of AOL. The founding chairman was squeezed out because, frankly, he didn't fit the culture. The real man running AOL was vice chairman Ted Leonsis. Dot-com scribe Michael Wolff writes in his book Burn Rate that when AOL brought in Leonsis,

[Update: Hi, new reader! If you want more current AOL creepy user news, check out AOL creepy user watch: Volume 10, Volume 11, and Volume 12 — each creepier than the volume below. True addicts can subscribe to the Valleywag AOL news feed.]

The tech world continues to condemn AOL's exposure of private search records, then gleefully sift through those records. Here's more of what we've found digging through AOL's garbage.