Former Valleywag party girl Megan McCarthy's all-too-brief career at Wired: admired, hired, inspired, fired. (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

If not in traffic or revenues, where has Bebo leapt ahead of MySpace and Facebook? In turning its social network into a TV channel, says NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes. She credits Bebo president Joanna Shields with figuring out the LonelyGirl15 phenomenon in 2007 and hiring the show's creators. Thus was born KateModern, which has been seen some 30 million times, earning exactly $405,000. Expect more of that, the pro-Bebo argument goes, now that the company is tied up with media giant Time Warner. With 2,099 more hits like that, and the deal might pay off.

Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme just plunked down $31 million on a company he also chairs, called Searchme. It's an image-based search engine. Search is a crowded field but Searchme CEO Randy Adams thinks there's room for innovation. "Search," he told BoomTown, "is still largely a text and list experience." True, but Snap CEO Tom McGovern told me almost the exact same thing in May 2006. Didn't work out for him. Now Snap is a site for bloggers. Below, a video demonstration of Searchme's "innovation" and another video showing two-year-old Snap doing pretty much the same things.

A state legislator in Kentucky has proposed a bill that would make it illegal for anyone to post anonymous comments on websites, setting penalties as high as $1000 per violation [WTVQ]. Representative Tim Couch (NOT the former NFL quarterback by the same name, unfortunately—this is the Tim Couch of "Self-employed, Hyden Grocery, Couch's Shell.") says that the bill would cut down on online bullying, which has "especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district." Try life in New York City, motherfucker! Considering that a law like this would bankrupt hundreds of world's largest blogs overnight, as well as flagrantly violate the First Amendment, we'll probably not lend our support. Want to weigh in? Why not send Rep. Couch a letter, or just give him a call at his home number? It's listed on his website, consistent man that he is:

When all else fails, declare yourself "open." Netscape first pulled this maneuver in the late 1990s; the Netscape browser is now extinct. Yahoo has declared its search results open to improvement. Website publishers are encouraged to submit ideas for prettying up Yahoo search — presumably to include prominent links to their sites. How this is supposed to make Yahoo search results better, it's not clear; won't it just fill them with promotional spam? We'll leave you with this wisdom from a guy with a blog:

JuicyCampus founder Matt Ivester created a site that allows college students to anonymously post gossip and rumors about each other. With threads like "Who is the sluttiest girl??????," it's been popular with the kids. The lawyers, too. Now Ivester wants users to know "hate isn't juicy":

Steven Spielberg, who allegedly believes in ghosts, is launching a social network for other tinfoil-wearing crazies. Thank god they'll all be corralled in one place; fear that they might find a leader and organize.

Director Steven Spielberg is going to launch a social network this year for people who've seen ghosts and aliens, according to TechCrunch. (This reminds me of my Baptist-school teacher who thought Spielberg's role on earth was to prepare humanity to accept a demon invasion through Spielberg's alien fiction.) This sounds suspiciously like a boring Internet forum, unless this one comes with annoying zombie apps, which would feel redundant really.

Microsoft has cut the price of the U.S. consumer versions of Windows Vista. The Ultimate Edition fell from $399 to $319 and the Home Premium Edition went from $159 to $129. The Register nails it: "It's hard to believe that millions of Windows XP users were just waiting for Vista to get a little cheaper before committing themselves." Why don't they just put XP back on the shelves? That seems easier. (Photo by mkeefe)

We heard through the grapevine that copies of this month's Wired were being taken off newsstands without payment — because unsuspecting readers thought the giant "Free!" on the cover meant the magazine was available no charge. Wired editor-in-chief Greg Anderson tells Valleywag:

We weren't actually serious about Julia Allison following up her Time Out New York cover with an appearance on the front of Wired. And yet, here's a photo from Julia Allison and Meghan Asha's brunch meeting with an unnamed Wired "marketing manager." Our hope is expired.

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When a presidential candidate puts her daughter on the hustings, they call it "pimping." But when a company sends a girl out looking for dates, we're supposed to call it a community service? That makes Cordarounds the pimp this Valentine's Day. In a viral marketing project titled "Karen the 13th," the horizontal-corduroy pantsmaker subjected winsomely hapless Karen Palmer — and us — to a drawn-out search for the man of her dreams.

Voce, a wireless service for hipsters with scraggly beards and ducktails who could nonetheless afford to buy Prada handsets and spend $118/mo. on service fees, has gone under. The company's COO learned of the shutdown when his Voce phone stopped working. [RCR Wireless News]

As the real world's real-estate bubble pops, a virtual one continues to inflate. Cruise.co.uk, a British travel agent, has paid $1.1 million for the domain name cruises.co.uk. An exorbitant sum to let pasty Englishmen know they are able to purchase more than one cruise at a time. The second domain is to be used for a "social network," Cruise.co.uk's PR agency claims.

Remember how the invention of the Segway in 2001 revolutionized urban transport, to the point that cars have now vanished from the streets of Manhattan in favor of a fleet of two-wheeled scooters? Well get ready for the next generation of city movement: iShoes. Achieve 13.5 miles per hour for only $600! To see them in action is to become a believer[iShoes]:

So—Karl Rove is going to be a Fox News contributer! What an exciting and unexpected move. We hope it goes well for them! It probably won't, though. Because Karl Rove, that Machiavellian Boy Genius, is terrible on-air and also not even particularly adept at analyzing politics. He's a great smear campaigner, sure! But he's not even Lee Atwater's equal in that dubious regard. The man micromanaged one of the least popular presidencies of the last hundred years, parlayed untold goodwill and love into worldwide scorn, and also lost two of Bush's most important elections. Namely the 2006 midterms and, oh right, Bush's initial election itself. The only people who still think Karl Rove is some sort of brilliant political mind are semi-literate Kos commenters. And Roger Ailes, apparently. Even Keith Olbermann thinks Karl is only the third worst person in the world! See for yourself, after the jump.

In a desperate bid to strip dangerous "bloggers" of their growing influence, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced this weekend a devious plan to legitimize internet scribblers by employing them in government agencies, thus ensuring that no one will ever take them semi-seriously again. In the attached clip, Hillary suggests the radical new blogger policy as a convenient means of avoiding a question about HOW THE CIA KILLED JOHN KENNEDY. [HuffPo]

Chirp, a so-called "social screensaver," has launched to the usual barrage of press. How could a company stocked with such brilliant founders — CEO Eve Phillips has a masters degree from MIT and an MBA from Stanford — have come up with such a brain-dead business model? Screensavers have been technologically outmoded for a decade or more, and they waste electricity. As more computer users switch to laptops, and close up the lid when the computer's not in use, do they have much of a future?