Round up the usual suspects! Playboy.com has decided on the hottest female bloggers. Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin and her ex-lover, sexblogger (and Fleshbot contributor) Violet Blue, are both on the list. (All posts referencing Blue were recently deleted by Jardin from Boing Boing—awkward!) Oh, wait, it's a poll, and the winner will be asked to pose for Playboy.com. (Nude? They didn't say.) So far, videoblogger Brigitte Dale is in the lead with 27% of the vote, while Rocketboom and Sometimes Daily's Amanda Congdon has only 5%. The rest of the bloggers named after the jump.

Goaded by a commenter, writer Rex Sorgatz wrote a passionate defense of those who share intimate details of their lives online. The media blogger (and recent author of a piece on microfame for New York) had linked to his anonymous Tumblr blog, which documented conversations Rex had about New York and the hookup scene. (The blog was outed even more quickly than Rex expected.) Rex says his pillow-talk conversations weren't oversharing, and fuck you for accusing him of that. So what's his defense, and is there anything still too intimate to blog?

Two years ago, two of the Washington Post's political reporters urged the paper to start a separate political website. The paper turned them down, and those two guys-John Harris and Jim Vandehei-left the Post and launched Politico.com. Now, the Post has decided it does want to launch a separate political site. But! There was a SLIGHT PROBLEM.

Craig Seymour is a college professor who was living a boring little life in Washington, DC when he said, quote, "Fuck it" and became a gay stripper. And now he wrote a book about the whole thing, as strippers who are also writers are wont to do. And you'll never guess who Seymour's good "cool ass white boy" pal was back in the day. That's right, internet politigossipmonger Matt Drudge! Who loves nothing better than soap operas and Chaka Khan remixes:

Nearly ten years before Violet Blue vs. Boing Boing, the Internet's early bloggers discovered their new medium's killer application: Personal spats. Radar Online blogger Choire Sicha, angling for his 14th return to us here at Gawker Media, recounts blogfeuding's past. Choire: tl; dr. Only one era bears recounting: the months after 9/11.

Internet freedom advocates—a group that includes just about every blogger—are up in arms at the revelation that Boing Boing, the incredibly popular this-and-that blog, has purged its archives of all the works of Violet Blue, a blogger who also contributes to Gawker sex site Fleshbot. The reason for the disappearance is unclear; but whatever it is, it can't fit in well with Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow's free speech crusading. But you can file it under one of the great universal truths: Media People (of all stripes) Are Touchier Than Anybody.

Assorted hippies at the Bonnaroo music festival booed Kanye West last week after his show started eight hours late, at 4:30 in the morning. YOU UNGRATEFUL HIPPIE BASTARDS. Did you think that Kanye West would stand by and allow negative articles about him to appear on Digg without STRIKING BACK on his blog with CAPITAL LETTERS AS WELL AS EXCLAMATION POINTS?!? Shows what you know, SQUID BRAINS!

Sports blogs might be losing their edge! Back in the good old days they were all bile-spewing, rumormongering perverts who cared about nothing but posting pictures of NFL players cavorting drunkenly with Buzz Bissinger (pictured, ranting). But as time went on, they actually started making money and gaining credibility and—wouldn't you know it—now they're paying more attention to making sure stuff is true! At least that's the theme of the weekend's sort of obvious-day LAT trend piece. The reality is that this entire "These kids are finally maturing, thanks to us" angle is primarily designed to make old school sportswriters feel better about themselves as blogs steal their lunch money.

Billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn launched his very own blog in January, with the totality of its content being the words "Blog coming soon." This caused the NY Post to put a clock on its website counting the minutes until Icahn actually posted something, just because they knew it would be annoying. But now Icahn says he's finally set to post his first entry, about corporate accountability, today. A rich guy talking directly to you—so exciting! Right now it just says "This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com." But we know it's gonna be awesome! [NYP]

Sixty-year-old David "Doc" Searls, a ramblingly lucid blogger who has mentored many a protégé, is recovering very slowly in a hospital near Harvard University. Doc has spent the week suffering a series of increasingly outlandish medical malfunctions that would make for a classic Doc Searls blog post if they weren't so lethal. Searls, a Santa Barbara resident who currently holds a Harvard fellowship, scared the bejeezus out of friends and followers this week by detailing his increasingly preposterous illnesses on his blog and on Twitter. As conferencegoers frantically tried to figure it all out by reading his posts in reverse, Valleywag phoned Doc in his hospital room to get the 100-word version.

The Associated Press wants us bloggers to purchase a license from them for permission to quote 5 words from their stories. Ok guys, good luck with that. Recently they threatened some D-list bloggers in order to put the fear of god into everyone, but it backfired, naturally. So they're trying the good cop approach-they will not sue bloggers, they promise, and they will meet with some blogger advocacy group to hammer out an agreement. These new guidelines will be drawn up in consultation with something called the Media Bloggers Association, a.k.a. The Justice Blogiety of America, a.k.a. the Congress of Blogustrial Organizations. It's a powerless group of funny-looking nerds with no ties to mainstream "blogging" as we know it. Amusingly, after Night Editor Ryan Tate made fun of them last night, they sent him a wounded email asking why he didn't call them for comment first. OMG guys, you represent bloggers? Don't you know we never pick up phones? That email is attached, and more fun with the M.B.A. is below.

The first-ever IKEA store is opening in the borough of Brooklyn tomorrow, a development which has the local media all atwitter. Close to 40 people have lined up for the chance to be the first ones in the rapidly gentrifying Red Hook neighborhood to buy mass-produced Swedish furniture. To celebrate the occasion, the gruff and hilarious Park Slope guy who goes by the name of Blognigger (just to make you uncomfortable) has posted his own Onion-esque take: "Red Hook Blacks Line Up to Rob First 100 IKEA Customers." But he doesn't forget to make the scheduled robberies a multicultural endeavor for the Curbed.com-reading gentrifiers themselves, too:

Who uses David Karp's microblogging site Tumblr? To us, they are trustafarians and their hangers-on — men with beards and thick glasses, girls with rainbow leggings and bangs. They are Sanfrooklyn's creative types and those who dress like them. Or — according to David Seger's Tumblr: the documentary, embedded below — they are "the dumbest babies of them all." We take exception to this as a Tumblista ourself, though we can't deny a sad correlation between our self-worth and the number of those who follow us.

In a wonderful piece of linkbait, Vanity Fair produced an illustration featuring a number of popular "blogs" arranged in a cartesian graph from "Scurrolous" to "Earnest" on one axis and "Opinion" to "News" on another. While we're trying to grasp how the 'Wag ended up on the earnest side of the scale, more confusing is the inclusion of Salon and Slate. Apparently, if you're not printed on paper, you're a "blog" — even though both publications predate the term. But where the chart really gets things wrong is in using the disembodied head of Amanda Congdon to illustrate online video program Rocketboom. If the authors or illustrator actually watched the show or read many of the listed blogs, they'd know that Joanne Colan took over as host after a very nasty and public departure from the show by Congdon. Keep trying, guys, you're bound to figure out this Internet thing eventually!

The Perez Hilton brand is becoming an empire! Well, sort of. The off-putting celebrity blogger has been stamping his name on shitty clothing, he might be getting his own record label, and now he's had a damn musical written about him. Is he really becoming an unstoppable juggernaut corporation, or is it just hooey? We'll take a closer look at the corpulent stain-artist's side projects after the jump.

A new survey of newspaper editors finds that 44% of them wouldn't let their reporters have personal blogs without prior approval. On the other hand, 100% of reporters with personal blogs secretly hope to get fired so that they can become heroic blog martyrs. [Bloggasm, Previously]

Old things are worthless in this computer world of the future! Look at old, venerable magazine titles. Life? Gone. The Saturday Evening Post? Ha. But the Sporting News—the throwback, stat-filled, serious sports magazine that started publishing in 1886—is trying to stage a comeback against the dominant glossies of today like ESPN Magazine. The Sporting News' three-pronged revival strategy: A digital newsletter; more (ghostwritten?) columns from retired sports stars (Troy Aikman speaks!); and a new column by the soon-to-be-former Deadspin.com cult figure Will Leitch. Hey, one of those might be beneficial!

Newspapers have figured out that they need web content, and they're desperate for it. So they take reporters and repurpose them as bloggers. Makes sense, right? Not really. As it turns out, blogging isn't the same thing as reporting, and many of these reporters are bad and out-of-touch bloggers. Case in point? As Jossip mentioned earlier, Elizabeth Snead of the L.A. Times. Today, she points out the lovely Liv Tyler's "bit of bulk" during a premier: "Suck that tummy in, girls!" Bloggers and reporters are two separate species, and they must be kept apart! That's not to say that a hybrid can't be bred successfully, but we must remain vigilant against journalistic miscegenation.

An anonymous blogger is posting Facebook statuses along with comically slightly disguised photos of the people who wrote them. It has the potential to be a carnival of derision, except the blog has no comment form. Good thing we do.