Internet nerds became terribly excited recently when Twitter sprung a man from jail, but it's worth noting that in most of the world, blogging is much, much more likely to send you to to clink. While there are a number of bloggers whose eternal imprisonment—possibly in the Phantom Zone—we fantasize about daily, we grudgingly admit that throwing bloggers in jail for blogging is probably bad. So as a public service, we're here to tell you where not to blog if you value your freedom. China and Iran probably get the most press for their blogger crack-downs, and Malaysia just arrested a blogger this week, but if there's anything we learned from skimming the site of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, it's this: don't Tumblr in Egypt.

A couple weeks ago, when we showed you how to redesign your Tumblr for free, we mentioned that a company called Tumblize plan to charge $499 for the very same service. We were wrong. Andrew Wilkinson's Tumblize, launched today, will design you a customized Tumblr for "just $999." Startled by that kind of nonironic usage of the word just? Don't be. If Tumblr's blogging hordes have taught us anything, it's that earnest is the new ironic. Besides, Tumblize already has customers offering testimonials. Simon Frankson extols:

Well now! Terrance Dean, the former MTV producer who's about to release a book about the secret gay secrets of the rap industry, is slowly unveiling some teaser stories on a blog (not to be confused with his own, vague blog). His first story concerns his sexy meeting and sexy rendezvous with a sexy male professional athlete, who proceeds to have sex with him! And is a closeted man! So who might this be:

Stanley Fish—public intellectual, Times blogger, and man of secret ethics—has been doing a lot of thinking about rental car ads, and their relation to cheating on your wife and/ or gay lover. "The genius of the commercials is that they foreground the sexuality that informs the relationship between the car owner and the object of his/her affection," Fish wrote. That's what I'm saying! Because many rental car ads play on the theme of leaving your old car for a new one, Fish believes they are deserving of deep deconstruction. About his favorite Avis ad, he concludes "Lust is lust and betrayal is betrayal, whether the relationship is gay or straight." Others might just like the part with the car, and the guy, and the joke. The ad, and his deep, sexy analysis of its genre, below.

Buzz Bissinger, the excellent sportswriter and blog hater who made himself a very unpopular man very quickly by becoming unhinged and cussing out nice-guy Deadspin editor Will Leitch on TV last week, has had some time to think about what he did. And he's sorry now. First his wife told him he looked bad. Then everybody else did. "I started reading emails sent to me. The majority were predictably vindictive — dickhead, horsefucker, douchebag, windbag, ugly, stupid, etc. But what struck me far more is that many of the emails were smart, not laced with personal invective, and made cogent points about sports blogs and the Internet." He has perhaps now learned a valuable lesson, or three!

Getting stuck in an elevator could be the new path to media stardom. It did wonders for the guy from BusinessWeek who got trapped in one for 41 hours and ended up losing his job and his mental health. But he did get in the New Yorker! Now the parodies have begun, and this one, from Max Silvestri of 23/6, is actually pretty hilarious. Be warned, though: it makes light of the serious issue of elevator survival skills. Clip below.

Prodigy, the Mobb Deep rapper currently taking advantage of his incarceration to hone his blogging skills, is concerned about quite a few things: ritualistic murders, the 9/11 conspiracy, secret societies, missing children, and "NATURAL ENERGY LINES THAT CRISS-CROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET." How do these things all tie together? Allow Prodigy explain at length [Vibe], like a man with plenty of time to type and type and type and go crazier and crazier and crazier:

"Sometimes when I deal with celebrities, they have fun laughing and talking with their friends and I remember that they were once real people before the certain way that God arranged their features made them "recognizable." Other times, they stand there with their mouths open and vacant looks on their faces, and I wonder if they know how to feed themselves." Rob the Bouncer, now a published author, is back to bouncing and blogging hard. Consult him for updates on the various ways nightlife sucks. [Clublife]

If everyone's getting a book deal for their blog, why aren't you? Mostly because your writing hasn't gone anywhere better than a Gawker comment thread, but also because you haven't followed these three steps (note: not a joke article! Real advice inside) to getting a blog book deal. Short version: Start a blog that's short and sweet and high-concept, spread it on Tumblr and LiveJournal, send it to Gawker, and call Kate Lee.

Byron Crawford, one of the best hip hop bloggers out there and also a raging homophobe and horny bastard, was very impressed by fake author Margaret Seltzer's outfit and demeanor in her video rendition of fantastic tales from the hood. He'd like to get to know her better. "You know who has two thumbs and lurves white chicks who wear doorknocker earrings? This guy. *points at himself with his two thumbs*," he says. Just carrying the message! [XXL]

Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million.

Last week we showed you the supremely artistic "Darth Vader Meets Murakami" work of the anonymous vandal whose canvas is poster advertisements in the New York subways. But as impressed as we were by that, new photos—purportedly by the same vandal—have surfaced that, conceptually, make the earlier work look like a quickie plaything. This anonymous person has messages. All with only the ad posters themselves to work with. We're told these are all genuine, and not Photoshopped. Well, anonymous vandal: You are really fucking good. The six new photos [via And I Am Not Lying], after the jump.

Wow! As a nerd on the PR and marketing beat I find this to be absolutely astounding and heartening: the UK is about to make it a crime for companies to misrepresent themselves as consumers in their online marketing. That means, for example, that a company setting up a fake blog to hype its own products could be prosecuted, fined, and jailed. Free speech? Whatever. This is an awesome development. And bloggers can be locked up, too!

Ad agency Leo Burnett put this poster up in its offices this week, announcing a new company dress code. Even the creatives would have to wear collared shirts and cotton trousers! And the ladies! It's obviously a big ol' joke designed to help Leo Burnett seem "cool" and "with it" even though they are a huge and ancient company. But it freaked out all the ad bloggers! Ad Age's Adages blog points and laughs at those duped. Meanwhile, ad agency creatives are still allowed to not dress like assholes despite being assholes. [Adages]

• 0:40: WordPress.com has 140 million unique visitors a month, generating 600 million to 700 million pageviews.

Over the last few months, wily spammers may have figured out how to crack the security feature known as "captchas." With an army of compromised Windows PCs known as botnets, they've been using their new power to flood Google's Blogger with spam. Why Blogger?

Insane creatures of all different backgrounds and creeds have been sucked into the seamy world of online reviewing, but no one has come out quite as shiny as blogger Dave Cassel. Some write online reviews for the love of sharing their views with others, but not Dave. He does it all for the zeroes in his bank account. For 100 days writer marketing website Helium.com offered all users $3 per review to review anything, and Dave went haywire. All told Cassel churned out about 200,000 words over the course of 300 articles, weighing in on everything from Cyndi Lauper's Christmas album to the classic 70s series Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp and Thomas Wolfe's poetry. And the reviews, though often centered on absurd subjects, are far from terrible. Cassel's review of the syndicated Natasha Henstridge comedy She Spies has us wanting to pick up a season set: "It was intentionally unbelievable. But it was also a lot of fun." A fitting epitaph for your accomplishment, you brave bloggeur you. [Destiny-land]

While exploiting tragic deaths and blogger heatlh problems for a trend piece in the New York Times is bad, trying to gin up new customers by jumping on the bandwagon is yet worse, but that's just what MessageDance is doing with their latest email direct marketing campaign: "Power blogging minus the heart attack!" Especially since it seems to imply that making it easier to post updates anywhere and anytime will somehow relieve the pressure to constantly stay on top of the news.

The New York Times' big front page investigative story on Sunday about the tight connections between ex-military "analysts" on news programs and the Pentagon's PR machine was a solid re-affirmation of most people's suspicions that they, along with much of the media at large, were all play-acting in the inevitable march to war. The piece was hugely comprehensive, but it did lack the input of one man: incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian, head of the press-friendly agency 5WPR! Luckily, Ronn has chimed in with his advice to all of you who may have been upset by the story of undercover warmongering propaganda: chill. It's all just PR 101.

An online publishing veteran who goes by the name of Halsted has stopped drinking from the RSS firehose. She says she's not missing her feed reader's unread items folder: