Liz Smith went on CNN today and said she was "really inept at making [the Web] work." Then the deposed New York Post gossip proved it.

One minute Eagles fan Peter Knox is reveling in a Giants game at the Meadowlands; the next he's on his back at the hospital and blogging "this is shit."

Uh-oh: it's the brand-new blog of Lindsay Lohan father/religious fanatic/jailed DUI-er Michael Lohan. Don't hope for gossip, however: "let me say that this website is NOT about Lindsay or Samantha."

Courtney Love, our favorite rock star/experimental meta-blogger, clearly on an all-night blogging bender, warns that if we're expecting a happy Christmas story from her, then "think again..."

Hottie 27-year-old chief speechwriter for Obama, Jon Favreau, acted inappropriately with a cardboard cut-out of Hillary Clinton at a party (HE GROPED IT) and it ended up on Facebook and now everyone's talking about the golden boy gone douche. What if it leads him to not get his White House appointment, now that Hillary is Secretary of State? He already sent an apology to the Clinton camp, for the crime of posing in photographs where he's "dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer," as the Washington Post put it. Come on, dude's 27—you have to take the good with the bad. And God knows what kind of hours ol' Obama has him working.

Arianna Huffington had some good advice for aspiring bloggers on the Daily Show tonight — blog your passion, go with your first impression — but her most important technique was communicated only implicitly, by way of example: Promote the hell out of yourself. From a brief guest stint on the Comedy Central show, Huffington gleaned exclusive backstage video for her own site, negotiations to have host Jon Stewart blog for her exclusively, a big plug for her "Complete Guide To Blogging" book and a televised recruiting call for free writers for her "blogging the meltdown" project.

Last week, what our sister site Jezebel described as a "strange, in-depth essay" on Michelle Obama's ethnically-proportioned butt, "First Lady Got Back," ran on Salon. Obviously, this was provocative enough in some circles to draw a storm of Internet criticism, which, of course, is exactly what Salon wanted. Everybody won: they got the attention and blogs got some content. But! The author of the piece, Erin Aubry Kaplan (who is African-American, has previously written about Jennifer Lopez's rather more sizable ass, and is an op-ed columnist at the L.A. Times) felt the need to earnestly respond to the disproportionate freakout her essay created.As she responded on the blog 3 Brothers and a Sister:

Interested in serving in the president-elect's cabinet, or some other high-ranking capacity? Obama has 63 questions he'd like you to answer, quite possibly the most extensive vetting process in White House history. In addition to listing everything embarrassing or controversial that's ever happened to you, which must be pretty standard from administration to administration, or whether anyone in your family owns a gun, there are all sorts of exciting internet-related inquiries. Has anything been written about you, online, ever? You basically have to send all your Google results. Obama's team will also need anything you've ever written online, including fake names (see excerpt above). More exciting demands after the jump!

Remember the mysterious Park Sloper who goes by the name Blognigger? He quit blogging at Vice founder Gavin McInnes's website Streetcarnage today with a big fuck-you goodbye on the site itself declaring "OBAMA VICTORY RENDERS HIPSTER 'MOVEMENT' OBSOLETE—Neo-Cynicism Now Strictly For and By the Fags.'" It's very long, very ranty, and very hilarious. Before ol' Gavin—who proudly declared that he didn't bother voting—takes it down, we captured it for posterity. It's a surprisingly snide-yet-sincere post-election call to hope decrying the cynicism of so-called hipster young. Oh, and: "We must never fall into the common retard-trap of allowing ourselves to believe, for even a second, that there’s any deeper 'meaning,' or 'movement' behind our chosen music-and-t-shirt collective."Excerpted from Street Carnage, unless they took it down already: First, social scenes are they are applied to hepcats are analyzed:

The election was called early last night—but not so early that people weren't drunk off their asses, social-networking technology in hand. Many embarrassing and over-earnest prounouncements were Twittered and texted last night. Crying seemed to be a badge of pride for the melodramatic (don't want to see one more blog post about your tears of happiness), and everyone had Something to Say. (We'll admit that we did.) But now we have a snark-break hangover. Hackneyed revelations from the usual suspects were out in force:First off, our notoriously cold-hearted publisher Nick Denton just admitted that he cried last night. "And I'm not even a Democrat!" And there were a thousand different versions of this statement across the blogs: "I am so proud of all of you." Thanks, Mom. Here's another anonoblogging overshare:

Being a regular girl is work enough—God knows what being a Cosmogirl entails. A tolerance for fruitinis? The ability to exist on salad alone? The shamelessness required to "[come] to bed in a soaking wet white tee shirt"? We've been gleefully following Cosmopolitan blogger Leo (Smith '07)—her blog's narrative is "one socially awkward girl's attempts to transform into a sexy, social butterfly." At first, we pointed and laughed like bullies—but it was only because deep down, we all feel awkward. We teased her about her use of the word "[doing] the grown-up" as a euphemism for sex, and how she wondered aloud if playing the field was "immoral". We also said that "increasingly, watching her thirty-day evolution at the hands of people who professionally suggest 'how to be a total man-magnet' is like watching a gazelle getting torn apart by hyenas." That was bitchy. But we were rooting for her all along. Leo's written her goodbye post, and we were worried: did the Cosmo machine spit out a Cosmotini-swilling, Choo-wearing girl-droid in the shape of their brand?Writes young Leo:

The spectacle of a slighted novelist going on a gossip blog and defending themselves in the comments—then starting a nutty Tumblr and throwing a "Take Back the Internet" party—is now referred to as the "Gessen Method" by a Texas publication. They're referring to n+1 editor and first-time novelist Keith Gessen. He has now been branded—much to his chagrin, we're sure—not as the next young literary man but "is an icon—a symbol—a cautionary tale about Internet conflict and the way we deal with it."

"While 72 percent of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60 percent of them said they rarely or never read blogs." [Times]

The jerkblogger behind the festival of misogyny and general frattishness that is Take a Report was found out by his employer, Citigroup, where he was a vice president. Due to its misogynist and generally idiotic overtones, "Large," a.k.a. Michael J. McCarthy, was fired for his blog's violation of code-of-conduct policies. Perhaps they objected to posts such as, "Although I'm pretty sure you don't condone the drugging and subsequent raping of female bar inhabitants, haven't you at one time or another considered what would happen with the right girl and the right mix of vodka and chloroform?" But for every job lost, a doucheblogger gets his wings: "I have been asked to be the keynote speaker at the Saturday Banquet of this year's Dallas Trading Convention... it's BY FAR the best of all the trading conventions." Woo! Some excerpts from Large's musings after the jump: how he once managed to get thrown out of an Eric Clapton concert by screaming insults about Clapton's dead son.

Food critic Giles Goren, who writes for the London Times, has a history of enraged letter-writing. He must be feeling silly this week, as a past blowup—over a line edit of one of his articles—was leaked to the Guardian. "It occurs to me it can only have been leaked by one of four Times staff. God, they must hate me," he told the Guardian's media blog. A sample: "This is someone thinking, 'I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and I know best.'" Clearly!

If you're annoyed by internet fameball Julia Allison and Non Society, the "lifecasting" startup she just launched with partners Mary Rambin, Megan Asha and (effectively) Wired magazine, you could always wig out and publish your extensive thoughts on every last reason the site is a grotesque monument to talentless celebrity and that the people involved are annoying. Or you could make like Topher Chris, aka Christopher Price, and resign yourself to the fact that your life will never be as amazing and action-packed and CRAZY as those of Allison & Co., and will consist entirely of doing pedestrian things that no one in their right mind would want to watch, totally unlike Allison and her buddies (ahem). Then you could set up a site called, say, Non Exciting, based on this shockingly honest premise. And then you might even find, in the end, that you've actually created (intentionally or not) the most clever send-up of Allison's fame to date. After the jump, a side-by-side comparison of the Non Exciting and Non Society intro videos.

Oh, hey, remember how Vladimir Putin and his thugs control everything important said on television, newspapers and radio in glorious free ex-Soviet Russia? Well, it seems the regime would like to extend its power over the media so as to stop people from saying mean things on the Web while stifling any real online dissent while they are at it. A blogger from Syktyvkar recently wrote that police are "scum" and that the force "should be cleaned up by ceremonially burning officers twice a day in a town square." Syktyvkar is basically next to the north pole, so this was probably just a misunderstood offer to warm everyone up by the campfire, but the blogger has been given a suspended one-year prison term, and everyone is upset that the police state is about to ruin the last fun place to say mean things about people (oh and also express political opinions or whatever):

The discerning readers of Perez Hilton's site, which features cum stains, genitalia and unborn babies drawn crudely onto paparazzi photos, were shocked when the celebrity gossip today launched a tasteless plan to enrich himself through the suffering of others. Hilton's "Gossip On The Go" phone-call service costs $5 per month and threatens "you'll be hearing from us almost every day... whenever something big happens." His commenters called the plan "too expensive," "tacky and presumptuous," and "quite possibly the stupidest thing i've ever heard." Also, Hilton himself (real name: Mario Lavandeira) was called a "sell out" about a thousand times, as though he had once possessed a reserve of dignity and credibility, and is now trading it in. Here are some of the more interesting comments from PerezHilton.com, followed by an email from an "avid" Perez reader who is defecting to Gawker.

The most-emailed piece in London's Guardian yesterday is about British blogger Zoe Margolis: she's moving to New York to find fresh men who haven't read her personal sex blog, Girl With a One-Track Mind! (Love and labels, isn't that what Carrie Bradshaw said?) Her story is eeeeeerily familiar to us American oversharers; she blogged about her personal (sex) life and subsequently ruined it! "Four-and-a-half years ago, fingers hovering over a keyboard, I did something that, unbeknown to me, would change my life forever: I began to write about my sex life in explicit detail and then publish it, anonymously, on the internet on a blog..."