Brijit, a startup which provides 100-word abstracts of news articles, has "temporarily" shut its doors. The three-word reason: out of money. [News.com]

At Valleywag, we were quite proud to think we'd come up with the idea of reducing the verbosity of bloggers and pomposity of pundits to 100 words. How could we have missed that Brijit had started a whole business around the idea back in 2006? Our hats are off to them. We admire, too, the bravery of their pay scheme: $5 per summary, regardless of the number of pageviews it draws. They may well need to tweak that. But until someone finds a cure for logorrhea, both Brijit and Valleywag will have a market.

You know how all these magazines come to "your" house, but how "you" don't read them? That is the thesis of a Washington Post writer named Frank Ahrens and an entrepreneur named Jeremy Brosowsky. So now Jeremy has made "a Web site that creates 100-word abstracts of articles from dozens of magazines and rates them." Yes, Brijit review-summarizes articles from nearly 50 whole magazines and pays freelancers five dollars to write a summary. Well, we guess that's 20 cents a word. (In doing so, Jeremy employs hipster hottie and music-loving blogger Orr Shtuhl.) This all could be worse. Somehow. Or? You know what? I recant my previous opinions about the internet making people smarter and better readers. The internet is destroying everything. It is worse than T.V. and we should turn it off permanently.