In your ignominious Thursday media column: Conrad Black has big plans, new hires at Fast Company, Conde Nast's memo-writing abilities are woefully inadequate, and the wee New York Times Co. lives in a tiny dollhouse.

Fast Company asked online voters to decide on the most influential person online. And after being lobbied via Twitter, Facebook and spam emails they've spoken: Jeremy "Shoemoney" Schoemaker is our king. Surely you know him? Shoemoney? Anyone?

Yes, there are going to be more lawns, bleachers, entrances, elevators, see-through decks, and a brand new garden space called the Chelsea Thicket when the stretch of track from 20th Street to 30th Street is opened to the public. You can see them in the representational drawings of the city's hippest public space at the end of the video. They even have animated people showing you what will happen in the park at night. Our favorite? A shadow man and woman who are approaching each other from different directions, they meet in the middle and the guy seems to say, "Hey, wanna get out of here?" and makes a hand motion. The lady agrees and they walk off together. Maybe he's taking her back to The Standard for a night of sex in the windows or cavort in their new topless bar Le Bain [NSFW]! Thanks, High Line for making all our dreams come true.

Fast Company visualizes "The Biggest Stories of Our Time." Here, a graph of media mentions for panic-inducing stories like disease and the Y2K bug. See them all at Fast Company.

Twitter is like a real-time conversation! And just like many conversations, sometimes you want to cover your ears, Eric Eldon, Micki Maynard, Ellen McGirt and others teach us:

• The New York Times Co.'s bank balance is running a bit low, but that hasn't detered the company from handing out lavish pay packages. The company's CEO, Janet Robinson, received a total compensation package valued at $5.58 million in 2008, up from $4.14 million in 2007. [NYP, HP]
• Is Rachel Maddow losing her glow? March was the lowest-rated month so far for Maddow's MSNBC show since its debut last fall. [LAT]
• The Chicago Tribune plans to cut another 20 percent of its newsroom staff as it looks to reduce expenses amid continuing declines in advertising. [CB]
• Yahoo posted a 78 percent decline in quarterly profits and said it would eliminate about 675 more jobs, or 5% of its work force. [WSJ]
• Tonight is Len Berman's last night at WNBC. [NYDN]

John Koten, Fast Company's volatile CEO, has reportedly departed, as underlings suspected he would.

John Koten, the nautical-enthusiast CEO of Fast Company and Inc. publisher Mansueto Ventures, moved out of his office last week ... into a cubicle. The move has magazine workers "freaking out," a tipster tells us.

What thoughts keep magazines bosses up late at night? Late last night John Koten, the CEO of Fast Company publisher Mansueto Ventures, was wondering why his staff hasn't asked him about how great he is.

Ignored in high school, the geek princes of social media now thrive on attention from eager fanboys (and calculating flacks). Relentless Fast Company egoblogger Robert Scoble was their king. Until he got dethroned.

What did the media overshare today? Jennifer 8. Lee thought about high school reunions instead of Snapple, Today's Ann Curry toured refugee camps, and Fast Company's Ellen McGirt got down with a lot of leather.

This will be hilarious: Self-obsessed videoblogger Robert Scoble, managing director of FastCompany.tv, has a new boss — who's the same as my old one. Noah Robischon is leaving his job as managing editor of Valleywag's publisher, Gawker Media, to run Fast Company's websites, which include Scoble's personal blog, Scobleizer.com.Everyone assumes Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton personally pulls the puppet strings at Valleywag, but since I was hired last year, I've reported to Robischon, a friend I've known since we were both at Time. Damn: This means Denton actually is personally pulling the puppet strings now, doesn't it? I'm in so much trouble. But not as much trouble as Scoble: "I'm excited to be getting back into day-to-day editorial, and building something new," Robischon writes. Translation: Scoble will have to start making sense.

Here's a career tip from Ed Sussman, the fired head of Mansueto Digital: Have a startup in your back pocket. Since March, he reveals, he's been working on a side project while running the websites of Fast Company and Inc. magazines for Mansueto Ventures. His job was one of 20 eliminated in the cutbacks, which primarily hit the company's online and events divisions. He tells Mediabistro that he and his partners have "put some 4,000 hours into the project" — an effort to commercialize Drupal, an open-source blog software program. Gosh, do you think his boss would have waited until October to lay off Sussman if he had known how much free time his employee had on his hands?

We remain impressed, if not dumbfounded, that Internet-obsessive videoblogger Robert Scoble talked his way into the absurd title of "managing director, Fastcompany.tv." We'll be even more impressed if he keeps the job, now that the guy who hired him has gotten the boot. But there's evidence that Scoble has buckled down a bit! Or slacked off, depending on how you look at it.Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user is, has adopted the "milliscoble" as a metric. One-thousandth of Scoble's average daily output on the 140-character-update service equals one milliscoble. By his own standard, Scoble has been falling behind; in the past 100 days, he's been running 32 percent below the 1,000-milliscoble mark. If it falls to zero, will he suddenly be three times as productive in real life? Nah. It will just mean he's shifted his timewasting entirely to FriendFeed.

Times are tough all over. That's the excuse bosses are now using for cleaning house, making hard decisions they were too timid to execute in bubblier times. We've just heard that Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Fast Company and Inc. magazines, is laying off 20 people. Inside the company, it's being spun as an "economic move" — but if it's a financially motivated maneuver, why is Fast Company magazine being left untouched in the layoffs?Most of the cuts are hitting Mansueto Digital, the company's Web arm, previously the fiefdom of executive Ed Sussman. Sussman is leaving the company, and control of Fastcompany.com is now being handed to the magazine's editor, Bob Safian; traffic had fallen by about half on Sussman's watch, while rivals like Wired saw visits to their websites grow quickly. Robert Scoble, the self-obsessed managing director of Fastcompany.tv, will still be employed as of Monday, though he now reports to Safian. Darn!

"What's killing the newspaper business — with thousands of jobs lost and even the Washington Post Co.'s reporting its first loss in 37 years — is its inability to reach people like me." — Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, in a column some Fast Company editor wrote for him, in which Scoble goes on to relate all of the ways he obsessively consumes newspaper articles online.

JAMESON'S IRISH BAR, BOSTON, MASS. — If you'd gotten over that unclothed photo of Robert Scoble and Naked Conversations coauthor Shel Israel, here's a new one to haunt your memories. Scoble, Fast Company's pet videoblogger and social media guru, was in Boston for the EmTech conference, and he wanted to go to a bar. Why? So he could sit at a table and ignore everyone around him, constantly reloading FriendFeed, the Web-activity tracker on which he relentlessly documents his nonparticipation in the world which surrounds him. Two startup executives who had just watched the Red Sox play at Fenway Park with Scoble told me he Twittered nonstop through his visit to the Green Monster. The only time he was separated from his iPhone? When he lent it to me to take a picture of him. That didn't turn out, but I found another pic Scoble had taken of himself, fresh out of the shower.

Before it landed Microsoft's $300 million account and hired Jerry Seinfeld as a spokesperson, the admen of agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky met with Fast Company's Danielle Sacks in April 2007. That's when Alex Bogusky explained exactly what kind of computers it uses, and why:

Ubiquiterrifying new media maven Robert Scoble will be filming yet another show, FastWork.tv, out of the Revision3 studios in San Francisco. >He announced the move at a MediaBistro event in New York yesterday, where Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback was also in attendance. I'm going to take a wild guess that the new show will be brought to you by longtime Scoble sponsor Seagate.

Before he turned into a Philip Seymour Hoffman clone, there was a time when Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble looked more like James Spader. And here we thought Scoble was a run-of-the-mill nerd before he found his videocamera! Thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers have not improved him. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments, and the winning one will become the new headline on this post. Thursday's winner: sample032, for "Google raises the stakes in competition with rival Baidu." (Photo by Steve Sloan)