If you're overwhelmed by the number of items on Gawker, you can view just the day's most popular stories.

You can follow your favorite commenters, and see which stories they're talking about, by clicking the + button next to a comment. (You have to be signed in for that to work, though.) Once you have a few friends, you'll see updates like this between the first and second posts.

Cover your web tracks using a service such as Tor. (Particularly useful if you're bitching about your boss in Gawker comments, from work.)

You can find a list of Gawker's most popular stories of the last 24 hours at http://gawker.com/popular/.

We're looking to reinstitute our review of the wittiest posts from personal blogs. So many words; so few readers. That has to be fixed. The old list is still in the feed reader, but could do with some fresh names. Suggestions, in the comments, please, or in email.

NICK DENTON — I am, says Jacob Weisberg, doing a "Cheney" — heading the search committee for a new managing editor of Gawker, and choosing myself. Thanks for that. Yes, Brian Stelter had the story right. The site won't change much: it will remain focused on media gossip and pop culture; Alex Pareene will blog the breaking news; Maggie Shnayerson will continue to embarrass the magazine industry and permalancer-abusing media conglomerates such as Viacom; and Sheila McClear will cover book publishing. We'll be adding some new contributors over the next few weeks. To begin: Richard Morgan, who'll focus on the TV networks; Nick Douglas, a Gawker Media veteran, as our early warning antenna for Youtube clips and other pop culture phenomena on the web; Richard Lawson, better known as the commenter lolcait, will be running the site's new photo caption contest. Oh, and there's a surprise guest, this afternoon at 2pm, in the comments. After the jump, other new year changes at Gawker's sibling titles, if you're interested.

Herb Caen's typewriter is gone from Moose's, but the recently remodeled North Beach hangout still hosts the beloved columnist's spirit, I'm convinced. So I picked the spot for drinks in honor of Megan "Leggy" McCarthy, our party correspondent who's headed to some print rag in SoMa. (In Soviet Russia, Wired gets you!) Drinking starts at 4 p.m. Drunk blogging starts at 4:15 p.m. RSVP on Facebook, or just show up with a juicy piece of gossip dripping from your lips.

I just published my first in what will be a whole lot of New York Times personal technology articles for non-nerds. "A Universe of Gadget Advice" leads those of us (read: me) who can't follow the gadgetspeak on Gizmodo through the hell — well, the heck of online last-minute gadget gift shopping. NYT techniology [sic] editor Damon Darlin turns out to be a perfectly nice guy who gets my jokes. And then edits them into English. I'll be writing about cellphones, cameras, TVs, and any Web 2.0 stuff that survives Ted at Uncov. I'm pretty sure I'm now the first writer to simultaneously contribute to the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and Gawker Media. Look, you've got your creepy life goals, and I've got mine.

An apocryphal retail-store study recounted to me once by a professor supposedly found that any revamp of a grocery store lowered sales. No matter how the aisles were reconfigured, the mere fact of switching things around left shoppers confused and prone to buy less. I worry that my publisher's fixation with frequent redesigns may have much the same effect on you, gentle readers.

Megan McCarthy, who since October 2006 has covered the Silicon Valley party circuit for Valleywag and become bizarrely famous in Germany along the way, starts at Wired in two weeks. Instead of drinking startup founders under the table, she'll be fetching doppio venti extra-hot raspberry white soy milk mochas for Epicenter blog editor Dylan Tweney, who himself once wrote for Valleywag — we're all dizzy now. Megan (pronounced meh-gan around here) will continue posting for us until she makes the switch. Please, please please send her out with a big scoop. (Photo by Mike Calore)

The wisdom of crowds? We'll believe it when we see it. Charting the social graph? Best left to people without friends. Forgive me if I greet our parent company's latest upgrade to our site with a mix of hesitation and chagrin: You can now follow other commenters on Valleywag.

Nicholas Carlson is the Alleywag. The nickname is inevitable, so we've embraced it. We've hired Carlson away from Internetnews.com to be our first New York-based correspondent. Not because that city has a burgeoning tech scene of its own, as News.com suggests — though it's amusing to watch local entrepreneurs posture as they fail to hide their thinly disguised Silicon Valley envy. Rather, it's because so many of the big companies we cover — Google, Yahoo, AOL, among others — are invading Gotham, and transforming Madison Avenue as they go. They'll take Manhattan, with charmingly geeky clumsiness, and Carlson, I expect, will have a grand time reporting their every misstep.

I'm Evelyn Nussenbaum. It's not an existential question. But in case you're wondering where the lovely and talented Owen Thomas has gone, the answer is Hawaii. With his spouse. Leaving me to fill his extremely large (but stylish) shoes. So who am I? The short answer is that I am a refugee from the late, great Business 2.0 Magazine—ok the October issue is coming out, but it's the last one. This is a collector's item, people! But my stint at the New York Post is probably the most relevant to Valleywag. OK, I was a business reporter, but I sat next to Keith Kelly and across from the King of All Gossip Columnists Richard Johnson—something must have rubbed off. I'll report, you decide. And you don't need to see a picture of me—I look fabulous, especially sitting here in my pj's.

I've had it. Between you vicious commenters and my cold, ruthless overlord, I'm near my breaking point. So Mr. Valleywag and I are headed west for a week on an abruptly scheduled vacation. (What's west of San Francisco? I'll leave that to the geographers among you.) I'm leaving the site in the hands of my former Business 2.0 colleague Evelyn Nussenbaum, pictured here. What really gives me hopes that Evelyn will make it through the week is not her experience at the deuce, as valuable as that is. No, it's the fact that she spent three years at the New York Post, back to back with the Page Six crew. If she can work for Rupert Murdoch, she'll manage just fine. Tip your guest editor!

If you're not a word nerd, you'll want to skip this post. But for those who pay attention to such matters, a few notes on style. Previous regimes at Valleywag have vociferously rejected CamelCase in company names, but I've reinstated it. While I cringe when I see people incorrectly capitalize the "W" in "Valleywag," I find it equally noisome when people write "Myspace" for "MySpace" or "Linked In" for "LinkedIn." With all due respect to my predecessors, I don't think it makes one look hip; I think, rather, that it makes you look clueless and lazy. Likewise, I'm breaking with the vile Luddite practice of lowercasing "Internet" and "Web," and insisting on their capitalization. Why?

We at Valleywag have made clear our feelings towards Burners, the attendees of Burning Man, a weeklong arts festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert that's getting underway now: We think they're dirty, environment-hating hypocrites who are marginally employable at best. The main business implication of the event? That you're never, ever, ever going to get any software project finished in Silicon Valley during the last week of August. So why would we send a reporter to the event?

Let me replay a scene from the heated negotiations that brought me to Valleywag. Nick Denton, Noah Robischon, and I are sitting at a table at Balthazar, Denton's home away from home in New York's Soho neighborhood. "Minions!" I shout at Denton, upending a few espresso cups as I slam the table. "I demand minions!" Denton shrinks in his chair and looks at Robischon. "We can get him minions, right?" the blog mogul whispers. "Well, maybe if we cut Sicha's male-hookers budget," says Robischon, as he whips out his programmable calculator. "Screw Choire!" I bellow. "Minions!"

There's a new wag in town. And I'm feeling good. This sleepy little burg has a thousand secrets, and I can't wait to start telling them. But for the curious, I'll start, briefly, with the real story of how I got this job. Nick Denton has his version, of course, but I think mine's better, because it involves tormenting Denton.The short version: Much as I wangled a gig at Suck.com by being a complete pest, I got this job by bothering Denton. Nonstop. For two years. The torment, of course, mostly consisted of repeatedly turning down the job of running Valleywag — and then turning around and IMing Denton daily — no, hourly — no, minutely — to tell him how, precisely, I thought he ought to do it. My passive-aggressive campaign for the job culminated in drinks in San Francisco's Mission District a couple of months ago, when he finally confronted me:

SCOTT KIDDER — Why, hello there! My name is Scott, and I've been at Gawker for almost two years, but normally all I do is shine Denton's shoes. Lucky for me, he's in London or something, so they've let me out of my cage.

I'm Bitter Ex-Dot-Commer and I'll be your Valleywag editor today.
A little about me: I'm a Leo and I come here often. I like pina coladas, but I'm just as happy to chug Robitussin if the occasion calls for it. I'm from San Francisco, but I've been festering in New York for the past five years.
What I'm looking for: A good time. Wait, wrong site. What I'm looking for: Juicy tips.
You know you got 'em. Talk to me at tips@valleywag.com