Kurt Andersen, who invented "snark" in 1986, is now "microblogging" at Twitter, the official web service of imagined pithiness.

China has apparently blocked access to nytimes.com, now that the Olympics are over and the government doesn't even have to pretend to be mildly less restrictive anymore.

Do you have a question for Barack Obama? Sure you do! Barack Obama has a thing on his website where you can ask questions of him and the transition and, eventually, his administration. Of course, many politicians have these easily ignored comments sections for questions, on their sites, but this one is different: it's got Digg-style voting! So far there are 78,934 votes on 1,192 questions, and the winner is a lame softball along the lines of "what will you do to establish transparency and eliminate waste and how warm and nice, exactly, will the hug you give all of America be, once you're in office?" Surely the internet can "crowdsource" some better questions than that.

Back in the day, bloggers who didn't do any reporting like Mickey Kaus and Jeff Jarvis and probably Glenn Reynolds used to spend a great deal of time talking about how the blogs (specifically their blogs) would soon supplant the "Main Stream Media" forever. Well, some years have passed, and the MSM is in dire straits, but blogs have not really made much of a dent in CNN and the New York Times' market share, eyeballs-wise, and the boundary-blurring has manifested itself mainly as old school publications getting a little more "webby" in tone and content. There is one metric, though, that has bloggers pulling ahead of their MSM counterparts: jail time! The Committee to Protect Journalists just released its 2008 prison census, and as you can see in the attached pie chart, internet people finally make up a greater share of the journo prison population than snooty newspaper jerks. Way to go, internet, and Burma! [CPJ]

Jeff Jarvis, former TV Guide and People TV critic and founder of Entertainment Weekly, is now an internet expert. He was one of those guys who became internet-famous back when there were like six bloggers, all of whom were guys whom 9/11 turned into HAWKISH ACTION HEROES, and they all brayed about the Islamist Menace and felt quite proud of themselves for being former liberals who grew balls and for some reason none of them went away? (Another one of those guys is Nick Denton!) Anyway! Then he became an internet futurist, which means spending a lot of time gloating about the death of print and babbling about the future of media gallivanting around to conferences and "consulting" and just wasting everyone's time with obnoxious writing and simplistic evangelizing for a miserable digital future. Now he's in an immature fight with Ron Rosenbaum, who is much smarter than he is, if also old and blinkered, about THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM. It's fucking bleak. Rosenbaum just took him down in Slate, partly for his new book about Google that happens to be just made up of things Jeff Jarvis thinks about Google. Here is the important part of the rant:

Here are snapshots of the world's biggest blog titles—as they are now and as they were at launch. Here's Gawker from 2003 when the gossip site was edited by Elizabeth Spiers—and from yesterday. Less change than one might expect: the logo has shrunk because the site has less need to trumpet its arrival; the ad is real rather than a placeholder; the testimonials and blogroll have gone from the sidebar to be replaced by data about pageviews and comments; the skyline of top stories is new; and the site is rather more visual than it was. But the ancestry is unmistakeable.

Opus, Berkeley Breathed's troubled, herring-loving penguin, has managed to eek out an existence since he first hit the strip "Bloom County" in 1980. But now he's gonna die, because Breathed is gonna kill him, and it's all your fault, snarky snarking internet users! Asked why Breathed is ending Opus's self-named strip next week after a five year run, Breathed tells Salon, "We're not a movie. In most aspects, there's no arc to the human story. Only a line heading upward. For nearly everything. In this case, the coarsening of the National Discourse. We aren't returning someday to any sort of golden era of political civility. The line heads heavenward and has been since the Republic started. And with the intersection of two rather dramatic dynamics — the cable and Web technology allowing All Snark All the Time ... and the political realities of No More Free Lunch in America, it will spike in the coming years like Don Draper's sex life, and I hereby pledge that that's the last pop reference I use." But isn't it during dark times that we most need funny satire? Screw you, noob!

Who was the dark mastermind behind last January's Denial of Service attack that shut down Scientology.org for a little while? A teenager, obvs. 18-year-old Dmitriy Guzner, a self-proclaimed member of the 4Chan-related anti-Scientology group Anonymous has been busted by the Feds for his part in the shenanigans. The Verona, NJ, teen has plead guilty and could get slammed with ten years in prison. Ouch. Press release after the jump.

Is The Daily Beast Tina Brown's clever homage to Evelyn Waugh's fictional newspaper or an inadvertent description of the new website's voracious financial appetite? The web property needs $18m from Barry Diller's IAC to fund its next three years, according to Simon Dumenco.

BREAKING: Permalinks for Slate blogger Mickey Kaus? After all these years? Sort of.

Hah! You write three little items about how blog mistress Arianna Huffington is a terror to work for and suddenly you're off the blogroll at the Huffington Post. Seriously! We've had a place on that long list since day one, but today... nothing. And after all we've done for you, Arianna! Need we remind you of that party Nick threw for you when you launched your goofy blog? (The funny thing here is that we've made fun of the content, business plan, other contributors, comments, and tone of the HuffPo for years with impunity, but now it is apparently personal?) Anyway in retaliation we're going to retroactively unpublish all the times Balk mentioned Rachel Sklar's rack. [HuffPo]

Magazine-turned-web guru Tina Brown has never claimed her design sense was that original. At the stillborn Talk, she opted for a portable format, a magazine published on thin paper that could be rolled up and carried around like a European newsweekly such as Stern. And that same inspiration is shared by her baby news website, the Daily Beast. "I've always loved the look of the European smart tabloids," she says with the sophistication that comes from a media career on both sides of the Atlantic. There's just one problem: the logo of the new IAC-backed website looks more like that of the Philadelphia Daily News, the tabloid paper of New York's rather dowdy southern neighbor.

Recently Videogum did a little deep dive into the world of viral videos, and came back with some interesting findings. It seems that 2006 was the peak year for dumb mashups, terrible singers, heartwarming lion hugs, and all manner of other popular YouTube crap (basically all those people that got killed on that one episode of South Park). So what's happened since then? Where have all the virals gone? Well, we think they're kinda dead, and after the jump we'll tell you why.

So the vile HACKER who HACKED poor Sarah Palin and her precious emails? Some kid from Tennessee. His dad is a Democratic state representative, which means of course that he was paid by Barack Obama personally to HACK the shit out of that poor woman. The kid (the ALLEGED HACKER) is obviously a brilliant computer genius. Didn't you hear how he hacked all that hacking he hacked? He went to the "I forgot my password" screen and correctly guessed the answers to the "security questions." HACK HACK HACK. Now the FBI is going to throw him in jail for a zillion years, even though they should be arresting Yahoo, it seems like. The dumb kid brought it on himself by revealing the proxy server he used to hack hack hack, and his Anonymous buddies at 4Chan (NSFW) are either disavowing that he was truly anonymous or saying he's a SMOKESCREEN, or something. Internet, lol. [CNET]

Everyone's favorite shaved bear of comedy, Will Ferrell, was good enough to brave the wastelands of the Internet to answer questions from the legions of anonymous hellions who lurk in the comments section of movie websites. As usual, they were very, very interested in male genitalia. Click to view

SeamlessWeb, the high-class Kozmo.com of the new millennium (this means they deliver you meals from local restaurants, while you are at work, if you are too lazy to call a restaurant) (oh hah one of the founders of Kozmo.com went back to Lehmann Brothers when that site shuttered), might be in a spot of trouble! You see, the financial sector is melting down and thousands of Wall Street people are going to get laid off. Those Wall Street people and their Wall Street firms make up a large part of SeamlessWeb's client base! (Not out fault you guys list like two restaurants in Brooklyn, losers.) But don't worry, SeamlessWeb employees! The CEO sent out an email this morning promising that even though all their corporate clients are facing upheaval and chaos, SeamlessWeb will continue to deliver sushi: "Regardless of whether people are at work or away from work, they need to eat. And, SeamlessWeb provides a highly efficient and cost-effective way for them to order food from local restaurants for both takeout and delivery." Poor dopes. (Of course, SeamlessWeb is owned by food service giant Aramark—so they may ride out this hiccup yet.) Click to read the sad email.

Did you see the cute Times Thursgay Styles story on the 7-month-old with the extensive online presence thanks to his terrible parents? You know, on some sort of "Facebook for children," full of idiot parents attributing adult characteristics to their babies, who are still dumber than chimps? We found a story that is the opposite of that trend piece, except in that it exceeds it in awfulness: The Rocky Mountain News in lovely Denver live-blogged the funeral of a 3-year-old murder victim, on Twitter. Top entry: "family members shovel earth into grave—about 21 hours ago from txt." Some things, guys, were not meant for microblogging. Can you imagine if there'd been Twitter on this day in 2001? Ha, you probably don't even have to imagine, there is surely some funny internet comedy site creating that little parody right now. [Colorado Independent]

Today's Times opinion section features an op-ed by Ronen Bergman, an Israeli newspaper correspondent who tracks the mood of jihadists by monitoring their internet message boards. This is important intelligence work! Apparently they're all having debates about suicide bombing and should they maybe not be martyring themselves quite so often, because suicide itself is not considered a good thing. All interesting stuff! But reading excerpts from discussions on Ekhlaas and Firdaws, "two main Web platforms for discussing the technical aspects of jihad," just got us thinking: who moderates these forums? And why is their level of discourse so much calmer and smarter than Western blog comments?

Hey internet trolls, troll-victims, and other people whose lives have been ruined by the buzzy, robotic forces of the internet! Would you like to go on television and share your woes with millions of Tyra Banks fans? If so, we have good news for you. Producers for the Tyra Banks Show, a talk show of sorts in which a thirty-something former model bellows about herself and her bowel movements for an hour, are looking for people to appear on an episode about the various wicked pitfalls of the web. "Have you or anyone you know had their life ruined because of the internet? Have something with blogs, myspace, facebook affected your entire life in a negative way? We want to hear your stories ASAP," the casting call pries. Yay! Now you can ruin your life all over again, in front of a larger audience! Here's hoping our dear old friend John Fitzgerald Page makes an appearance. Full casting notice is below.

Click to viewThe Insane True Story Behind the Birth of the Internet, by Those Aren't Muskets. Because clearly, the best way to satirize the vapid faddishness of Internet culture is for a group of white men to create an online sketch comedy video. (Via Laughing Squid)