Here in the Bay Area, we have a skewed view of both who qualifies as a rich and what constitutes typical technology adoption. Households earning $100,000 a year or more account for 20 percent of the American population but earn 58 percent, or $4.6 billion, of aggregate household income. That's according to the latest release of the Mendelsohn Affluent survey from Ipsos. A new section of the study focuses on Internet browsing and buying activity. What does the data reveal?Almost every American in the upper income brackets uses a computer to access the Internet and has a cell phone or other mobile device. Among the six-figure income set, time spent on the Internet now leads all sectors of media consumption, including television. They spend over 23 hours online a week, with the wealthiest spending the most time online and watching the least television. Only 40 percent use a mobile device to access the Internet. The number goes up to 57 percent when you reach households earning over $250,000. On average, the wealthy connect to the Internet 26 times per week via a computer and nearly 18 times a week on a mobile device, making a total of around ten purchases a week online. What are they buying? Plane tickets, hotel reservations and event bookings, followed by women's wear, books and menswear. Only 10 percent of mobile Internet users make purchases with handhelds, mostly placing orders for takeout from restaurants. Email, maps, weather and news are the primary online activities, with Google topping the list of preferred search engines. Watching video, publishing online or reading RSS feeds aren't very popular, with only 12 percent watching television online and 9 percent keeping a blog. Nearly 30 percent, however, read a blog, and 72 percent share photos. So for advertisers and entrepreneurs looking to tap into a demographic with disposable income, you'd be correct in looking online instead of on television or radio. But instead of getting fancy with iPhone apps, try finding something real-world to sell them. (Image from Ipsos Mendelsohn)

The Huffington Post is decidedly not for sale, site founder Arianna Huffington announced yesterday in Denver. That means, most likely, that they still can't find any buyer willing to pony up anything close to that $200 million figure that got leaked to the Times. This year, the hard-working HuffPoors broke a couple political stories that decidedly altered the campaign, expanded into another city, and launched lifestyle sections with great fanfare, but let's be honest with ourselves: despite their fantastic skill with PR (thanks to Arianna's charm and moneyman Ken Lerer's experience working the press), the HuffPo is still not worth the paper it's not printed on. Click to viewHere are the two interpretations of The Huffington Post that Arianna and company would like you to forget: "left-wing Drudge Report" and "unedited celebrity Livejournal." The increasingly bloated HuffPo still is mostly an unhealthy mixture of those two things, of course, but their ambitions are higher. They have to be, to justify that ridiculous internal valuation. Hence HuffPo Chicago! And, more importantly, HuffPo Living, full of bullshit local-news quality health stories, "how to beat workplace stress" listicles (or often worse: links to those listicles posted elsewhere), alternative medicine quack-bloggers, and other "grab the apolitical old women" content. (To be fair, this shit does fit in well with Arianna's moony guru-filled California lifestyle, just as the media and political sections compliment her strident populism and personal hatred of the establishment press.) And with entertainment and style sections, HuffPo now calls itself "The Internet Newspaper." Real newspapers across the nation spiral into bankruptcy, but HuffPo's overhead costs are much lower, what with not paying most of their contributors. And also what with not having any original reporting. The site is still another damn aggregator, curating and linking real work done by traditional newsgatherers. With insane raving commenters, of course. And "blogs" from Nora Ephron. [Three years later and they still call each "post" a "blog." This still drives us insane.] This is the point L.A. Times media writer James Rainey makes in his slightly bitter piece on Arianna and the site. "I confess I'm as charmed and amused by the beguiling Ms. H as anyone," he says, "but also slightly queasy about whether her Huffington Post will ever offer original content and reporting that lives up to the hype and pretty packaging." What, you're not happy with featured content like "One Millenial Speaks Out: Why I'm Enrolling in Culinary School"? [Ed. note: we wuz wrong.] But, you know, they're still working on that whole original content that will make their site actually worth what they'd like to cash out thing!

We are pretty sure this is a photoshop. But who knows because it just appeared out of the blue on a Tumblog today, without attribution or sourcing. Maybe crazy Rex is right about this [via] business! It's been tracked back to this demotivational poster, making it already an altered image, though it was presented without that crucial bit of information when it first set down on a the microblogging corner of the internet today, whereupon it was emailed and IM'd to your editors like three times in ten minutes. Now it's been reblogged on god knows how many other Tumbling Logs! So let's play Snopes: find us a clip, guys, because this looks like bullshit. If it's not on MediaMatters it didn't happen. We did crack up last night when the Fox graphics said "ALERT: MRS OBAMA: I LOVE AMERICA" though, among other statements that look hilarious when preceded by "ALERT."

With the possible exceptions of various sarcastic asides by John Dickerson and Jack Shafer, online journal of contrarianism Slate has run like one intentionally funny piece in its 100 year history-this examination of Chuck Klosterman jacket photos by Doree-so we're not entirely sure why they keep trying. Humor is not really your bag, Slate! Today we received an ominous email from Slate's indefatigable flack: "Slate V Spoofs Lolcats: Polcats—What if Barack and Hillary Wuz Kittehs?" It might go... a little something... like this: Click to view Slate, this is the kind of idea we get at like 4:30 p.m. on a Friday and we think better of before we even finish the email pitch to Blakeley. This is apparently the kind of idea you decide to publish as an actual book so our advice is probably falling on deaf ears.

Nothing makes us prouder to be Americans than knowing, at least, that we are free. Free specifically to post insane allegations against any media or political figure accusing them of conspiratorial scurrility on YouTube, where it will be viewed by millions of our fellow crazies and followed up by response videos even less grounded in any sort of observable reality. So you can imagine how thrilled we are that this post-modern citizen campaign work can now be showed on real tv right next to T. Boon Pickens windfarm fantasia and Obama clubbing with Paris Hilton or whatever. It's all thanks to Saysme.tv, a new service that allows your average man-on-the-street the chance to have his 25-second commercial aired in various local cable markets for a tiny, tiny fee. Listen to Saysme.tv's chief executive on how this is all about freedom:

Something called "The Upgrader" at Conde's style.com has ranked some "Microcelebrities," which means uppity women who are famous on the internet, plus Jakob Lodwick and the Tron guy. And now you get to read tiny bitchy capsule reviews of these women's internet accomplishment and then vote on them, or something. Why? [The Upgrader]

Hackers brought down the website for Russia's state-sponsored news agency, RIA Novosti, for several hours today with a series of cyber attacks. This in the wake of three days of fighting between Russia and Georgia. "'The DNS-servers and the site itself have been coming under severe attack,' said Maxim Kuznetsov, head of the RIA Novosti IT department." It's hard to imagine why in the world anyone would want to cripple good ol' RIA Novosti's news-spreading capabilities. Oh, in unrelated news, here is the rest of the Kremlin-backed article.

What one blogger could give both Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan a massive, unrepentant for former support of the Bush administration hard-on? No, not Wil Wheaton—George Orwell! Orwell's son and some other guy are going to reprint Orwell's diaries, on the internet. In daily installments. Like a blog. Starting tomorrow. OMG! "The first entry, from Aug. 9, 1938, will appear online Saturday, exactly 70 years after Orwell wrote it." Wow. Can we leave comments? "First! (English socialist to have misgivings about Stalin!)" (See what we did there?) Finally America will learn Orwell's top ten all-time most awesome rules for effective English writing ever! (Never use one superlative where three will do.) [NPR]

Seriously, this is it. The nadir. Pack it in, Internet. Someone make sure to turn off Digg on the way out. It's time to go home. [L Magazine]

Tina Brown has worked in the US for more than two decades, since taking the helm of Vanity Fair in 1984; and she's now attempting to reinvent herself for the internet. But Lady Evans, as the 55-year-old former magazine editor is also entitled to call herself, remains at heart a Brit of an earlier generation, pickled in ink and arch wit. Her forthcoming news site, backed by old patron Barry Diller of IAC, is to be dubbed The Daily Beast, after the shameless tabloid of Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop. The Digg kiddies will be so confused.

I'm not sure what is more telling: the fact that the Los Angeles Times website got only 127m pageviews last month; or the troubled newspaper's belief that's a statistic to trumpet. The West Coast's largest newspaper has the traffic of a humble blog network.

Hooray! The National Enquirer has published photos of former political person John Edwards with a baby. The baby is almost certainly made up in part of DNA he left in a woman named Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards staffer who now spends her time cashing checks and hiding in hotels and denying everything to the media (until Good Morning America finally books her!). So now would be a perfect time for, like, established print media to cover this story, right? Anyone? Ha, no, they are all too embarrassed. Once again, it's up to the internet! The story is still sneaking in through the cracks. McClatchy ran a "why isn't Edwards answering our questions" piece that will set the tone for future MSM stories on this terrible subject. Leno and Conan have mentioned the story too, which definitely suggests that the era when no one would've known about this unless the Times picked it up is finally over.

It is one of the wonders of America, that business celebrities like junk-bond salesman Michael Milken can be disgraced and then redeemed, often within the span of a decade. Tarnished former media mogul and social climber, Bob Pittman, has secured the first big payday of his new career as an internet investor: his Daily Candy, the email newsletter for women who buy handbags, has sold to cable giant Comcast for $125m, according to Silicon Alley Insider. That's more than had been rumored, and way more than Pittman in 2003 paid for his stake: $3.5m.

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has been indicted. If you want to know why, check here. Or you can just watch this awesome video about the internet! This, to us, is the highest poetry the modern age has produced. "An internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?"

Cuil (pronounced "kewl") is a brand new website that exists to give lazy tech journalists something to write about. It's also a search engine—one launched by former Google employees—though like ten seconds of playing around quickly demonstrated that it is a barely functioning search engine. Seriously, it doesn't work. Though you wouldn't know that from reading today's featured Times story on how it's a Google-killer! Sigh. [Valleywag]

Weinstein Company head Harvey Weinstein is blogging away at Portfolio in a perfect storm of terrible news that we are required to cover. He is mad at you for going to Batman instead of some bullshit pretend indie he released to no acclaim. IT WON FOUR BAFTAS. The problem is the lying, biased media. "So, you see, its not that I'm not focusing on great independent films, it's just that no one is paying attention to them." So go see some weepie pretend indie and help Harvey Take Back the Multiplex! [Portfolio via NYO]

It's unlikely that the average Cuban will be catching Ron Paul mania on YouTube, but there will be more cries of "Viva la revolucion!" being uploaded from official sources thanks to a fiber-optic line running across the Caribbean from Cuba to Venezuela, to be completed in 2010. And, naturally, Cuban telecommunications vice minister Boris Moreno is blaming the current lack of access on Fortress America:

Ok guys, deep breaths. Do you know the Fanjuls? Pepe and his lovely wife Emilia? They're maybe the wealthiest Cuban-American couple in the nation. Emilia, a socialite about Palm Beach, the Dominican Republic, and, yes, New York, is famous for her charitable work. Recently she's made a couple headlines for her newest project—"helping to finance and build a sparkling new campus for Glades Academy, a charter school in the town of Pahokee, Fla.," a town full of impoverished migrant workers and their families. So it's odd, isn't it, that her "executive assistant" and publicist is a white supremacist.

Back in 2006, a startup started up that promised to revolutionize the financial information business. It was called Monitor110, and it had a kind of clever idea: it aggregated and analyzed raw content from all corners of the internet and turned it into useful news and information for traders. Like, message board threads and blog comments and Twitters and Flickrs and Tumblrs and what-have-you would all help measure consumer sentiment or whatever sorts of things traders need to know about. Monitor110 raised millions and millions of dollars and their founders kept saying they'd bury Reuters forever and now, today, they are shuttering because no one wants to give them money anymore. Turns out that 2006 was basically wrong about everything! Crowds are morons and their wisdom is useless noise. Calacanis: right again (after the fact)! [PaidContent]