The May W features an Arianna Huffington interview in which she reveals how influential and important she is. She lunched with David Geffen and Ari Emanuel calls her every day! Also she's all over the TV pimping her new book, which is about how much she dislikes Tim Russert. And she's single! This might be a good time to hook up with her, if you can make it stick: she's got about a six-month window to unload HuffPo for a very large amount of money. Traffic is huge at the moment, but will the new lifestyle content make up for the post-election downturn? Probably not! And as our good friend Nick Denton once blaaaahhgged, advertisers are terrified of political content. Even when it's by Alec Baldwin and Nora Ephron! [W via LAObserved]

It seems like only yesterday that I got my first unsolicited piece of shit email from some piece of shit selling some piece of shit. But spam is actually 30 freakin' years-old today! "The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC-a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet-the internet's forerunner-and won its sender much criticism from recipients. Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day."

Just yesterday, the single most popular episode of any of the fantastical tv shows available for on-demand viewing at Hulu was some utterly random selection from a forgotten '80s detective show called Simon and Simon. And today, it's gone. Just like that. WE DEMAND ANSWERS, NBC/UNIVERSAL (AND FOX). [Hulu, Previously]

We were at Hulu doing some important research for a post when we noticed this. And now we need someone to explain it. Apparently, the most-viewed episode of anything ever on the popular video site—more popular than all the Family Guy, 30 Rock, Office, and Simpsons episodes they offer—is some random episode of the utterly forgotten '80s detective show Simon & Simon. No other episode from that classic Gerald McRaney vehicle appears in the first five pages of results organized by popularity. Seriously, why is this the most popular thing on Hulu? Why? On a site where you can watch all of Arrested Development! [Hulu]

Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger hates the internet. Deadspin editor Will Leitch, despite also having written books (printed on paper and everything!) represents the internet, as a whole. So Bob Costas sat Will down with Bissinger (and, for some reason, Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards) so that Bissinger could yell at Will for ten minutes and call him "full of shit," among other things. Costas just kinda smugly encourages the whole mess. Will is apparently to blame for the existence of photos of Matt Leinert partying, which Costas seems to think were dug up from someone's trash. And Buzz cannot stop cursing and interrupting and shouting in his vitriolic attack on the uncouth, anti-journalistic rudeness of bloggers, an irony he apparently does not give two shits about. Will! The nicest Gawker Media editor! This, along with our hideous physical deformities, is why we don't do television. Clip attached (in case YouTube's disappears).

Atlantic contributor Jeffrey Goldberg started his very first blog this week, with a charmingly naive post mostly about how he knows nothing about blogging but does sit near uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan. "This is almost certainly a mistake," he begins, and it turns out he's 100% right. When the New York Observer's media blogger Matt Haber (the forgotten Gawker Alum!) devoted a post yesterday to basically announcing the existence of Goldberg's blog and needling Goldberg for his initial boneheaded support of the Iraq War, Goldberg blew up with rage. Haber's post was a mugging, he says. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey. We'll show you what a mugging is.

What's New York's biggest internet site? AOL, no longer. Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia which is my some measures the seventh most popular site on the web, has no central office. But Jimmy Wales, the site's pundit-loving leader, is moving to the city.

There are now more Internet users in China than in the U.S., according to the China Internet Network Information Center. The current count: 221 million. As of December, the U.S. had 215 million users. The upshot: When the Web 2.0 bubble pops, expect a rush of signups for Mandarin courses at City College of San Francisco. [Reuters]

Anne Rice is not just an author, she's an Author. In the comments of a post from blogger Dawn Papuga's site about Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's lawsuit over Harry Potter Lexicon creator Stephen Vander Ark's book project, she criticizes the manner of Papuga's assault on Rowling's lawsuit: "The rampant viciousness on the internet is hurtful to to me even when it’s not aimed at me," she writes. Rice joins a cacophony of voices attacking the tone of the Internet, which won't play by the rules of famous and important Authors. With the Internet-fighting team of Julia Allison and Emily Gould joining Rice's crusade to end being virtually criticized forever, we find it shocking that no one has stepped up to support Al Gore's greatest invention. Here's why they're wrong.

Our favorite cocaine-dappled redhead, actress Lindsay Lohan, has a Facebook profile! But it's undercover... She goes by the name "Lindsay Ronson," using the last name of her friend (girlfriend perhaps??), DJ Samantha Ronson. She's friends with Marc Jacobs, his ex-fiancé (and former hooker) Jason Preston, The Hills' Lauren Conrad, model Jessica Stam, random internet socialite Cory Kennedy, and a whole host of other notable idiots. It's funny to see that all these loathsome people are connected, though I guess it makes some perfect cosmic sense in a way. Though maybe they don't all get along. She's friends with a "Hiilary Duff" (a notorious enemy) and, judging by her "Wall," she and model Lauren Hastings seem to be in some sort of fight. Also, as you can see from her "Status," she's totes serious about her new sober living ("It was 430 am!!!" she offers as cryptic explanation for something), even though she's been seen hard partying all over the place. Radar has two theories about the possibly "glassy-eyed" Long Islander). Find her "Wall" after the jump, plus, a profile picture of French toast and Parliament Lights (yum!), from Radar

Guys, we can pack it in. AOL finally finished work on their advanced blogging android, programmed to churn out and rehash Funny Internet Content in unlimited combinations. They've given their Blogbot a site called "Urlesque" and now it will set about destroying Best Week Ever, Buzzfeed, Rex Sorgatz, Gawker, Tumblr, Funny or Die, The Superficial, Stuff White People Like, Cracked, and people who forward funny things—by becoming them. It's all automated now! There's a machine in Estonia that churns out LOLcats and most "people" on Vimeo are animatronic. Jason Kottke is actually three lines of code. Activate Muxtape-creation sequence! Unleash the Diggbait List algorithm! Taze humanity, bro! YAHH TRICK YAHH! [Urlesque]

Brave Virginia Heffernan launched a brazen attack against The Onion in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, slamming the faux-news organization's year-old Onion News Network. Chagrined, one of the Network's biggest supporters fired back with the following volley:

Oh god we've been playing into their hands all this time. We rib CNN for their terrible tabloid-style headlines, but we had no idea how profoundly unembarrassed they are about their naked attempts at cheap traffic grabbing. Now, you see, you can click on a little icon next to selected CNN.com headlines and buy those headlines on a t-shirt. Seriously. The internet has caved in on itself! Only certain headlines merit the shirt treatment—so, like, the "weird fish" one, but not the "20 bodies found floating near Bahamas" one. It's still in Beta though! So you can quite easily mock up CNN headline t-shirts that say anything you like. Like the ones we've attached after the jump. Make your own!

An adorable little blonde person ventured out to the East New York home of former Gawker advice columnist Tionna Smalls to ask her what she thinks about Internet fame. "It's all a lot of fun of games in the beginning." But. "If people think you're getting more burns off their site than they are, they'll get rid of you. It's jealousy."

The New York Post killed poor PageSix.com after something like ten internet minutes, but now we just discovered this weird new blog they have (we know it's new because it has a big NEW BLOG sticker on it) called, uh, POPWRAP. The internet is running out of names for things that are obvious clones of five other things! Anyway, if PageSix.com was their TMZ-killer, this is their scaled-back Gawker/Daily Intelligencer/maybe-Best Week Ever-copier. The whole damn thing is edited solely by one guy (like us, back in the golden era!)—former InTouch "lifestyle editor" Jarett Wieselman (ten posts today, Jarett—you can get it up to 12 by Monday!). Oh, wait, we remember that name! Wieselman was brought over from InTouch with Kathy Campbell to run PageSix.com. And then that imploded and now they've given him this. Anyway we didn't read very many of the "words" but the pictures look pretty and the headlines are suitably sarcastic-ish. Also there is a caption contest feature because bloggers are for some reason never happy with the captions photos come with. (So far: one comment on this one. Go help 'em out!) Now you have one more source for mildly irreverent takes on celebrity news. [POPWRAP]

"Formerly anonymous blog commentors would have to say their piece out loud, face to face." [Emily Gould's fantasy, in the New York Observer]

Will Smith's entertainment company is investing in a YouTube killer for music videos that will either be Hulu for music (which would be neat! Hulu is pretty cool!) or another pointless stupid failure like every other major label or studio effort to kill YouTube. They got vids from Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group, and Universal Music Group. But so does MTV.com and we never look at that. [CNET]

The Standing Room reports that the lady pictured at left "is having a secret affair with a coworker." While they sat, stranded, waiting in vain on a delayed flight, she "made a series of calls to various girl friends to discuss the situation. All her friends are 'the best.'" Ha ha ha. Let this be a lesson to everyone: if you babble about secret affairs while surrounded by annoyed travelers at the airport, someone will instantly upload a photo of you to the internet. And now she's exposed—not for the sin of carrying on romantic dalliances with coworkers (though we recommend against it, which is why our love for Hamilton must always remain secret), but for forcing everyone at JFK to hear all her business. So annoying. Text about it if you're bored! [The Standing Room]

The Atlantic is a magazine about news and culture and stuff. It has been continually published for thousands of years—its founding editor was Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Now, though, the internet, which has made Americans forget how to read, is killing it. They struck back recently by putting on their cover a woman who is famous for being mentally disturbed, and now they've gone so far as to bring on brand consultants. Folio reports that Atlantic Media hired "an integrated marketing agency to handle its rebranding." They're redesigning the magazine and relaunching the website! Next fall they will "roll out of a full-scale marketing campaign to communicate the brand message." This is "something the Atlantic has never done" because it is a thing that was invented by marketing agencies ten years ago. [The Atlantic]

Richard's off today, so to cover all the important celebrity gossip we might bring in this guy, whose celebrity blog is apparently machine-translated from Italian. It is the best gossip blog in the world. Breaking: "Wide-brimmed hat Anderson and Lauren Conrad is between the invited celebrities to assist to the lunch of association of the correspondents of pressa of the White House the 26 opens them." Also: "L' last egg whites of Kylie Minogue flopped in the tables of the United States." Oh man, one more: "The Jr. Of Downey it has fought public the drug addiction during their relationship of seven years, before that the braces cracked in 1991." Still more coherent than TMZ! [TaylorMayde]