Many years ago, the Bush reelection campaign site had a little gadget that allowed users to put their own slogans on Bush campaign signs. This gadget was abused, humorously. No one learns any lessons on the internet, thank god, and now a site created by a Barack Obama supporter allows you to upload any photo you want and stick it in the candidate's official logo. Animal has a bit of fun with this. Can any of you do better than this terrifying Julia Allison/MisShapes/Corey Kennedy triptych? [Animal]

This cute thing with the Googlegangers in the Times? You know, where people search for other people across the country with their same name, and feel some sort of mystical kinship, or something, because of innate biological self-similarity biases? Some people have funny last names that were made up out of whole cloth a couple generations ago at Ellis Island or somewhere, like in An American Tail. These people have no Googlegangers, which is a stupid word, because everyone on Earth with that last name is directly related to them and probably embarrassed by what's being done with it on the Internet. The closest non-relative these hypothetical people can manage to track down on the Google might be Dana Perino. So screw you, "Jon Lee" and "Jason Rodriguez." [NYT]

Many months ago, top Washington Post political reporters Jim VandeHei and John Harris left their real newspaper to go be partners in a multimedia cross-platform Web 2.0 venture called Politico, which is actually a tiny little newspaper in Washington, DC. And a website. They lured a bunch of other top reporters over there too, with promises of lots and lots of Internet money, just like the Huffington Post gets, and promises of expansion and fame. It's been a huge success! Maybe! The Observer reports today that Politico is now turning into a TV show, which makes sense, because they are owned by a company that owns TV stations, but there's still not any word on whether this venture is actually making any money, for anyone. Which we're kinda curious about! Is it, as it appears to be, a big vanity project?

Bloggers, are you afraid you're going to die after reading that Times article earlier this week? Well, guess what! With the assistance of two new websites, you can set up farewell emails to be sent to your family and friends in the event of your untimely demise. Go ahead, tell them all the things you never had time to say in life because you were busy blogging yourself to death. See details below...

Nielsen, one of the outfits which tracks where web users spend time online, also asks survey respondents a series of questions about themselves-including, interestingly, their political leanings. So which sites are the most liberal, and conservative? The blue bars represent the proportion of the site's audience who declare themselves to be liberal or very liberal; the red bars represent conservative, moderate and undeclared. Daily Kos and Huffington Post, unsurprisingly, attract an overwhelmingly left-wing audience. Fox News and the Drudge Report draw the highest percentage of conservatives-even though Rupert Murdoch's news network still declares itself "fair and balanced."

Peter Walls is the chief executive of a "social housing firm" in the UK. John Finn owns a rival housing firm. One day, Finn started a website called dadsplace.co.uk, and on that website, many anonymous people said many mean, mean things about Walls. They accused Walls of nepotism and sleeping with underlings and other sorts of things like that. Then Walls sued Finn for libel. He just won! He won one hundred thousand pounds, which is around eleventy-billion dollars. Injunctions were filed against two of the anonymous commenters who said these mean things! In other words, being anonymously bitchy on the internet is quite dangerous in England. Which is why there is not really so much of a market for "gossip blogs" there, you see. As Denton just told us, this case "serves as a reminder that the abuse that we take as our god-given right to inflict, or duty to tolerate, is illegal in many places." God bless the U.S.A.. [Guardian]

"Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri will soon answer the hundreds of questions submitted by journalists, militants and others about the terrorist network's future, its media wing announced Wednesday.[...]Al-Sahab announced in December that al-Zawahri would take questions from the public posted on Islamic militant Web sites and would respond 'as soon as possible.'" [AP, Related]

Is this a cruel hoax? A Gawker Operative reports: "I just came from the Starbucks on Spring/Crosby and they got no hot coffee! They got water pressure problems. I fucking bought a frappucino!" This could cripple the internet media.

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day, traditionally a day of amusing media hoaxes and journalistic pranks. The English press, as usual, does it better, but Jack Shafer's 2007 roundup of how not to look the fool provides some good examples of American merry-making. It's ok when the newsmedia lies to you if they're funny about it, after all. Even the internet gets involved! After the jump, a few selected web hoaxes from last year, and how to avoid getting taken in this year, you sucker.

Last night, Slate launched their new "Hillary Deathwatch," a recurring feature that will measure Hillary Clinton's odds of winning the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. Right now they have her at 12%. Also there is a little cartoon of Hillary Clinton standing atop a sinking ship. Cute! Entertainment Weekly founder and blog evangelist Jeff Jarvis raves: "I never liked Slate. And now I like them less." The truth comes out! Jeff never liked you, Slate. Him and Salon used to make fun of you behind your back in 1998, after Internet High School let out. [Slate]

The New York Times recently investigated the internet phenomenon known as Rickrolling—the fun-for-all-ages game of tricking people into clicking on a link that takes them to a Youtube clip of unlikely pop star Rick Astley singing his greatest hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up"—but they didn't do a very thorough job, considering that they were unable to track down Mr. Astley himself for comment (the LA Times found Rick and ran a lengthy, entertaining interview). They were also duped by a hoax clip of a "prankster" interrupting a college basketball game dressed as Astley and lip-synching the song. That performance, it turns out, happened before four different games, none of them the one the Times identified, and was not a halftime prank. And so, today, the Grey Lady runs a Rickrolling correction:

OMG! Where will former Gawker employees and their mothers express themselves? Twitter?!

The Drudge Report's permanent list of links to blogs, papers, columnists, and other sources has always been idiosyncratic. Peggy Noonan and Rosie O'Donnell share precious space with Forbes and CNN; blogs are generally underrepresented but Gawker's long been a staple. Earlier today, he quietly updated. New to the Drudge permalink club: Daily Kos, Free Republic, and Talking Points Memo, among others. The man's had Perez Hilton up there for god knows how long but he's just now getting around to a web magazine that's been online almost as long as he has? And such belated recognition of Kos? Is liberals growing hatred of Hillary Clinton really all it took to win Matt's love?

People boasts 4m visitors to the Time Inc. magazine's web site on the day photos of Jennifer Lopez' newborn twins went up. So, is that supposed to be impressive? Well, it is more than New York magazine drew for its cunningly classy recreation of Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoot, with the troubled actress played by a modern-day trainwreck, Lindsay Lohan. Adam Moss' stunt drew 1.3m US visitors per day at the peak of public interest, according to Quantcast. However, People simply directed web visitors to the print magazine, while New York milked the interest for all it was worth, generating nearly 20 pageviews per visitor. And, while People paid a record $6m to Jennifer Lopez for rights to the actress' babies, New York gave Lohan only a boost to her faltering credibility, which cost nothing, except Moss' reputation for high-mindedness. On the web, at least, People got the poorer deal; and that makes their chest-thumping all the more silly. (Data on New York magazine's traffic comes from Quantcast.)

This is my new favorite website. [Dog Report Dot Com]

In itself, the exit of a junior staffer shouldn't be that significant to Forbes, the right-wing business magazine. But Lea Goldman's departure to Marie-Claire highlights the vulnerability of the storied business magazine, and the increasing importance of web-bait such as listicles in even the most seemingly traditional of media.

The scene: two billionaires, former friends, are feuding over an internet conglomerate, IAC. John Malone's initial salvo comes in quotes given by the corporate assassin to the Wall Street Journal. Barry Diller, IAC's chairman, described his reaction in this week's court struggle for control of the sprawling internet company.
Malone: "The hook is set. It is our company... Barry ain't going to be able to spit the hook."
Diller: "I sail. I don't fish. I got the point."

The Times warns us that because so many people watch funny videos of talking cats and dancing teenage girls on the internet these days, there might not be enough internet left for the rest of us! It's true: there is only so much internet, and YouTube is using like all of it. "In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011." Oh no! We were totally planning to watch "I'm fucking Seth Rogen" that year! This is almost as bad as the time the internet totally suffered that "catastrophic collapse" in 1996, according to that 1995 prediction by engineer Robert Metcalfe. Man, the internet never recovered that that nonexistent disaster, we can only imagine how it'll fare after this one. [NYT]

For IAC's Barry Diller and his backer John Malone, the two billionaires wrestling for control of the internet conglomerate this week, a lawsuit is merely the continuation of negotiation by other means. A witness notes that the moguls are continuing settlement talks even as they trash each other in a Delaware court.

Just how desperate is AOL for some magic cure? The troubled New York internet portal, which just fired its advertising boss because he wouldn't sign up to ridiculous revenue targets, has bought one of those hip social network sites. Bebo, too expensive for other potential acquirors, is to go to the Time Warner internet unit for $850m. Bebo is popular among UK teenagers, particularly those with suicidal tendencies.