You know how you're at the Tumblr party, drunkenly caning the free whisky like there's no tomorrow and then a sexygeekboy sits down and starts chatting to you, and before you know it your legs are touching and then he's whispering in your ear that he has an early morning flight and "do you want to leave now and make a night of it?" and you're grinning and saying "yes", and then you stumble back to yours and fuck each other furiously, and you're wondering how the hell this drop-dead gorgeous man ended up in your bed, and then he writes down his email before leaving for the airport, and you curl up in bed with a huge smile on your face, waking a few hours later to Google his name and discover that he's not just any sexygeekboy but one that also happens to be famous on the internet?

Yeah, that

Curt Viebranz, fired as president of AOL's sales arm after just half a year, may have lost a struggle with the internet portal's bosses. But he's unlikely to be the last executive casualty at the Time Warner unit, New York's biggest internet business. Alley Insider reports Viebranz may have been fired because he refused to sign up to unrealistic ad sales targets. But why were the bosses' expectations so unreasonable?

When we first saw this graph of the recording history of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", we thought, a) god almighty everyone needs to stop covering "Hallelujah", and b) everyone really needs to stop graphing songs. It was all worth it though for this Kottke guest-blogger post, which perfectly encapsulates the blinkered triumphalism of the boutique bloggers. You see, a half-dozen random bloggers were all pretty sure that their posts on this graph launched Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" cover to number one on iTunes—until their one friend who watches TV pointed out that an American Idol contestant sang it last week. [Kottke]

What's going on in our nation's capital? I'll tell you what: Bloggers! Four young, liberal bloggers occupy a single row house in DC, meaning that a major paper is contractually obliged to cover the phenomenon as a trend. A slow-moving, couch-based trend. We learn that the roommates in "the Flophouse" send IMs to each other when they're all at home; that they write about stuff that goes on the house on their blogs; and that "These bloggers are the cool kids who know they're smart, like some Seth Rogen character with a Ph.D. from Harvard's Kennedy School." Sure! This antisocial scene reminds me of nothing so much as the current incarnation of THIS:

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing is already set to be 2008's Gladwellian The Long Tailing Point Web 2.0 trend book of the year (especially after every blogger in Manhattan went to its release party). Former Gawker Mascot Andrew Krucoff is totally in the book! Because he was an early adopter of phone-based OG social networking gizmo Dodgeball, you see. Everyone else in the New York media scene signed up for it too, but only to write about it. The Krucoff excerpt, via noted music blog Young Manhattanite, is below, accompanied by a comment from mysterious YM contributer 99 that saves us the trouble of making fun of it.

PageSix.com: a name that carries weight not only in the corridors of gossipdom, but in the virtual corridors of the internet blog-o-world. The Post's gossip site knows that it needs to spread its influence throughout the online realm in order to remain competitive. But they're not so clear on what a blog is. The following email from Page Six was sent to a MAGAZINE—NOT A BLOG—which really undermines its call for solidarity amongst gossip bloggers:

Break Media just bought WallStreetFighter.com for an undisclosed sum, which must be a tidy one because of the words "Wall Street" in the site's name. Apparently Wall Street Fighter gets half a million visitors per month [TVWeek]. Who knew? Break decided its mix of simplified finance posts mixed with "check out this cool thing" content would be a good addition to its portfolio of guy-targeted sites, which includes venerable paste-jobs like HolyTaco.com and Chickipedia.com. Unimportant in appealing to guys: punctuation.

Paul Tilley, the ad exec who killed himself because blogs were mean to him (or something), continues to inspire the most self-righteous and least self-aware of scribes to put quill to parchment, adjust their oft-dropped monocles, and write, more in sadness than in anger ("I think I'm more saddened than pissed off"), strongly worded letters to whom it may concern regarding those mean, mean bloggers. Today, Bob Garfield, who blogs at Ad Age, helpfully explains "the difference between commentary and vandalism." "Commentary" is when smart, mustachioed professionals who've written books and things blog. "Vandalism" is when people are mean to those people, on the internet. [AdAge, UnRelated]

Iran is going to shut off the Internet for the duration of the upcoming election. Unfortunately this only applies to the Iranian election, and only if you live in Iran. [IHT]

A breakthrough study from the Society of Medical Researchers Who Didn't Think Up a Study Topic Until the Very Last Minute has found that limiting the amount of time your fattie kids sit on their ass watching TV or playing on the internet could help them lose weight! Kids tended to eat less junk food when they were forced to get off their ass and do something else, the study determined [WSJ]. One doctor is recommending parents get some kind of electronic device that limits brain-numbing time per week for children. We wholeheartedly support this effort to whip these no-account kids today into shape. Junk food and TV are not the way to go. There is only one safe and effective way to gain weight:

Why let your abandonment of this mortal coil prevent you from continuing to be a self-impressed techno-utopian schmuck? Now you can alert the world that you read BoingBoing ever after death with the "Public Domain Donor" sticker. Put it on your license today so that when you die your Twitter will revert to the Public Domain where fellow Twitterers may build upon it with further Twittering. [Public Domain Donor via Kottke]

According to well-placed sources, the entire internet in all of downtown Chicago has been out of service for two days now and no one has noticed.

Sometimes Denton will send me some link and I will say "OLD! Defamer had it in January!" Because I read the entire Internet every day, which is why I am such a miserable bastard and no one really enjoys talking to me anymore. Anyway, that "Garfield without Garfield" thing is funny, isn't it? But it's not as clever as ARBUCKLE, the comic where Garfield remains in the strip but his thought bubbles are removed, which makes it all even more existential and depressing. (Also some of those photoshopped strips have been floating around message boards for years people.) (Seriously, I'm becoming completely intolerable to be around.) [Arbuckle, Garfield Minus Garfield]

Earlier today we showed you Barack O'Bollywood and invited you to send in your favorite distracting and discomfiting viral videos about the Democratic candidates. Some of you did! We've embedded some of these videos after the jump. They make for disturbing viewing, you have been warned. There is musical theater and porn and ABBA.

Dear Internet: If you really wanted to see photos of screenwriter Diablo Cody's nipples, you could've just read her old City Pages blog, where all of them came from. Honestly, people. [Defamer] (Clarification: we're bitching about EGOTASTIC, to whom we did not wish to deliver more traffic, not our friends at Defamer. Also the internet as a whole.)

"Free!", the upcoming book from Chris Anderson, explores the exciting new business concept of freebies. Okay, Wired's editor-in-chief isn't pretending he discovered loss leaders, ad-subsidized media and such; he's just the first to sell a book about it (coming this summer, though of course there will be a Free! version). For Anderson, the book means a Free! feature article in Wired, released today. It's 4,703 words! Here's the 100-word version, in Anderson's own (edited) words.

UK tabloids are enjoying huge web traffic thanks to American celebrity scandals. Unfortunately for our trade deficit, we see none of that money. Even when the Daily Mail runs New York's NUDE LINDSAY LOHAN shots, without permission. (The photos, owned by Bert Stern, are under embargo—the Daily Mail just made up a little "nymag.com" watermark, slapped it on, and ran with them.) [FishbowlNY]

Magazines are dying and the web is surging, but maybe there is a web ad bust on the way, and also maybe the web is what is killing magazines, or maybe no one reads anymore, and (former Gawker managing editor) Choire Sicha is trying to figure it all out in today's Observer. He's also trying to figure out Rolling Stone's Britney Spears cover and New York's Lindsay Lohan cover, the two most important magazine covers of this century. But, about that Rolling Stone piece—we all saw the good bits, because they were leaked, by RS, to Perez, but maybe we mostly missed the more "important" thinky bits of Vanessa Grigoriadis' story, because RS only put the first 606 words on their website? Regardless, Rolling Stone had their "best week ever in the history of the Web site," even without the story. So maybe all they needed were the photo galleries? "Until the people on the business side are sure they're going to replace that revenue, that's how it's going to be," says an editor. Maybe we don't actually need content anymore, just the idea of content? That will save everyone a bit of time and money!

Alt-weekly crusader and Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple wrote the definitive story on the battle between traditional newsrooms and their web counterparts, where "definitive" means "extraordinarily long and often forgetting to make a larger point in its various attempts to embarrass the Washington Post." It's still entertaining though, as a case study in precisely how, over and over again, one should not roll out and maintain the web side of a major publication.

The aptly named anonymous anti-Scientology Internerd group "Anonymous" has released another video threatening the Church of Scientology with more protests and other vague opposition-type actions. For all the overly dramatic voice concealment, spy novel language, and self-seriousness, the scary thing is the tiny little inkling you get that all the precautions just might be smart. Or they could be totally ridiculous! After the jump, the whole video—including instructions for joining the fight yourself, if you're so inclined.