Not unlike one of his songs, the saga of Moby's attempt to stay off the web goes on and on and gets increasingly more annoying:

The kids at Stereogum notice that Moby, in spite of his previous promise to stay off the Internet, updated his journal on Sunday. How's the project going? "I've lapsed a couple of times for work, etc."

This is random-ish and slightly more driveling than usual, but it's early, so: can anyone else get on the Daily News' website? We've cleared our cache and cookies, but our poor browser hasn't been able to find the News' server for the second day in a row. A survey of associates has found inconsistent access: maybe 1/3 of New York slaves can get online; outside of the region, it's inconsistent as to who can access the site. Do the Newsies even know that there's a problem? Did Mort forget to pay the bill? That we totally understand. (And oh, how we long for the days of Network Solution outtages — happy, halcyon snow days...)

Recently, an individual who has registered an insane amount of Brangelina/Shiloh-related domain names offered us the chance to purchase any number of his culturally hot dot-coms:

Times couch potato Virginia Heffernan can finally sleep at night: Lonelygirl15 — AKA Bree, a YouTube user whose video diaries of her life as an beautiful, home-schooled nerd captured the hearts of chronic masturbators near and far — has been definitively exposed as a fake, a calculated effort to create an online drama in hopes of developing a movie from the resulting buzz. You care, right? Maybe someone in marketing should, because at one point, over 700,000 YouTube views were devoted to this girl. On her corporate blog Screens, Heffernan has made Lonelygirl15 into her great white whale, first proclaiming the girl deserving of her own television show (July 28); since then, Heff's devoted 15 posts to the cult of Bree. And today, finally, Lonelygirl15 earns her place in the "real news" pantheon with Heffernan's story published on actual newsprint.

When YouTube first launched we were like, "This is cool and everything, but how do we know what's worthwhile? We sure wish someone like Carson Daly would come along and just show us the best web videos available."

· AOL struggles to find new reasons to justify its pointless existence in a broadband world by offering downloadable movies from most of the majors, set at the three price points of $19.99, $14.99 and $9.99, or crap, crappier and crappiest. [Variety]
· More online entertainment news—we know, it's too much sexy, you can't bear it. CBS will stream episodes of some of their series, such as The Unit and The Class, in the hope that eyeballs they've lost to computer porn might shift over to some of their shows once they're, uh, done with their computer porn business. [Variety]
· A national janitors' union presents their Golden Broom Awards for the "worst place for janitors to work." (Wouldn't a golden broom suggest excellence in the custodial arts? We would have gone with the Leaky Bucket Awards, but hey, not our gig.) Winners this year include NBC Studios, Universal Citywalk and Warner Music Group. Defamer commentators go wild with "Tom Cruise new career opportunity" jokes. [Variety]
· Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank will put their ambisexual chemistry to the test in P.S. I Love You, a movie we will not see because it is called P.S. I Love You. [THR]
· THR claims this year's Emmys arrive among "a din of disenchantment." Hey, if it makes you feel better, Emmy, we'll check you out. On TiVo. Well, we'll just fast forward to the Conan O'Brien bits and to see if Ellen Burstyn wins The Leaky Bucket the Emmy for her 14-second performance. [THR]

It's come to our attention that Glamour's fearless dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky, whose job requires her to navigate the single-girl waters based on the results of reader polls, was offended by some of our earlier posts. Let's be clear: we have no ill will towards Alyssa and think her column pic is kind of cute. If we seem "bitter," it's because we don't know where to buy that grey tube top (seriously, the loose fit is so crucial after had a few beers. Bloated!).

With the exercise ball endorsement racket not as lucrative as it once was, Nick Lachey has decided to look elsewhere for goods and services to which he can attach his name, which has evolved into a trusted brand synonymous with bad music and tabloid oversaturation. YFly, the latest venture to get the Nick Lachey stamp of approval, is a recent entrant into the crowded category of online communities. But where field leader MySpace may reign supreme with its sheer number of subscribers, it also suffers from a scourge of faked celebrity home pages. Not YFly, however, which guarantees "real celebrities, athletes, and artists - no posers!" among the "kick a** people" in its database. And how do you know your new friend is the "DaREALJessAlba," and not just some balding, middle-aged impostor preying on horny and gullible teenage boys? By marking their profiles "Certified Celebrity." Their brief FAQ explains how Lachey fits into the picture:

The long-rumored deal between skank-humor hub CollegeHumor.com and Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp has finally been consummated. IAC has acquired a 51% stake in CollegeHumor's parent company, Connected Ventures, LLC, and full voting control of the company (Barry's a bit of a dom). The Post guesstimated the deal to hover around $20 million, but we've been told that the price tag was quite a bit higher. Never underestimate the financial viability of photographing pyramids constructed from beer cans.

Because internet service provider AOL lacks, how do you say, common sense, the company released data for over 20 million web queries for over 657,000 users; the data was so specific that even the Times could ascertain the identity of one user looking for information on dog pee and "60 single men." The search information has since been removed (mirrored here), but while tooling around the AOL database, we were pleased to find the following search queries took AOL users to Gawker:

• Lee Gomes doesn't care what all you Chris Anderson cultists think; The Long Tail is full of shit. Inevitable Anderson riposte t/k. [WSJ]
• Mariane Pearl, widow of slain WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl, writes her first column for Glamour. Ann Coulter, 45, immediately calls her a whore. [Glamour]
• Hard-hitting Observer investigation reveals that some firefighters in the "FDNY Calendar of Heroes" come from out of state. [NYO]

So this has been floating around the web of late: It's a look back at the Internet of 1996, an era of poor design and disturbing aesthetics. It's a fascinating capsule of an era, and our usual willingness to make mockery of it is tempered by the fact that we took a look at Gawker's content and design in 1996, and, well, we're in no position to point fingers. After the jump, a blast from our past.

CNN's website is about to get a whole lot shittier — and we don't mean because of an increase in ill-placed "watch now" links. According to an exciting press release we've just received, CNN.com is harnessing the "power" of citizen journalism by launching CNN Exchange, a user-generated content destination with video, audio, articles and other assorted crap submitted by YOU! (Just like College Humor.) Funny — just yesterday Nicholas Lemann was telling everyone that new media/citizen journalism has not yet risen "to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media," but CNN isn't going to listen to that old fuddy-duddy. If they want to dilute their website more than a Gawker comments thread, they're going to do it. Just you wait.

While browsing for the DVD of the Charles Bronson/Lee Marvin fugitive fur-trapper classic Death Hunt on Amazon.com, Austin360.com's Dave Thomas discovered a feature he hadn't noticed before*: User submitted plot keyword tags, ranging from the extremely broad (clicking "Snow" brings you to 16 pages of wintry titles, including The Empire Strikes Back and, predictably, White Christmas) to the highly specific ("Shot In The Eye" conveniently aggregates movies, such as Saving Private Ryan and The Godfather, that feature a well-placed bullet in the peeper, though a separate tag exists for "Shot In The Genitals"). The classification system is highly useful, even if it tends to tread into the realm of obsessive excess: V for Vendetta, for example, gets 103 tags, and while it's helpful to remember that Fight Club and The Seven Samurai also feature someone having their head shaved, we think we were fine without having access to a list of titles that also make prominent use of a toilet.

Without the assistance of recently-Condefied reporter Gabe Sherman, the Observer's Off the Record column is free to roam to the wildest corners of editor Tom Scocca's imagination — like an in-depth look at YouTube! And today, that means peppering your article with anecdotal nostalgia:

Running Mischa Barton's nipple a close second for most overexposed item on the Internet, Wired editor Chris Anderson's The Long Tail is the perfect example of a tidy thesis stretched out to book form and embraced by the usual subjects (i.e., bloggers, and the people who try to understand them). Anderson's theory, for the two of you who may have missed the book party and every single website of the last two months, is that while brick-and-mortar commerce is reliant mainly on big hit items, the Web, with its infinite capacity for niche marketing, can focus on things that do much less volume but which will, over time and in aggregate, wind up selling more than the big hits. (Take a second and read that sentence again, we know we sure are.)

While the Internet provides countless opportunities for expression, connection, and experimentation that otherwise might have never occurred, these expressions are, as you might expect, of varying quality. So when we spot something as entertaining as this Craigslist ad, we feel duty-bound to pass it along. It's a gripping tale of real estate and unstoppable compulsions, and you really do need to read it. We're just sorry that the no doubt bored office drone who wrote it during work had to resort to CL to get this gem published: It should have been a "Shouts & Murmurs" piece in The New Yorker. I mean, it's certainly no less funny than anything Andy Borowitz ever wrote.

• We really ARE overdue for a George Michael assfucking scandal, aren't we? Don't worry, it's about to get much better: the former pop star was caught having a "seedy liason" in a public park with the hot piece of twat pictured at right. 58-year-old unemployed van drivers who live with their cat sure are irresistible, aren't they? [Sun UK]
• Tomorrow Russell Simmons will be named a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador, putting him on the well-worn path to becoming Angelina Jolie. Perhaps he's splitting with Kimora over whether or not to adopt an Ethiopian AIDS orphan. [FishbowlNY]
• You know what's wrong with magazine publishing? The people who are running it, specifically those at the Magazine Publisher's Association who believe a mascot named Captain Read is going to do a goddamned thing other than inspire mockery and ensure irrelevancy. [AdAge]
• Though we wouldn't put it past Simon Dumenco to hook up with Cap'n Read. [AdAge]
• Conde Nast will master these internets yet, even if it means going the route of incredibly boring trade sites. [Craigslist]
• Is somene pushing a Times-ian frenzy surrounding the raising admission fee for the Met? At the current rate, they'll churn out 60 pieces by November, which will almost be enough to satisfy Bill Keller. [Seth Mnookin]
• It doesn't matter how fantastic a "trailer" for a book may be, because it'll never half as good as the trailer for Snakes on a Plane. That's just a fact. [Guardian]
• Greg Gutfeld's still life with Arianna Huffington. [HuffPo]
• Dallas Mavericks bloggy freakshow Mark Cuban has an open job offer for anyone who can think of a new way to market movies. On the downside, you'll be working for Mark Cuban. [Blog Maverick]
• Who Wore It Best? — crotchety Sun Valley mogul edition! [WSJ]
• Why does the Regal Union Square movie theater smell like Chinatown on a simmering July afternoon? [Cinecultist]

Obsessive indie rock kids and Williamsburg hipsters are starting their mornings with bowls of Cocoa Puffs and tears, as it would seem that popular music blog Stereogum.com has fallen victim to a nasty hack. You know, when hackers choose to direct their efforts towards a blog rather than, say, websites of actual consequence, maybe it's a sign that the mainstream media should pick things up a little bit.