Like Lifehacker, but better.

And so another long-rumored internerd deal inches closer to fruition: it would seem that Viacom has shown interest in humor paper and website The Onion. Granted, The Onion has come up in every single "Who Shall We Rape and Pillage This Week?" meeting for the past 3 years, but now that Barry Diller is snatching up frat boys and their anal-probing foam fingers, Viacom CEO Tom Freston is seriously considering acquiring the wit and wisdom of Jean Teasdale and Jackie Harvey. If the online shopping spree continues, it can only be a matter of time before Office Pirates finds a home within the arms of some major media conglomerate. Or, at least, a major media conglomerate that actually wants them.

If you recently attempted to purchase securities from a reputable Manhattan investment bank but instead found yourself patronizing an international network of strip clubs and escort services, you may be the victim of brand confusion. Big-money bankers Goldman Sachs are challenging the domain owner of Goldmansex.com, a site dedicated to helping mongers worldwide locate their preferred flavor of tail whilst on the road. The Dutch proprietor of Goldmansex.com claims befuddlement, declaring that "Goldman" is a nickname friends tagged him with, as "People thought I was always lucky in life." One could be forgiven for assuming that Goldmansex.com caters to a less hetero clientele, due to the Oscar-statue man-icon and distinctive logo emphasizing "Gold mansex." None of these interpretations are likely to sit well with the bankers, though there's yet no similar outcry over JPWhoregan.com.

Hey old geek, are you still making jokes about "the Internets" — or, ugh, "the Intarweb"? Get with it — the new ironic phrase for the Net is "a series of tubes."

You're smart and hip, right? The kind of person whom your friends ask about the latest restaurants, what movies to see, or how to invest their 401ks? Of course you are. Well, whether you know it or not, you're an "Opinion Driver," and there's a new online community for you! It's called HOTSOUP.com (notice how the all caps lend an extra sense of urgency), and it comes from a vast collection of "high-profile leaders from the worlds of politics, media, and technology." Who are these high-profile leaders? Well, there's some of the guys who almost got the vice president of one of last century's most successful administrations elected in his own right, but, uh, didn't. You've got some Bush ad people, who were responsible for that all-time classic commercial where wolves were going to eat your family if you voted for John Kerry. You've got a guy who advised the Kerry campaign, which means he actually got beat by the hungry wolves ad. And, on the tech side, you've got the president of some social networking site for ladies called sisterwoman.com (presumably because auntbroad.com was alreadytaken).

And there she is, in all her lumbering glory: the beta page from My Times, the Times' new service that will allow members to customize their NYTimes.com homepage. As of right now, you can only add feeds from various pre-selected sources (the AP, Salon, Instapundit, MSNBC, Arts and Letters), making this really no more than a limited RSS reader. But it's Bill Keller's RSS reader, and that makes it "special." Or so we're told. But the Times logo slapped up top isn't going to make you look any less douchey while you scan Pitchfork headlines.

Well look who's got themselves a new sugar daddy: the pretty ladies at Daily Candy have found themselves a minority investor valuing the company at $130 million. Back in February, Daily Candy's controlling investor Bob Pittman put the trendy email service on the auction block with a minimum bid of $100 million — but the ballsy number was enough to scare off the New York Times Co., News Corp., and Hearst. Instead, the Wall Street Journal reports that the company is no longer for sale, the ladies having decided to whore themselves to just one minority investment, the money from which shall go towards maintaining their well-stocked closets.

It's hard to single out the most objectionable part of this weekend's Modern Love column ("Little Girl Likes Computers") but were we pressed we'd have to choose the following paragraphs, which contain the lamest namedrops in recorded history:

The Huffington Post breaks the news we've all been waiting for: There's a new anchor for Rocketboom! She's former MTV Europe News VJ Joanna Colan. According to HuffPo's Rachel Sklar, Colan "formerly the music/DJ curator at Table 50, will begin on Monday, July 10th, when Rocketboom is scheduled to go live again."

Rocketboom was a three-minute, daily video blog that covered the day's news in a quirky, kind-of-humorous-but-eh format. We never really got into it, if only because we just weren't into ogling the show's host, Amanda Congdon. But Juggy McJuggerson was pretty damn popular with the show's virgin audience, who were loyal to Congdon like a baby to his mother's teat. Alas, Congdon — who had a cameo on CSI, you know — has left Rocketboom, leaving the vlog's 300,000-some viewers with no one to masturbate to. Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron wrote on the Rocketboom site that Congdon had left the show to pursue opportunities in Los Angeles and Hollywood; Congdon claims that she was fired. Naturally, she airs her side of the story on her blog, even producing a short video in which she explains that she won't be doing Rocketboom any longer.

In a column today which is completely not a puff for John Battelle even though the success or failure of his new web company will determine how much longer Pinch can keep his cousin from the corner office, The Times' David Leonhardt looks at Battelle's concept of "the database of intentions":

A letter of complaint sent today to NYTimes.com and copied to us:

After a craptastic first issue (Beyonce), Spin EIC Andy Pemberton finally resigned yesterday, opting instead for a summer of "going to the beach." As of this morning, Spin online's main domain name, Spin.com, seems to have resigned as well. Aren't we cheeky, Pemberton.

Our slutty sisters in Washington love to pick on The Note — ABC's way-inside-the-Beltway daily political tip sheet — but it's not typically on our beat. But this morning, and for the first time ever, we received a press release from an ABC flack alerting us to some highlights in today's Note. For example:

Slate's founding editor Michael Kinsley has a nostalgic recount of Slate's first ten years; amidst the self-congratulatory high-fives, he explains that he feels like a real winner when people forget that Slate is a website:

• We just can't believe that anyone calling himself "Jacob the Jeweler," who makes his living crafting massive, diamond-encrusted watches and pendants for the good people of the hip-hop industry, would have anything to do with a drug ring called the Black Mafia Family. [TMZ]
• Introducing our new favorite website: Long Awkward Pose. People look stupid when they pose for pictures, but they look even more stupid when they don't know they're being videotaped during their earnest posing. Hilarity ensues. [Long Awkward Pose]
• Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos thinks Maureen Dowd is a "catty, insecure bitch," which may or may not having something to do with former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox. Crazy fucking redheads. [The Stranger]
• If a sex shop comes to Soho, it has to be luxe. Kiki de Montparnasse fits the bill — and if it's high-end, the celebrities shall flock. Go and watch Lenny Kravitz buy a high-end dildo, it'll change your life. [NY Sun]
• Daniel Klaidman comes to NYC to be the assistant managing fluffer at Newsweek. [FishbowlDC]
• Associated Press management slowly dehydrates its staff to death. [The Slug]
• Bill Gates announces that in two years he'll go part-time at Microsoft and devote his energies full-time to his charity work. Steve Jobs cackles, John Hodgman weeps. [Forbes]

At the dorkalicious Webby awards last night, Fishbowl NY accosted Times columnist Thomas Friedman for a quick interview. In regards to his column being hidden behind the Berlin wall of TimesSelect, Friedman says, "I hate it. It pains me enormously." On the bright side, he reminds us, he can still hop on a plane and travel to whatever far-fetched place he fancies, and the Gray Lady will have to foot the bill (suckers). But as he chuckles his way through telling of how it nonetheless hurts to lose readers in Hungary, we can't help but think one thing: how long until Friedman and Frank Rich have a jolly-off?

The HuffPo's virgin media blog Eat the Press has an entertaining new time-waster: the People Ranker, which charts the levels of buzz in the blogosphere. Just enter a string of names, and the fun little gizmo spits out popularity contest-style results. We love it — it's so much easier to be snotty and judgmental when you have concrete data.

We've been hearing a lot in the last week about how Conde Nast is finally jumping headfirst onto the internet, what with the recent appointments of web editors for several big-name titles and all the ballyhoo that Portfolio will be not just a magazine but a web presence, too. And that made us wonder how another big, old-line magazine company is doing with its newfangled online venture. Office Pirates, the first-ever web-only Time Inc. project, launched to much fanfare a bit over three months ago; it was to represent a new direction for the company — all those people were laid off, at least in part, so that Time Inc. could refocus its energies on new areas like the web.

We already knew that Barbara Corcoran, the teeth-gnashing doyenne of overpriced real estate, is cool when it comes to the web — her professional website has its own goofy little blog (written by some peon), which is kind of adorable. What we didn't know was that the CorcoDevil was so relaxed and hip to the 'net that she even allows her brokers to list the company website on their Big Muscle Bears profile.