On Tuesday, Gawker media was taken offline by a German ddos attack. Today, three of the 'net's largest social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal, are experiencing similar outages. Twitter now reports they are under a denial-of-service attack.
Prince Marcus Von Anhalt (painting with nudity, nudity in picture galleries), also on MySpace (autoloads his very own gangster rap song), might have you believe that he is of royal blood. Wikipedia would disagree, revealing that he bought his royal title from ZsaZsa Gabor's husband. Incidentally, he owns over 20 brothels, a chain of exotic dancing establishments, and wrecks cars. To ice the cake, he has been dubbed the worlds richest asshole by Jared Paul Stern (Other pages on this blog contain partial nudity.)
A Psychologist Analyzes the Increasing Pervasiveness of Snark. From the Psychology Today blog site comes this article about snark, Gawker, and David Denby's definitions of "snark" versus "Satire." [more inside]
Business writer Seth Godin tell readers to forgo the MBA and spend six months in his company. While potential applicants have made use of social networking to show their enthusiasm, others think it's a bad idea. Great opportunity or massive scam?
Living the life observed, or the life exposed? Emily Gould (formerly of Gawker) writes about the impact her blogging, and exposure on the internet, has had on her life. (NYTimes, registration or use of bugmenot possibly required.)
The dangers of being a TV news reporter. A guaranteed context-free three-minute montage of television field reports gone awry.
Trent Lott announced today that he will be resigning from the U.S. Senate at the end of the year. His swift and unexpected decision to retire just one year after a re-election that many saw as a comeback from his much disgraced comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party in 2002 has puzzled many folks. Rumor is spreading that his resignation is due to an alleged scandal: his involvement with a gay escort. [more inside]
Battle-test your friends – in under four hours a week! Tim Ferriss, creator of the cold-fusion perpetual-motion machine that is the four-hour workweek (MetaFilter passim), gives you a list of stress tests you can apply to supplicants and other would-be “friends” – show up half an hour late or early, “forget” your wallet, induce them to “jostle” the lower classes. My kinda guy. (Gawker takedown.)
Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass. In a lengthy and critical New York profile, Vanessa Grigoriadis reveals Gawker to be a place where the employees are miserable, the model has shifted from pay-per-post to pay-per-traffic, and shamelessness (and Julia Allison) is the new commodity. Denton responds.
So now we can all stop, right? A brief catalog of Bloglish clichés from Gawker.
HelpMyBabyLive.com It comes down to this. If we can't raise the $50,000 in the next 3 months, we'll have to choose abortion. And you thought Save Karyn was bad. Via
Like old cheese and vomit, mixed with dog food ... Halitosis and aged cabbage ... Rank Swiss cheese ... Sour milk ... Pee in the air every day ... Like an open corpse ... Like a musty homeless person decomposing in musky homeless person urine ... Caramel with a slight undertone of mildly rank underarm ... Rodenticide. It's Gawker's New York City Subway Smell Map.
Elizabeth Spiers, of Gawker fame, has a new site, Dealbreaker, which bills itself as "an online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog." Content-free snark, with links to articles of interest to Wall Street fanboys? Oh, Elizabeth, you steal my heart. But, perhaps just mine.
Zombied-out customer-service reps beware: the Consumerist, the newest edition to Nick Denton's Gawker "nanopublishing" empire, is watching you. Gizmodo's Joel Johnson (who recently spent a month in New Orleans) serves up sassy shopping tips and customer-service-tests-from-Hell. More hip-product-pr0n-with-an-attitude, just in time for
Christmas the happy holidaysTM.
Gawker bucks vs journalists' bucks. The idea of bloggers going pro, though a relatively new one, has been discussed for a few years now. With blogging being discussed in the same breath as mainstream journalism, especially since last year's election in which the two activities seemed to clash in a very public way, is it time to ask ourselves if blogging is or can be just another form of journalism with its own professional personalities and success-based pay rates?
Lifehacker is a fairly new addition to the Gawker Media family of blogs, publishers of another personal favorite in the Gizmodo gadget blog. Lifehacker posts articles on how to do all sorts of things better/quicker/cooler/cheaper:
- How to make a "life poster" with Photoshop
- how to opt out of credit card junk mail
- free Hubble Space Telescope wallpaper images
- get thumbnail screenshots with your google search results using firefox
- How to cut vegetables (previously posted here)
FIDDLE • GoldenFiddle.com sends up Gawker.com, tailing celebrities in Atlanta: "Saw David Cross over thanksgiving at the Magnapop show in east Atlanta. He seemed really pissed off about something. Christianity maybe?"
Gawker Stalker and The Elevator Chronicles: I'm a sucker for genuine celebrity sightings (in my experience, they're true if they're thoroughly disappointing and boring) and Gawker has been having a whale of a time with them. The unfolding Elevator Saga (starring Anna Wintour, the editor of Yank Vogue) and Gawker Stalker are great fun, even for profound thinkers such as myself. [My paltry celebrity sighting inside.]
Just what exactly was Calvin Klein, the Fashion Designer, saying To Latrell Sprewell, the Basketball Player? [Photo and more inside.]
Gawker.com has arrived. All about New York, "Condé Nastiness, downwardly-mobile i-bankers, real estate porn -- the serious stuff". It's all good. It also looks like the latest attempt to make a living out of blogging. Will that ever happen?
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