Kimball (pictured) is the fellow who wrote a wrongheaded and nakedly self-serving New York Times op-ed about how much internet recipes suck, and how the web's terrible food writing basically killed Gourmet magazine. Where can you turn for quality recipes? Cook's Illustrated, naturally.

Now that the op-ed has drummed up controversy, Kimball is trying to stage a fight, between himself and "the WIKI [sic]:"

The current rage is the WIKI [sic] recipe notion... I am willing to put my money, and my reputation, where my big mouth is. I offer a challenge to any supporter of the WIKI or similar concept to jump in and go head to head with our test kitchen.

Well, of course Kimball wants to cook off against something from a Wiki. Cooking is a chemical process, and tinkering with what is fundamentally a science experiment via the Wiki's trademark mass, open editing process is... well, it's a recipe for disaster, as Kimball surely knows.

Far more interesting would be to see Kimball square off against a reasonably popular food blogger. Here is just a brief sampling of some of the free online material I gathered in five minutes from various food blogs I track from home in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• A restaurant pastry chef's recipe for Madeira Cake.
  
• A restaurant sous chef's recipe for jams, pickled vegetables and cooked vegetables.
  
• A farmer's recipe for canning your own tomatoes.
  
• An urban farmer's guide to when the fruits and veggies grown in the backyards of my actual town are at their peak ripeness.
  
• A restaurant cook's guide to frying an egg "Spanish-style in olive oil... my new favorite way to devour these culinary jewels." See also his "Least popular recipe ever."

Of course, acknowledging that this stuff even exists would slightly undermine Kimball's point that the internet is an eater's idiocracy in need of rescue by his fine magazine (which, side note, I subscribe to, being a proud media omnivore). But at least it would make for an interesting cook off rather than the contrived burning of a culinary straw man.

(Pic by Laurie Chipps)

Of course, 24/7 Wall Street has the advantage of being able to conjure made-up estimates out of thin air; that's how the site put a price tag on various blog networks back in February (PerezHilton.com: $32 million (ha); Gawker Media: $170 million (HA!)). Now the site's taken those made-up estimates and combined them with additional made-up estimates of how much each blog network would be worth without its iconic founder. In other words, it's estimating the economic worth of each blogging boss — not to be confused with their actual wealth.

Here are the numbers. Spoiler: Drudge is king, even in hypothetical death.

(Correction: This post originally said 24/7 Wall Street was an AOL property. It is in fact independent.)

Gawker Media's Nick Denton: $26 million. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but it's only 15 percent of his company's hypothetical net worth, since Denton doesn't do much writing or editing. "Gawker would miss the guiding hand, but presumably the company could get another skilled CEO." (Pic: Eliot Shepard via mednut on Flickr)

Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington: $23 million. Huffington is the face of her company, 24/7 correctly notes, lending it valuable "star power and relationships." But the site overestimates the extent to which Huffington has delegated control to "highly skilled editorial staff:" although she's made some promising recent hires from the likes of the Washington Post, Huffington has stocked the wide-ranging site with nepotistic hires willing to abide her detailed (headlines, story placement, story assignments) and wide-ranging orders. As such, she's probably at least twice as essential to the organization as 24/7 estimates (25 percent of HuffPo's $90 million net worth). (Pic: JD Lasica)

Drudge Report's Matt Drudge: $43 million. That's 90 percent of his site's estimated $48 million value. Sure, Drudge has in the past received help from swell guys like Andrew Breitbart (no longer working for him), but they hardly had the skill to open email messages containing Republican talking points and newsroom leaks: "Drudge obviously has editors working for him to gather the hundreds of links from other media but the scoops that run on the sites are almost certainly his."

PerezHilton.com's Mario "Perez Hilton" Lavandeira: $30 million. The jizz-doodling celebrity gossip blogger is obviously an irreplaceable genius i 24/7's eyes: Without him, says the website, "the $32 million value of PerezHilton.com would go to under $2 million." Right, except for the fact that Lavandeira's got his sister and probably others actually writing/doodling the damned thing on his behalf. And since 1> Perez Hilton isn't anyone's real name to begin with and 2> his sister doesn't go around calling people "fags" like Lavandeira does, she might actually be able to make the site more popular.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington: $12.5 million. Sure, TechCrunch's flagship tech business blog has "more than 20 senior writers, editor and business staff," but Arrington is "a controversial and polarizing figure," so he's worth half the company's total imaginary valuation of $50 million. (Pic: Robert Scoble)

The rest: MacRumors' Arnold Kim, a onetime doctor is estimated worth $4.2 million to his $21 million site; GigaOm's Om Malik accounts for $2.9 million of his tech blog network's $9.5 million value; Mashable's Pete Cashmore is estimated worth $1.25 million, or half of his tech blog's $2.5 million value; Business Insider's Henry Blodget $1.5 million or two-thirds of the total value of his financial blogging company; Markos Moulitsas (pictured) $1.7 million of political blog Daily Kos' $2 million made-up value. (Pic: Steve Rhodes)

Hilden, a Yale-trained First Amendment specialist, examined a New York trial judge's decision to strip Rosemary Port of her anonymity in lawsuit brought by her nemesis, "skank" model Liskula Cohen. In reviewing Google's stance in the case, she found the company dodged big First Amendment issues and instead objected that the judge's request for blogger information was a pain in the ass; "overbroad, vague and ambiguously worded."

In short, Google took no real stand in support of the First Amendment rights of bloggers on its system, even though the Supreme Court has held that anonymous speech is often protected. The court itself noted in its opinion that Google "essentially has no substantive opposition to [Cohen's] application."

So if you want to anonymously call a model a "skank," or anonymously satirize Steve Jobs, or anonymously pick on the New York Times, maybe try WordPress.com instead, you filthy insane adorable whore skank anony-bloggers, you.

(Pic: Port)

A Massachusetts legal blog called The Docket carries an odd story: a federal judge wanted to hold Sullivan to account for marijuana possession on a national seashore, which after all is only a misdemeanor and $125 fine, and other people are prosecuted for it all the time in his very court. But the U.S. Attorney's Office insisted on dropping the charges, to keep Sullivan's record clean so his immigration can go through.

Are bloggers getting VIP treatment at the federal level now? The magistrate hearing the case, Robert Collings, certainly thought Sullivan was:

Collings says he expressed his concern that "a dismissal would result in persons in similar situations being treated unequally before the law. … persons charged with the same offense on the Cape Cod National Seashore were routinely given violation notices, and if they did not agree to [pay the fine] were prosecuted by the United States Attorney … there was no apparent reason for treating Mr. Sullivan differently from other persons charged with the same offense."

In his day, newspaper columnist and radio host Walter Winchell enjoyed a close, favor-trading relationship with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; according to Neal Gabler's biography of Winchell, this mainly involved the funneling of confidential information. But his special relationship with the Justice Department eventually became public knowledge and helped turn him, in the public eye, from the scrappy underdog into a dangerous media baron. If anything, the blogosphere has bred an even stronger distaste for special treatment than the tabloids did; which is why Sullivan, heretofore tight-lipped about the incident, will probably issue some sort of plausible explanation for the whole affair posthaste. Or at least attempt to.

UPDATE: Here is Collings' "memorandum and order" on the matter, which at 12 pages is quite concise by the standards of federal legal documents. We daresay it's almost eloquent! Docs via The Docket.

(Pic: Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff)

You'll no longer find Rebecca Ruiz's post "NYTPicker Revealed" on the Times' Media Decoder blog, although for the moment it remains in Google's cache. Citing "a person with close ties to the site," the Times fingered as NYTPicker's author David Blum, the Times vet turned fumbling newspaper turnaround artist. Blum had declined to comment to the Times, but about half an hour later, NYTPicker denied the report on its Twitter feed, and the Times pulled it from the Web.

The wording of NYTPicker's tweet did imply a team of two or more writers is behind the site, and that would certainly help explain its impressive track record: The site caught the Times romanticizing the plight of a child rapist, taking a hypocritical position on publishing the identities of foreign kidnap victims, and writing several erroneous things in Walter Cronkite's obituary. It also coaxed the first admission of plagiarism from Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

The site's authors are no doubt having still more fun at the paper's expense in the wake of its bad guess. And to think that, just two years ago, this sort of embarrassing public guessing game was played only by unscrupulous bloggers. Silicon Valley was in a frenzy about the identity of the author of the anonymous blog Fake Steve Jobs. After several erroneous, confidently-worded guesses by Gawker Media CEO ringleader (and then-Valleywag blogger) Nick Denton, the identity of the real author, Forbes editor Dan Lyons, emerged, thanks to some old-fashioned digging by none other than... the New York Times. Maybe the writer behind that successful exposé, Brad Stone, can be brought in to help this time around.

UPDATE: The Times has issued a new post, carrying a full denial by Blum. The paper adds that Blum "hadn't intended to decline comment." WTF?

Original post:

The latest case: A decorating firm in Queens called Holiday Image has asked a court to force Google to reveal who made a Gmail account in the company CEO's name, then sent fraudulent emails to clients of the company badmouthing the company itself, and its clients.

Well! We are not lawyers but that one sounds a lot more like "fraud" than does the Liskula Cohen case, where a pissed rival girl made an anonymous blog calling Liskula a skank. That one just sounded like "dumb." But the type of dumb that should be protected by free speech!

The bigger issue here is that if Google plans to roll over and reveal the identity of anyone doing something anonymously on the internet that pisses someone else off, we're all screwed. Here's another case that's a little more serious, courtesy of someone who is a lawyer—Anne Salisbury, who defended skankblogger Rosemary Port in the Liskula Cohen case. She notes a case in California, where a developer is suing to get Google to reveal the identities of an investigative group of journalists who wrote stories about a bribery scheme the developer was involved in:

Google has taken the position that unless it receives a written
"motion to quash" the subpoena, it will release the information to the
developer's attorneys. Many people in the free speech community are
alarmed at this potentially dangerous incursion, because of the belief
that vigorous, honest discourse will be stifled by fear of retribution
if personal, identifying information can be so easily obtained.

The problem is not anonymous insult artists or their victims. The problem is Google. Why don't you just shut up, Google?
[Pic via]

The changes at Wikipedia, which mandate review for anonymous changes to articles about living people, sound reasonable enough. The online reference has messed up its share of biographies, after all, falsely reporting the deaths of Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd and erroneously linking a prominent journalist to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

"The Ethicist" Randy Cohen's diatribe against anonyblogging of the sort aimed at Vogue model Liskula Cohen (pictured) likewise rests on a not-so-controversial assertion, namely that anonymous internet commenters are often complete assholes. And yet the column by Cohen (the nebbishy Times writer, not the hot model) is controversial, because it turns out he quoted his ex-wife without disclosing that fact. Which we know because of a — wait for it — anonymous blogger!

And that's the thing about being impolite online: it might be needlessly abrasive 95 times out of 100, but those other five times it's awesome, conveying fresh perspective readers would not have seen were it not for the cloak of anonymity. Cohen says we should make anonymity utterly shameful, except in cases where there is a "reasonable fear of retribution," but this sort of etiquette is basically just a way of regulating opinion, and runs counter to the rawness that has historically been one of the Web's great strengths. You could say the same thing about Wikipedia's new mechanisms for institutional control. Anonymous writers might not always absolutely need the secrecy the shroud themselves in, but they have good reason to want it.

Put another way, if we have to choose between prim scolds like Randy Cohen and impolitic ankle-biters like Fake Steve Jobs (anonymous for many months) or NYTPicker, we'll take the latter any day, even if the price is wading through tons of crap.

CocoPerez.com has been exposed in dribs and drabs; the website Evil Beet snuck past its password protection, then the website became freely available for maybe half an hour, now it's back to being password protected.

The site is meant to be more advertiser-friendly, and consequently finds Hilton doodling fewer crude captions on pictures. But his nasty side shows through sometimes, as in this caption:

Then there's this sarcastic headline, complete with Hilton's trademark double exclamation points:

But there's also analytical rigor! Evil Beet noticed that Hilton has been reposting items written for his old site, expanded with more "analysis." Below is a post about Harvard University's obnoxious new clothing line. On PerezHilton.com, the coverage ended with, "This is all fine and well, but there is one lingering question… why???" On CocoPerez.com, it ends,

This is all fine and well, but there is one lingering question: why?? This is from so far left field. We would understand if The New School or RISD or any number of artistic/fashion focused schools launched a line - it would still be unusual but at least a logical progression. But this?? This is just so random. Especially since Harvard isn't exactly thought of as the apex of fashion. This is like Janet Reno announcing she's launching a line of lingerie. You just can't get your head around it because it's so…bizarre.

Well, at least they've got our attention!

It is for this value-added piercing insight that the new site is apparently sponsored by Gap. We'd be surprised if many more sugar daddies sign on: Hilton's biggest advantage has been that he'll say anything, no matter how tasteless. But now he wants to make bank by playing nice, leading to muddles like CocoPerez.

Powell's movie is part blogger story and part Julia Child biopic; Meryl Streep plays Child, the famous home-cooking guru.

Now in preview screenings, Julie and Julia is already being savaged in food blogger circles. Chef, cookbook author and food blogger Virginia Willis' slam set the tone. While professing "no malice," it took Powell to task for daring to question Child's recipe, once:

One day she made a comment implying a recipe being wrong for roast chicken. I honestly don't remember what it was, but it struck me as being so disrespectful, completely without deference to Julia Child, that I stopped. What the hell did she know about food? Had she even heard of poulet au Bresse? Didn't go back.

Actually, the term Willis was looking for was poulet de Bresse, but we shouldn't interrupt a master bravely defending Child against a disrespectful (gasp!) acolyte:

People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts... Good grief, people who don't know how to begin to roast a ding dang chicken without following a recipe can be our new, ahem, food experts.

The bitter anger of a lone chef-writer? Hardly; other food bloggers quickly agreed. "Thank you, Virginia for... bravely expressing your frustrations," wrote one. Another: "Great post." Another: "A very well written article about something which, despite being an amateur food blogger myself, does frustrate me to no end." One blogger, after watching only a trailer, said Child "deserves more than being the other half to a Nora Ephron-penned romcom about a 'lowly cubicle worker' who blogs and struggles and cries and gets a book deal." Oh, plus also, Child thought Powell was a mere stunt artist! A clown, really! What a gleeful thing, to be able to report.

Powell, you see, has made enemies of her obsessive online peers. What infuriated them most was a 2005 New York Times op-ed decrying the "insidious... snobbery of the organic movement" — an all-out assault on the Church of Alice Waters. The reaction was furious: "today's stupidest piece of information;" "gratuitous... a coarse reductionist version of the... organic movement;" "[a] shockingly incoherent thing;" "ill-informed... erroneous." Or this, after Powell panned raw foodism in the Times: "Julie Powell... needs to stop huffing dust from the crypt of Erma Bombeck."

The prevailing "Slow Food" ideology of the culinary world is that the process of nourishment should be devolved — from massive centralized farms and feedlots and factories to local growers and aritsans and ultimately home gardens; from nutritionists and other food scientists to cultural and family traditions. And ultimately, we're supposed to replace slapdash restaurants with careful preparation in small, individual kitchens.

The irony is that here we have in Julie Powell the ultimate manifestation of these principles, an amateur who dived fearlessly into home preparations, devolving not only food but, via her blog, media as well, taking both cooking and communication into her own hands. And yet the foodie priesthood seems on the verge of ex-communicating her over these very traits. Sorry, guys, but Julie Powell is literally the embodiment of an organic movement. Buy some Milk Duds (TM), splash some fake butter on your Popcorn, pop open a Diet Coke (TM) and enjoy the film.

Sporting some kind of hideous quarter-goatee, Kneale, then at Forbes, allowed the Today show to confiscate his BlackBerry, back in 2007. He surely though it would be a glorious publicity stunt on a national stage; that Kneale only lasted 40 hours out of a week indicates he lost control of the situation, and that his on-camera tears were real.

Kneale has trimmed himself up nicely since this was shot, but we hear he's still partial to journalistic theatrics. And NBC is still turning his humiliation into easy buzz.

After Kneale's repeated on-air outbursts against bloggers, in which he has called them "dickweeds" (see June 30 video above) and "digital imbeciles," Kneale told our source who spoke privately with him that the crusade was dreamed up with his producer, former Fox News man Jerry Burke. The idea was to draw attention and drum up buzz.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it, that a major cable news channel is trying to scare up viewers in the puny financial and media blogosphere. Still, there's an outside chance the strategy could eventually produce PR gold; Kneale scored yesterday with a friendly article in the Observer.

Without specifically addressing what he's said to other people, Kneale told us in an email his feelings are "particularly heartfelt:"

My "animus" toward vicious, anonymous bloggers and blind comments pre-dates my joining CNBC... Look at the scary and brilliant Forbes cover story on net anonymity, which I edited, in October 2007: it should make bloggers feel ashamed.

Kneale's campaign against shame is something of a transformation for the one-time Forbes editor whose antics became legendary after editor Bill Baldwin lured him from the Wall Street Journal in 1998. The most famous story — we've heard others, but this is the one that was widely told on the Forbes staff; i.e. the kind of gossip that pre-dates blogs — occurred at the company Christmas party shortly after he was hired. As relayed by people who worked for the magazine at the time, it goes like this:

After the party, Kneale shared a cab back to Park Slope, Brooklyn, with three other people: a female Forbes writer, a male Forbes staffer and the staffer's wife. Somehow, in the course of the ride, Kneale managed to grope both women. The next morning, the male staffer showed up at Kneale's house to avenge his wife's honor, and when the story reached the office Kneale had to beg several layers of the Forbes masthead to keep his job.

The incident was purportedly the foundation for this Feb. 12, 1999 Page Six blind item:

WHICH business-magazine editor, who keeps a jar of blue jellybeans on his desk labeled Viagra, was called on the carpet for feeling up an underling's wife? The co-workers and their spouses were in a taxi heading to Brooklyn after an office party. The underling later went to the groper's home to get an apology. The groper's boss told him that if it ever happened again, he'd be fired.

Kneale declined to comment on the story, writing, "As a rule I do not respond to blind comments... if Gawker will publish the names of the people behind these 11-year-old rumors, maybe I'd have more to say." We know the names of two of the people said to be in the cab with Kneale and emailed them for their version of events. We'll update if we hear back.

We don't begrudge Kneale some purported drunken mistakes in his past. We all have them. Though the number of tales that have crossed our transom in recent days suggests Kneale has more than his fair share. And so we have to wonder if his hype-seeking crusade against gossipy, anonymous bloggers is less about principle and more an exercise in self-defense.

Then again, even a poodle will bite once in a while.

Take the TechCrunch dust-up. The tech business blog sheepishly negotiated with Twitter Inc. the release of internal company documents it received, unsolicited, via email. It was tech bloggers who lead the craven charge, excoriating TechCrunch for daring to run anything at all. On Twitter, several of Arrington's tech elite colleagues said he deserved to be literally spit upon. John Gruber of Daring Fireball called Arrington "a very sad excuse for a man" in a post that garnered strong agreement from longtime newspaperwoman Kara Swisher at All Things D, who added, "there should be no difference between Web 'journalism' and the old-fashioned journalism." Except of course, Swisher was only demonstrating just how different the two are.

This episode's Woodstein was as distraught as anyone to see their dear friends at Twitter burned. TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington wrote: "I wish this had never happened."

But of course, as at least two media lawyers have pointed out, old-fashioned journalists have been utilizing information obtained in violation of both laws and legally-binding civil agreements for years without this sort of ethical outcry. As far as the law goes, it is legal to use such information to journalistic ends, within some fairly wide parameters.

Yet blogs, especially tech blogs, lash themselves oh-so-closely to their sources. TechCrunch is hardly the only example. The diverse and vibrant collection of blogs that track Mac rumors routinely cave to cease and desist letters from Apple, because who wants to end up like the teenaged publisher of ThinkSecret, bullied into submission by Apple for reporting legitimate news about Apple products, news that was proven accurate and was gathered no more nefariously than the stuff that turns up regularly in the Wall Street Journal?

Who wants to be trashed by a spoonfed CNBC reporter , or have your (eventually proven accurate) sources called "illiterate"-sounding by a blogger, for contradicting Apple's company line on the health of its CEO?

This is how journalism dies. Not with a bang, but with a series of favors and quiet surrenders.

(Top pic: Alison McNeill of bub.blicio.us and "Gadget Guy" consultant Dave Mathews engage in a typical in-depth interview at a TechCrunch party last year, via Flickr)

The blog's explanation for pulling the post:

Basically, we believe that parties who are the subjects of an extensive and sensitive post like yesterday's should know they are being written about. This is both the neighborhood-y, Local thing to do and simple journalistic ethics.

In this case, the author of the piece identified himself to several climbers but not to the people who run the space. We were unaware of this lapse. We had concluded, based on the author's initial pitch, that he planned to be upfront with everyone, and we neglected - our bad - to confirm this after the piece was filed.

Well that's all well and good and friendly, but it's really the type of thing to decide before you publish the extremely extensive post about "this bizarre hybrid of subterranean climbing gym and hippie speakeasy" in Fort Greene. Because the entire thing is, of course, cached by Google. All anyone has to do is click here to read the whole thing, or visit AnimalNY, where they put up a screen shot of it. Now, Jed Lipinski's post on "one of the best kept secrets in Brooklyn" is going to get far more readers than it would have had you simply left it up.

See: The Streisand Effect.
[The Local's 'Why We Unpublished" statement and the original post, via Animal NY

We had high hopes that Peter Getty would give our "nakedly hateful" rant against him the full rich boy-thrashing, but alas. And alack. We're greeted with only diplomacy!

Seriously; we knew it wasn't going to be a stroll through the park sharing our thoughts about growing up rich at any time, least of all during a recession. But we had to introduce ourselves somehow. What was the winning move? If we point out the things we might have in common, we're patronizing. If we point out the differences, we're rubbing people's faces in it. If we mention any difficulties that accompany wealth, we're self-pitying. If we simply ignore the subject, we're Marie Antoinette.

Just address it frankly in our first post, we figured, get it out of the way and go for a few laughs, so that's what we tried. We expected a little initial hostility, but we have to admit we were surprised to see it go international this fast. A guillotine has yet to be erected in Union Square, so maybe we didn't bomb as drastically as all that.

At least any uncertainties about a subject for our second post were removed quickly enough. Still, we don't want this to become a series of writings about the last thing we wrote, so we'll try to move on. Join us if you like.

So you want us to "join" you, do you? Here is what we require to agree to your armistice:

• One gilt-laden vessel of Pharaoh's ashes from the tombs of Egypt.
• A procession of seventy peacocks, linked with a golden chain.
• Spoons of the finest silver; forks of the finest copper.
• A baronial estate on the highest San Franciscan hill, surrounded by Bengal tigers trained by the holiest Indian shamans.
• Babes.

The brothers' terrible blog "What the Butler Didn't See," you'll recall, is a failed attempt to obviate class rage with cheeky, self-aware disclosure, which can be effective if well-executed, but is not effective when it manifests itself in sentences like "You can easily make far better hot dogs at home than they give you in the luxury boxes," or in biographical entries that say "Peter Getty has flirted occasionally with real work, but finding it wearisome, has returned full time to his first love, watching television."

So that's pretty much what we said, in a more profane way, and we though that was that, but turns out Peter Getty went all over the internet leaving indignant comments on every blog that hated on his blog, including ours!

Since practically none of the comments here address the article itself, I'd like to express my relief that it was so poorly written, so filled with unwarranted venom, so nakedly self-contradictory, and so nakedly hateful and so smug in jumping to absurd conclusions about our motives, reasoning and "self-awareness" (although Mr. Nolan concedes that he doesn't even know whether we're "good guys" or not, he somehow knows better than we do how we perceive ourselves). I'm proud that we hold our writing to a higher standard than this.

But even more exciting is Getty's comment on SFist, which includes this:

The Gawker piece, in its completely unwarranted hostility, false presumptions, blatant self-contradictions, and errors of basic spelling and vocabulary, has provided us with an excellent subject for our next post.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.OOOOOOOOOOO. Ooo. Getty heir Peter Getty is going to bring the pain of an icy, cutting blog post directly into our area code! This will end well. Very well. Mr. Getty, we salute you for choosing to magnify this meaningless bicoastal internet class rage outpouring by a factor of one hundred. Never let it be said that you have something better to do than feud with underemployed "professional" bloggers, who decidedly do not have anything better to do. We are already composing a profanity-laced, grammatically incorrect and philosophically incoherent response in our head, clouded though it may be by the foul air of plebeian geography. Though your most recent comments on SFist indicate quite strongly that you may be a borderline wingnut by internet argument standards, we await your blow with grim determination, and neither Barack Obama nor a cat to assist us in our time of battle.

May our relationship be long and fruitful. I really think it will be.

[Previously. Pic: Facebook, Flickr]

First, here's more than you could possibly want to know about how qualified Zuckerberg is for this gig, courtesy of Abrams cohort/ Mediaite editor-at-large Rachel Sklar:

Her sister forwarded a listing from someone at Yale, presumably from the Yale Journalism List (we sent it to several university lists). Randi knew me and suggested Arielle apply. She did, and knocked Andrew's socks off in their phone interview (Andrew Cedotal coordinated the intern recruitment, and did a fantastic job because our interns RULE. I remember he was psyched because he made a "Dune" joke and she got it.) But more importantly, she's a genius - computer science major, knows Java and is an SEO whiz - interned at the NYTimes social media dept. last summer. She knows blogs inside and out and is just incredibly savvy, smart and is fantastic to work with. She's super smart and we value her immensely. I do want to emphasis that our interns with non-Valleywag-featured surnames are also amazing - we seriously can't believe how lucky we got.

Thanks, Rachel. And now, the big reveal of what you can expect when Mediatie Mediadate Mediaite launches soon. Thanks, The Google.

After Australian communications consultant Lee Hopkins picked up a Valleywag story about Tesla CEO Elon Musk's elaborate efforts to find leakers inside his company using tell-tale emails, Rachel Konrad, a former reporter for CNET, the AP, and the Detroit Free Press, sent Hopkins a message he characterized as a "snottogram." (Brutal honesty: just another reason we love Australians.) Here's Konrad's email:

Hi, Lee. I'm not sure how much you know about the various publications that you link to, but I really do need to take umbrage with your recent blog post about Tesla Motors citing a Silicon Valley gossip blog. If you want to discuss the company's ethnics, communication and transparency, I am happy to do so — and I am also eager to provide you with examples of real customers who trust the company and its products every day so you don't have to rely on speculation and rumors.

In fact, the first Tesla Roadster has just made its way to Australia:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25137276-3102,00.html

And I am happy to put you in touch with the Australian owner if you want to talk to someone who has first-hand experience with Tesla.

You are an influential blogger and I would be happy to establish a relationship with you if you are going to write about Tesla again. Please reach out to me, particularly if you plan to write a hit piece on the company, so I can give you facts and hard data on which to base your (and your readers') opinions of the company.

Thanks.

Rachel Konrad
Senior Communications Manager
Tesla Motors, Inc.

It's not clear why Konrad wanted to discuss the company's "ethnics" with Hopkins. She can't possibly have meant "ethics." After all, Konrad's former boss, Tesla executive Darryl Siry, quit because he feared the company was committing fraud by planning to take deposits for its Model S sedan before it had a factory site or financing for the launch.

Hopkins replied to Konrad's email asking a series of tough questions about Tesla's troubled business. He received no reply. So much for "communication."

And finally, what about Tesla's "transparency"? Konrad, formerly a distinguished journalist, seems to have adapted well to her new profession of PR. Not once in her email to Hopkins did she address Valleywag's reporting of Musk's digital witch hunt, though she seems to imply it is false. Konrad has not yet replied to an email asking if she really meant to deny the story. Right now, that's the only thing transparent about her.

"The exception you'll see, the Mumbai bombing, some of the best reporting was bloggers," says Newsom. Oh, Gavin! We think San Francisco's hunky god-mayor could have picked a far better example — like, say, that time a blogger in his own city scooped all of the local newspapers and television stations on the news of Newsom's impending fatherhood.

Poor Karp! The founder of the ultracutesy blogging platform, favored by Internet microcelebrity Julia Allison and the bored hipsters of Brooklyn and San Francisco, just got done cleaning up one censorship mess.

The latest accuser: The anonymous blogger behind Out of Print, a Tumblr devoted to criticizing Tumblr. He says that his blog posts have stopped displaying comments — a critical feature on Tumblr, which is built around users' "reblogs," an automated way of quoting a blog entry one likes, and other comments. The more popular a Tumblr it is, the more reblogs it generally gathers — so the Out of Print blogger claims that the disappearance of his comments is proof that he's being silenced by Karp's censorious regime. He thinks it has something to do with an incident where he hacked part of Karp's personal blog to include a taunting message about Tumblr's lack of security.

The charge only carries weight because Karp recently confessed to deleting a set of Tumblr blogs which included critics of Allison, an acquaintance of Karp's who often appeared at his side at parties over the last year. Not very credibly, Karp denied that any personal relationships were at play in his decision.

But the microscope on Karp's missteps is largely his own fault, since he's gone to such lengths to tout Tumblr as a kinder, gentler place to blog, free of the anonymous attacks and general snideness that pervade the Internet. Since Tumblr is, itself, actually on the Internet, that's proven impossible. Karp's quixotic niceness campaign has only made him and Tumblr bigger targets.

No one's calling Karp stupid. Everyone generally agrees he's scary-smart. So instead of malice or stupidity, couldn't we put down Karp's seeming censoriousness to youth, naïveté, and general scatterbrainedness? Otherwise, we'd have to believe Karp is carrying out absurdly petty yet nearly undetectible campaigns against his online critics. Why would he bother to subtly delete comments instead of an entire blog, as he's done in the past?

Far more likely: This is another bug in Tumblr's rickety technological infrastructure. If only Karp could squelch those.

This year's meeting is especially notable for the absence of Steve Jobs, who is on a six-month medical leave after his health took a visible turn for the worse starting last summer. Goldman, who made himself notorious for repeating Apple's PR lines as company flacks lied about the health of CEO Steve Jobs, first complained that Apple wasn't streaming the shareholder meeting over the Internet, which would save him the trouble of leaving his desk. Then he tut-tutted over Apple's decision to ban cell phones, laptops, and other wireless devices from the event.

It never occurred to him to just disobey Apple. That's what two members of Investor Village's Apple message board did. To their chagrin: The meeting was dominated by nutty environmentalists, universal healthcare advocates, and union-hating ranters. Apple board member Arthur Levinson shot down a question about whether the company had violated disclosure rules in not being forthcoming about Jobs's health. In short, the meeting was about as informative as a typical Apple report by Jim Goldman.