Newswreckers caught the awkward exchanage between Vieira and Colbert, in which he replied, "I have twatted." What's even better: Vieira's head-snapping response, where she veered from shock ("Oh my God") to cool-cat playing along ("So have I") back to shock (a second, breathier "Oh my God"). Sure, Internet commenters are going to claim they came up with this Twitter-twatter thing before Colbert. But did you get to say it on national TV? Kids, Colbert has given your people a moment of victory.

A user on eBaum's World, a site which posts pictures and invites often profane discussion, suggested his peers search on a string of icons — "✈ ▌▌" — and thereby launch it onto Google Trends, the search engine's tracker for swiftly rising Internet phenomena.

The trick worked; Google's algorithm declared the glyph's rise "volcanic." And despite a surge of protests about its tastelessness, the Googlers have yet to censor the term, as they've been known to do with other offensive searches which show up on Google Trends, like a swastika symbol which showed up last summer.

Officially, Google says it has robots which take care of this: "The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material." In reality? The 9/11 hack shows how easy it is to fool Google.

In most states, libel is a civil matter, not a criminal one; but Colorado's laws are archaic. Even so, criminal prosecution for libel are on the rise. 13 cases have been filed this year, six times the rate that prevailed from 1965 to 2002. Of course, the Internet's to blame: The seeming anonymity of the Web makes it a natural forum for venting.

That's what Weichel told police he was doing when he wrote on Craigslist that his ex-girlfriend, with whom he was locked in a battle for custody of their daughter, had engaged in child abuse and performed sexual favors for the services of her attorney.

Most people shrug this kind of thing off. If you dare to do so much as post a comment on a message board, someone's likely to call you a piece of shit, for sheer entertainment value. It's become an expected part of life on the Internet. Websites generally aren't responsible for their users' postings, and tracking down a virtual offender is a tedious chore.

Indeed, if we could just find these digital blackguards, we could reach back in time for a solution: dueling. Remember when we handled slights to our honor with pistols at dawn? So much less messy without lawyers involved. And the emergency rooms are great at handling gunshot wounds these days.

Wednesday night, after he posted a suicide note on the Web, he overdosed on pills on camera as users of Justin.tv, a lifecasting site, watched. Some posted comments egging Biggs on. When he took the pills and stopped moving, they laughed, expecting his corpse to revive and announce it was all a joke. No one called the police until hours had passed. They kept watching as officers came to the scene and verified his death. Even then, commenters wrote "OMFG" and "LOL."

NewTeeVee, an online-video industry publication, called the incident a "a striking display of the power of live video." The power, but definitely not the glory: It shows how the viewers of lifecasting devalue life. Users of sites like Justin.tv have grown accustomed to watching people mug for the camera. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women on webcams are merely players. But what happens when we're not playing around?

Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel, in a statement, didn't comment on the video, merely noting the site's policy for removing content flagged as "objectionable." The digital record of Biggs's death is just bits on a server. What about the users who cheered Biggs on as he performed a snuff film? Can we flag them, too? There will always be teenagers who try to kill themselves in awful ways. But one would hope the audience would not applaud.

Slapping an infomercial on YouTube will generate far worse publicity than talking to friendly Detroit-based hacks on the automotive beat, who are every bit as dependent on the U.S. car industry for their paycheck as assembly-line workers are. The 81,724 YouTube viewers who have watched the clip are as vicious as ever, rating it two stars out of five (a mercy rating, surely), calling for GM's collapse, and decrying the notion of a government bailout. The only upside for Detroit's messagemakers: The instant YouTube reaction allows them to take their PR campaign back to the shop all the sooner.

Connie, its such a shame you write such foolish prose. Given how poor your facts tend to be I would have expected you to make it up with words that quietly rolled from one to the next. Instead we get “spending up a storm” which is neither informative or elegant.

Did they keep you on at Portfolio after you wrote your silly, pointless and partially accurate story about me being a “Bad Boy” in Silicon Valley, a place I only see from the air if I see it at all.

Either pump up the prose, or secure some facts like other journalists, but this half fact, half invention in a pedestrian form just isn’t interesting.

Sorry, just one man’s opinion.

I can't wait to hear what Minor has to say about my post.

[random trolling, often with a wish that we'd die or are unethical in some way] - We get lots of these, and delete as many of them as we can. But first we check the IP address against previous comments left on the site. About once a month we see a really nasty anonymous comment that’s left by an IP address that had always been used by a single named commenter before that. Most of the time we had just posted a critical review of the person’s company right before the comment was left.

We don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great.

If you are going to say something nasty, use your real name or learn about the magic of proxy servers

Glam has always described itself as an amalgamation of very focused sites. What I’m noting in this post is that the vast bulk of the users it is boasting about through ComScore come from games, social networks, personal publishing platforms and shopping bots. There’s nothing wrong with any of those sites, they simply are not what Glam has said its business is about. And I’m not entirely sure that ads on them deserve the premium price Glam hopes to charge.

I've noted an interesting new development in the comments from Glam publishers: They now argue that, in a stormy advertising market, Glam's guaranteed payments are a safe haven. But the guarantees are only as solid as Glam's business.

We're told the company is no longer offering them to all new publishers, and is desperately trying to renegotiate existing publisher contracts to get out of its guarantees. No surprise there: An insider says the company's revenues are running at almost half what it projected for investors. If Hansell really wanted to dig into Glam, he'd find out what those numbers are. Glam's vociferous commenters may well prompt him to do that.

Might it help to make it even clearer how little time is left by adding a timestamp to your original post, and/or make some sort of a timer. It would be terrible if part of the crowd decides not to forward this because there's unclarity regarding the remaining amount of time.

What is Huesken asking for? Boil it down: He wants Andrew to code up an "Is my dad dead yet" widget. So unseemly, and yet so typical: Even when dealing with something as horrific as the imminent death of a parent, Internet users just want us to think about them and their needs.

Charles Forman (URL) said:Oct. 13, 5:59 PM
I don't like my name being dropped this many times without a picture of my pretty face attached.

Ah yes. The alley insider is up to rousing rabble for page views from my Google Alerts? Awesome. What's this? Detective Retardo is on the case - the champion of the underdog, and the morbidly obese? Totally fucking awesome.

Did I fail to entertain you? Did I fail to show something interesting? Of
I spent 2 days preparing my presentation so everyone wouldn't be bored to death. I doubt there has been another presenter that has put as much love into their presentations as I have.

Do you not understand what we am trying to do? Of course you do. You know how difficult and truly amazing it is.

I think the real problem is that you are jealous of my ability to run a mile in under 3 days. Maybe its that I date hot girls? Honestly, I don't understand how your beef with me - or your petty, passive aggressive approach.

If you have a problem with fairness, why aren't you paying $20? You very realistically take up 2 seats.

Seriously, if you have such a problem, why don't you just do your own democratic tech meetup and watch as no one shows up?

You are a sad, lonely, disgusting man. I hope you don't die of a coronary before we have a chance to patch things up.

*Kisses*

(Photo of Forman by Charles Forman)

John, since you don’t permit comments (why?), I’ll have to answer your blog by email.

The problem is, you completely missed the point of my tip (or you’re deliberately ignoring it to make me look stupid).

The tip is this: Use Google INSTEAD of the sites’ internal Search boxes.

This is not something that’s obvious, as you can see by the 80 comments for that post. ” You are SO right… Not only is this tip both so obvious and so overlooked, but it works like a charm,” says one.

I imagine that most people, when they want to search Amazon, NYTimes, Facebook, eBay, or whatever, go to that site FIRST and use ITS search box.

My point is that you can save time and get better results by NOT doing that.

In your post, you totally mischaracterized the point of my tip.

Dp

(Photo by macinate)

(Disclaimer: Valleywag is published by Gawker Media. So is Gizmodo, a gadget blog which competes with Engadget. Not that we care. Can you explain the difference between them to us? They both have freaky commenters who are way too emotionally involved in MacBook "unboxings," whatever those are.)