What happened to poor Julie Klam? Six months ago, the writer was "the best updater on Facebook," according to the Times' Viriginia Heffernan (pictured), excelling in a burgeoning genre of "perfect... spontaneous bursts of being." Klam was grateful for the value placed on her prolific Facebooking, but it seems her experience quickly went downhill; in a column published Wednesday, the same Klam was quoted by the same Heffernan as saying Facebook "felt dead" as of a few months ago — in other words, right after she "friended" Heffernan on the social network. "I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it's kids getting tired of a new toy."

The moral of the story: Journalists cannot be bothered to find fresh sources in the dog days of August for their specious (the New York Observer debunked it by the numbers earlier today) trend stories. Also: Under no circumstances should you "friend" Virginia Heffernan.

(Pic via)

True, a typesetter transcribing the speech did follow a semicolon with a parenthesis — the "wink" emoticon we all pretend to hate and secretly use in IM all the time ;) . And it did come in a parenthetical reference to the crowd's "applause and laughter" inserted by the transcriber. But Bryan Benilous, the researcher at ProQuest who noted the anomaly, admits that it's the only occurrence he saw in hundreds of similar, contemporaneous passages. If it were an intentional usage, meant to be read with its modern sense, wouldn't someone elsehave picked it up? Let us give the final word on the notion that emoticons have a 147-year-long history: :-p

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.

The star of the Times piece is Michael Buckley, a fast-talking and overbearingly gay celebrity commentator — think Ted Casablanca, if Ted Casablanca lived in Connecticut. Buckley says he makes $100,000 a year on YouTube ads. Google sells the ads and splits the revenue with Buckley, as it does with other video creators it has dubbed "partners."

It just gets worse from there, if you're looking for online originals. Take "Fred," the most-subscribed partner with 700,000-some regular viewers. A guy pretends to be a six-year-old, Fred Figglehorn, who speaks with an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice. (Yes, that's the extent of the schtick.)

These crap shows are the future of moneymaking on the Web — trite reworkings of tropes that we first watched in basic-cable reruns, lying on the floor of our dens?

If it's bad news for the culture, take schadenfreudian delight in the thought that it's bad news for Google, too, which spent $1.65 billion buying YouTube and is thought to be shelling out hundreds of millions more a year on servers and bandwidth.

At least Google can sell ads on partner videos. Most of the clips on YouTube are of such questionable ownership and quality that Google doesn't dare sell ads next to them. A Google spokesman says "hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month." Well, that's vague enough, but it tells us that Google's annual take from these videos runs somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. It turns out that crappy video is a crappy business. Justice!

Yes, nanotechnology — the catch-all term for fiddling with materials at the molecular level. A scientific study found that opposition to nanotech on moral grounds varied in proportion to the prevalence of strong religious beliefs in a country.

What offends the religious about nanotech? The notion that man is fiddling with nature, mostly. Futurists predicted nano research would lead us into a future of self-assembling, microscopic robots which would tear the earth apart atom from atom in a runaway quest for raw materials.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists are just as offended by nanotech, though on financial grounds, not ethical ones. Nanotech turned out to be vastly overhyped, a bubble that never really inflated. There was no gray goo, no robots, not even any fiddling with nature of consequence. The reality of nanotech is prosaic: It ended up being good mostly for stain-resistant khakis.

But that just shows you how much both the proponents and the detractors of futuristic technology engage in acts of wild faith and outrageous belief — over something so small, it doesn't actually exist.