• Batting .000 on his New Year's predictions, Firefox developer Blake Ross rushes out a second batch:

  Citizen journalism will finally topple Old Media, ushering in a remarkable new age of incisive journalism—"That Dude Across the Street Walks His Dog;" "Local Mail Arrives Ten Minutes Past 4." Illegal immigrants will protest the discriminatory name, forcing the blogosphere to rechristen the new model "Asscasting," short for "Broadcasting while sitting on my ass, which will never leave this chair."

  [Blake Ross]

• The new site Relishio does a cannonball into the news-aggregation-site pool that's already full with Digg, Netscape, Newsvine, TailRank, and TechMeme. Its founders are either clueless, arrogant, or — oh, the founder is 14-year-old Jake Jarvis, son of blogger and entertainment pundit Jeff Jarvis. We're not going to make fun of an eighth-grader, are we? [Relishio]
• Why is it hilarious that IT titan EMC bought security titan RSA? Because I know at least one RSA employee who quit the company months ago and joined a startup that RSA bought. Life wants some people to work in huge corporations. [EMC]
• Is the Internet down? [Internet Status]

Media mogul Battelle owns Federated Media Publishing, the rapidly expanding ad network that's signing up every coolhunting site. Among his culture-shaping properties:

• Boing Boing, the four-writer blog approaching 1 million pageviews a day (not much smaller than the audience of the Colbert Report)
• Digg, the newer sexier Slashdot rumored to have declined a $40 million offer from Yahoo
• Fark, the giant trashy amusement park of the Internet
• Metafilter, incubator for trendy A-list bloggers
• Newsvine, where molehills become news headlines
• PopURLs, a new addition collecting popular links from Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl
• PSFK, the trend-spotting blog by coolhunting consultant Piers Fawkes
• Reddit, a general-interest Digg-like site with even more instant voting gratification

As Valleywag friend and blogebrity watcher Kyle Bunch puts it, "Now an item can get run on BoingBoing, then dugg, then re-seen on popurls" — and Boing-Boinged, Newsvined, and Farked — and Battelle gets a cut each time.

Federated Media Authors Index [Federated Media Publishing]
Photo: John Battelle [JD Lasica on Flickr]

The aggregated, user-customized news site sphere is already crowded, what with:

Newsvine: The first rule of Newsvine is, you only talk about Newsvine.
Digg: Entire user base has Lindsay Lohan posters on their walls.
Memeorandum: Of course Dave Winer's comments about your blog post ranked higher than your actual post. That's because he's more important than you.
TailRank: Powered by developer Kevin Burton and eight lattes a day.
reddit: Meets Web 2.0 Color Wheel specs.

Megite managed to be different from all of the above — mostly by mashing them up. By ganking Memeorandum's conversation cloud, TailRank's wide simplicity, Digg's topicality, and reddit's pastel-blue obsession, Megite may have proven the real method for Web 2.0 success: arrive late, check out the crowd, and one-up them all. Maybe it can lure MS blogger Robert Scoble back into the hole.

Megite Technology News [Megite]
The John Dvorakification of the blogosphere (I m signing off of Memeorandum) [Scobleizer]

Time to predict who sells first. We'll pick our top three favorites to win the race to flip (and show you some other flip-ready companies).

Then you pick three of the companies below and e-mail them, in the order you think they'll sell, to editor@valleywag.com with the subject "Flip trifecta." The contestant whose top three picks sell first, in the order they choose, wins a prize. In the case of a tie, the winner's chosen randomly.

Flip Trifecta: the race to sell out

1. Digg: Kevin Rose denies a Yahoo buyout, but commentators (like TWiT's Leo Laporte) say "if he sells, he's buying dinner."

2. Newsvine: The citizen-journalism-slash-real-journalism site hasn't even publicly launched, but it's already earning accolades from beta users. Already fresh, but still ripe, this would make a trendy purchase for Yahoo.

3. Tailrank: Kevin Burton's tiny aggregator could become a one-man merger — but only if Kevin drops his dream of a user-funded startup.

4. Odeo: A natural acquisition. None of the portals have a good podcast play. And it's not taking off all by itself. Biz Stone just left Google to work at this startup; could he find himself back on campus?

5. Riya: The facial recognition software is a perfect technology to complement Flickr. On one round of funding, Riya has already developed smart recognition algorithms — for example, it recognizes founder Tara Hunt. But one search giant already took a look at Riya and passed.

6. Six Apart: The blog platform developer is suffering downtime as it struggles to handle a growing user base. Would anyone buy a company that's a mishmash of publishing software, hosting services and a free community site? Or will Six Apart patch itself up and run solo?

7. Technorati: CEO Dave Sifry told the Red Herring two years ago to "watch this space" for the blog tracker's exit strategy. This year, BusinessWeek predicts a flip to Microsoft. But in those two years, Technorati's piled on a lot of VC funding. Will its investors force it to take a lowball offer?

8. Napster: Not selling any time soon, and definitely not to Google. This sucker's losing money fast.

Make your pics and mail them in. The usual Gawker Contest Rules apply.