The trend piece doesn't even get into voicemail, which we've established everyone but old people hates. But it explores the clash between people who text too much and too little. Elizabeth Fishkin, an advertising professional, thought she was a big texter, and dumped a guy who ignored her text messages, until she met a Twitter fanatic:

Nothing obsessive, maybe five times a day — she just likes the ease, the directness, the speed of the medium. Texting is her language.

"I thought, if this is going to be such an issue . . . " she says.

Months later: another date, another guy, another technological incompatibility. This time she was out with someone who wanted to text . . . everyone.

"He kept talking about Twitter." Fishkin rolls her eyes. "Ashton Kutcher. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter."

And what did it mean when Mary, the Drew Barrymore character in He's Just Not That Into You, got asked out via MySpace? That would be a dealbreaker for Marc Houston, another young single profiled in the story:

"No cellphone?" Houston cannot fathom a relationship like this. He would never, for example, date someone who refused to text. And someone who was still on MySpace instead of Facebook? "Oh, that would be an automatic reject," Houston says. "It's kind of like a unibrow." He pauses. "Maybe that's why I'm single."

Yes, that sounds about right. This story isn't really about technology. It's about neurotic thirtysomethings who will find some reason not to be in a relationship. And perhaps that's for the best: If you can't even agree on the medium through which you'll communicate, is there any chance you'll ever be able to work through real issues?

RapRadar: Elliot Wilson, former editor of hip hop magazine XXL, is launching what he hopes will become the Huffington Post of Hip Hop. Which is just a horrible slogan. Basically it'll be some HuffPo-ish mix of blogging, journalism, and hip hop celebrities writing guest columns. "If Jay-Z wants to express his feelings about Obama, there's not really a forum where he can do that right now," Wilson says. This is false.
Chance of Survival: Not great, but theoretically possible. XXL was a quality magazine. If he can replicate that online, he could build an audience. Problem: XXL already replicated itself online. Problem 2: Audience doesn't mean advertisers. See Vibe magazine, currently.

The Wrap: Ex-NYT correspondent and Gawker opponent Sharon Waxman launched this Hollywood/ entertainment news site thing last month. Bad timing, but hey.
Chance of Survival: Ehhh.... moderate? It'll have to get better. Waxman has some money at her back, which is good. But she has some very entrenched competition in Hollywood. If something happens to Nikki Finke, then... slightly less of a chance of failure.


BastardLife: This is Genre magazine editor Neal Boulton's "pansexual sex & relationships site for ALL men." No idea what that means. Is 'pansexual' different than 'bisexual?' It's a question you may be able to find the answer to at Bastardlife.com
Chance of Survival: As a forum for Neal Boulton's personal musings, decent. As a moneymaking venture, very low. Unless pansexuality takes off as a recession thing.


Alpha Kitty: Atoosa Rubenstein was a big shot editor at Seventeen magazine. Then she left to run this "Alpha Kitty" project. Which, as best we can tell, now consists of her Myspace page and a Youtube channel.
Chance of survival: Ummm.. good? But the chance of making money with this is nil, as far as we can tell. Although to be completely honest I'm still not sure what this thing really is.


The Daily Beast: I made up a little haiku about The Daily Beast, ready?:
Tina Brown glamour
Fancy online articles
No advertising

Chance of Survival: Unless Tina comes up with a brilliant plan to monetize this site, it will be a victim of its launch timing and its utter lack of urgency to come up with a workable business plan. She will burn through Barry Diller's millions, subsidizing many worthy writers in the process, then eventually fold. It will be a nice place to go back to and read the archives one day, though.

[Disclosure: Neal Boulton has owed me freelance money forever, so I may be biased.]

5. Surprising that it even took this long for the trend pieces on this to come out, right?
6. The NYT and Time both dropped their trend pieces on this today.
7. New York Observer? Hello? Slackers.
8. Time angle: '25 Things I didn't want to know about you.'
9. Example: "I can't grow hair on my arms."
10. Good one, Time. Just as trite and uncreative as Gawker.
11: Takeaway from the NYT story: if you are Facebook friends with a reporter, he will steal your shit and put it in an article. Deal with it.
12. The writer of the NYT story: Douglas Quenqua, who we made fun of last week for his story on Facebook unfriending.
13. Doug used to be my boss! He's really, honestly a good guy. All my friends are pricks, though.
14. Once when I was a kid I stuck a peanut up my nose. Is that crazy or what! I mean, crazy. Just think about all the things you don't know about me. I could go on and on.
15-24. Rah rah rah.
25. Fin.

[NYT, Time]

It's a timely obsession. Just as polio captured the Cold War's feeling of paralysis, AIDS hysteria spoke to the sexual hangover from the '70s, and Prozac Nation answered the unease we felt about the '90s boom, autism is the disease of the moment for a time when computers are making us all feel less than human.

The death of Jett Travolta, whom some speculate had the brain-development disorder, has put autism in the headlines once more — though the papers hardly needed prompting. Michael Wolff, the shiny-pated media contrarian, identified the obsession with autism, but not its cause, in a recent blog post.

In its worst forms, autism is a horrible disease, incredibly painful for parents to deal with. It typically appears in a child by the age of three, interfering with the ability to communicate, blinding the victim to verbal and nonverbal conversational clues most of us take for granted.

Rain Man, the 1987 Dustin Hoffman movie, was for many the pop-culture introduction to autism, as well as the notion that it is often accompanied by unusual skills. But the mass-media fixation on it has grown as scientists have learned that autism exists on a spectrum. A milder form known as Asperger's syndrome — a combination of high intelligence and social ineptness — is thought to be practically epidemic in Silicon Valley; in 2001, Wired dubbed it the "geek syndrome." And since then, Time has put the disease on its cover twice.

The sliding scale of autism may be precisely what makes it so gripping now. The worry now: Are we all perhaps a bit autistic? Is the Internet turning us into robots, unable to express our emotions without mechanical help? Instant messaging famously suppresses social cues. Needing to type ":-)" to communicate our pleasure may give the tiniest hint of what the disease may be like.

There are a host of conspiracy theories about the rise in autism diagnoses, including the completely debunked notion it has something to do with vaccines. The consensus seems to be that we're seeing more autism cases because we're more primed to look for its symptoms. In other words, we see autism everywhere because we want to. And we look for it in our kids because we're obsessed with whether we have it ourselves.

Ad Age predicts a small amount of growth:

If trends hold, online advertising will grow in the low double digits or high single digits this year, driven largely by search.

But that may be way too optimistic. A pessimistic view would be to compare this financial crisis to the end of the tech bubble years, when internet advertising dropped by about 25%. And then to note that this crisis is actually far worse than that one was. So while search ads will probably not stop growing, it's possible that the rest of internet advertising could fall by more than a quarter, taking the ho-hum companies at the bottom of the market straight into oblivion.

Recent startups will be quick to fail. Aspiring startups will fail to get funded. There will probably be a rise in sites charging subscription fees, as the ad model stops bringing in sufficient cash—which may itself fail, since people are so used to everything being free. And what about our heroes, smartass blogs?

Publishers may not be immune to a big cull after growing up in what Spark Capital principal Dennis Miller calls a "fantasy marketplace." "You will probably see a healthy movement to two or three in each category that are delivering visitors and time spent on the site," he said.

Gawker, Drudge, and LOLCats: the only news left at the end of the internet apocalypse. [Ad Age]

It's not just this latest "PUNCH IN 'FACE BOOK,'" as the Post eloquently puts it. The media has been warning us of internet dangers forever!

• Myspace: Log on and have your children raped.
• Facebook is filling up with creepy old people (who are probably rapists).
• Also Facebook will ruin your engagement.
• Flickr: A place where baby rapists look at pictures of your babies and masturbate to them.
• The government uses bloggers to hide its role in the Kennedy assassination.
• Nasty internet comments in England could cost you eleventy billion dollars.
• And dangerous hackers are hacking your email and looking for pictures of your children, which is why we should all be thrown in jail.

We laughed at useless rich girl Brill for her dramatic(-ally blogged) declaration that "even my weekend in bedford wasn’t entirely restful because i still felt ‘on duty’ because i knew i’d be writing about it." Ha! But! Consider this from taser-loving, reporter-helping, cult-like-following-inspiring professional PR man Peter Shankman's long new blog post about how much he hates hearing the phrase "Why Don't You Do Some Work?":

Was having a conversation the other day with someone via IM. She asked me where I was, and I told her I was talking from the lobby of the W hotel in Times Square, waiting to have a drink with someone who runs a marketing firm.

“The W Hotel?! What a tough life! Will you please do some work?!” she IM’d back. It was around 3pm. She didn’t know I’d closed two deals, brought three new advertisers to HARO, and gotten one client onto CNN. Not bad for someone who, according to my friend, had to be nagged to “do some work.”

Shit. Do we really want to open this floodgate? Can you already see where Shankman is prepared to go (at incredible length) with this? That's right, into an exposition of the awesomeness of Peter Shankman and his awesome work-play life balance!

I’ve heard virtually identical comments resulting from Facebook or Twitter updates that have included “Driving from LA to SF, stopped to get gas outside some wind farm,” “Sitting in the lounge at Gatwick, munching on a bagel,” “Singapore–>EWR flight delayed, hitting Duty Free, anyone want anything?” “Sitting on the hood of my rental car, watching the sunset from the desert outside of Eloy, Arizona,” and of course, “working from the Ranch, waiting for them to fuel the plane,” which of course, is code for “handling a client issue via conference call, with my skydiving rig on my back, hoping I’ll finish the call before the next load goes up in the air.”

Just in case you didn't catch his Twitter updates: he goes skydiving! Have you ever been? No? Well some people just aren't born adventurers, don't feel bad.

So Let’s translate “why don’t you do some work” into what it really is: “How come your job lets you fly all over the place, and have meetings in really cool places, and why can’t mine? Your job certainly doesn’t seem like work, why does mine?”

My answer to them? Because you don’t want it badly enough. If you really did, you’d have it. You’d take the risk, and play the game. (In actuality, that’s all it ever is - one giant game.) Face it - Having a job where you’re not the boss is, well, safe.

Peter Shankman thinks you're a pussy, no disrespect intended.

Like to read thousands more words about how Shankman can close client deals on his cellphone immediately before parachuting out of a plane and Twittering about it on the way down and, upon landing, running a road race that ends in a TV studio where he is doing an on-air interview? Read all you want!

"An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind."
—Walter Bagehot

"Everybody's talking trash these days, so why not keep quiet?"
—Dennis Rodman

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

This is not of course, happening in the US. But maybe bloggers should rethink their opinions about accepting free shit in return for positive reviews. Word of mouth marketing online is big business here, but most companies and their marketing agencies are smart enough to realize already that disclosure can save them a world of scandal and bad PR.

So far the exact penalties haven't been spelled out, and it will likely take a test case, reported to the Office of Fair Trading and prosecuted, to make clear the size of the penalty and whether jail time is really likely.

Flogging?

Also, here we gratuitously bring up once again Edelman's famous fake Wal-Mart blog. If only it had happened after May 26, and in the UK.

[Ad Age]

Patricia Rogers, a counsellor and fellow of the BACP, even worries that the feelings that lead to Facebook suicide could trigger the loneliness and lack of self-esteem felt by people who really do take their own lives.

"It could be incredibly damaging for the ego to realise that you haven't got as many friends as you thought you had, or that those friends aren't particularly meaningful," she says.

"Comparing yourself with others, a big preoccupation on sites such as Facebook, can be damaging psychologically so, as a precaution, I think that people who leave should be carefully monitored, or at least checked up on, and then referred to counselling resources if necessary."

• Lawrence Lessig: The highest-profile email bankruptcy to date. The copyright attorney (who fought a Supreme Court case against a 20-year extension of all U.S. copyrights) sent a mass e-mail in 2004 asking anyone with important unanswered e-mail to reply, which would flag their mail as important. He carried off the task with aplomb, apologizing for failing to maintain "cyber decency." But rumor has it that Lessig still went through much of his "bankrupt" e-mail.
• Andrew Baron: The producer of the Rocketboom show reportedly declared an e-mail reboot in 2006.
• Michael Arrington: In October 2006, the publisher of the TechCrunch blog came back from vacation and deleted months of e-mails. He also turned off instant messaging.
• The better fix: Sean Bonner: Instead of dropping all his current e-mails, Sean Bonner put a throttle on future mail. The founder of the Metroblogging city-blog network started autoresponding to e-mail this month, saying he only checks e-mail once a day.
• Tim Ferriss: Sean's following what Ferriss recommends in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss follows his own plan (and apparently truly works four hours a week).
• Andy Baio: Upcoming's founder says he built a 10,000-e-mail backlog in 2006. He spent six weeks fixing it.

Before you try this at home, remember that the people above can get hundreds of e-mails a day. Try autoresponders before you try bankruptcy; everyone appreciates some sort of response. Consider hiring an assistant, even part-time, for less than you could make by saving your e-mail time. If these measures seem like too much, you're not that bad off. You just need to get quicker at managing your e-mail.

(Photo: Midnight Beep)

In this video from our local news channel, some guy named Ricky explains that being a technosexual is all about having the sexiest gear and setting up wireless routers for women. If this is all it takes, then this is the one "sexual" we're definitely suited for (the heteros only let us in begrudgingly).

Faaaaaabulous! – Jason Chen

Technosexual - the new new buzz [TechieDiva]

• And who are the suave, snappily-dressed men to offset the nerds? Venture capitalists. Oh, perfect, because as admin assistant Sand Hill Slave can attest, nothing's hotter than a coked-out stripey-wearing VC associate who keeps bragging about his job. [Sand Hill Slave]
• And the women of the Valley? "Hot for Silicon Valley" isn't a slam on real looks — it's a slam on every woman who insists on wearing a pantsuit from the 90s.
• Closing time in San Francisco: 2 AM. Closing time in San Jose: 2 AM. Closing time in Cupertino: 2 AM. Come on, California lawmakers — bar-going geeks need at least another hour to loosen up.
• The bedroom's out of wifi range.

Then again, it could be worse — we could all be in Washington, with all the romance of Silicon Valley and all the intelligence of Miami.

• Title: The Way We Boom Now
• Subtitle: What this age of Internet euphoria looks like to those of us who were in the game last time around. For one, bubbles aren't completely bad.
• The Internet industry is a bubble again. But it's not a bubble. But it is a bubble...or is it? No. Yes.
• Poster children: Fred Wilson, the blogging VC who fed the first bubble, now chastising the fools who fed the first bubble; MySpace, YouTube, and DailyCandy (sing with me: one of these things is not like the others...); bloggers and podcasters
• Illustration: (Pictured) The backs of two chic Net users, one in 1998 and one in 2006. Message unclear.
• Lead: Kurt Andersen and his friends are prescient but too dumb to notice.
• Bold names: John Battelle, dot-com journalist survivor of Boom 1 and founder of blog ad network Federated Media Publishing; Walter Isaacson, Internet czar of Time Warner in the 90s; Michael Hirschorn, Andersen's former business partner at Inside; Fred Wilson, "rockstar" VC; Jerry Colonna, Fred's co-founder at VC firm Flatiron; Dany Levy, founder of DailyCandy (more on her later today); Michael Wolff, Burn Rate burnout
• Lesson 1: A $100-million dollar valuation for a shopping newsletter is "really not crazy" if Kurt Andersen decides it's not. This is the magic logic of trend stories.
• Lesson 2: If Valleywag dedicates 250 words to a tip, it's worth one sentence to a real paper.
• Lesson 3: Burn Rate author Michael Wolff sucks at forecasting. Also, he calls the Internet "the business."
• Best line: "I'm a rock star again." — Fred Wilson
• Non sequitur: The whole slant is "We've learned our lesson" — but Fred's quoted saying half the boom participants weren't around for the 90s bubble. Where'd they learn this lesson, in grade school?
• WTF: "To call a Web business a 'dot-com' in 2006 would be the equivalent of calling a black person 'colored.'" I tried to verify this, but there weren't any black people around.

The Way We Boom Now [New York Magazine]
Earlier Lazy News: Web 2.0 has a local address [Valleywag]