"There is a simple way to render these guys useless," Clooney advised in an e-mail his publicist sent out to various other show-business publicists. "Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That's the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride. Thanks, George."

Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corp, told the Financial Times that, although he and Mr Murdoch were very optimistic about its prospects when they acquired it last year, MySpace had exceeded their expectations.

"MySpace is more potent and powerful than even we knew," Mr Chernin says. "And it is becoming a more integrated part of people's lives." However, as efforts grow to attract more advertisers to the site, News Corp is facing two challenges. Young users have to keep wanting to use the site, rather than switch to a "cooler" alternative.

Also, advertisers have to feel confident their reputation will not be tainted by "inappropriate" content. Teachers and parents are concerned that, because information on MySpace is publicly available, it might put teenagers in contact with predatory adults. In terms of retaining its appeal, Mr Chernin said users had to keep feeling the site was theirs. "We don't want to change the fundamental look and feel of the site," he said. "We do not want users to have any sense that it is corporatised."

The second project, DealBreaker.com, launched earlier today. It is a Wall Street gossip blog, conceived by former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers. She has recruited some excellent writers and is busy building a blog network that could possibly rival that of Nick Denton's. DealBreaker is just the first of many blogs Elizabeth has plans for. Expect great things.

Today we're happy to unveil something new: the Blogs of Note blog (meta!). Now you can see all the blogs we've ever blog of noted, going all the way back to 2001. This also means that if you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the Blogs of Note Atom feed to get the latest delivered to you every day.

We hope you have fun with this combination slice of blogging history/firehose of hot fresh blogs. As a bonus tip, if you run across a blog that you'd like to check out but that's not there any more, try running it through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to see if they have a copy.

Online sleuths can claim another victory. Howard Kaloogian, a Republican candidate in California's 50th Congressional District, has removed a picture from his campaign Web site that he claimed was evidence that journalists are distorting how bad conditions are in Iraq. The photo purported to show a placid street scene in downtown Baghdad, including a hand-holding couple in Western dress and shoppers out for a stroll on a cobblestone street in an unmarred business district.

As it turns out, the photo is a genuine street scene-from Istanbul, Turkey.

"I'm sorry, we'll correct it," Kaloogian told Nesweek after being contacted about the picture. "It appears like this is one of the photos from Istanbul." Kaloogian said that some members of a group that traveled to Iraq with him in July 2005 had a brief layover in Turkey's largest city. "We turned over literally hundreds of photos to our Webmaster, and apparently he chose one from the Istanbul layover."

Some of you know each other, others may not, but I'm calling all of your powers together because I have a goal that I cannot achieve alone. It's a goal of such lofty proportions that the mere thought of achieving it has me trembling in my darkened apartment. It's keeping me up at night. My goal, my quest, is to be an invited guest to the world premiere of the movie that is destined to change the world. A movie of such scope and awe that you need only read the title to understand everything you'll ever need to know about the movie. The fact that it's staring Samuel L. Jackson is a mere afterthought to the magical title. I want to attend the glitzy Hollywood premiere of:
Snakes on a Plane

Raw Story then spoke with Jack Stokes, AP's Director of Media Relations. Stokes took careful notes regarding our concerns and said he would investigate our claims. He found that the AP had, indeed, gotten our article from "human rights groups" but that it was AP policy not to credit blogs.

"It does turn out that we don't give mentions to blogs when we're researching our stories and when we've been given material by others such as in this case human rights groups that brought this stuff to us that we independently check," Stokes said in a voicemail message.

Stokes elaborated Tuesday, saying the AP does give credit to blogs. He said the reason Raw Story wasn't credited in the Mar. 14 article was because the bureau "hadn't heard of" Raw Story, and because they had received the article from third-party groups. He said the agency would be issuing a statement, most likely later today.

"We do credit blogs that we know," Stokes said. "We had no idea who you were."

Last week, over a three or four day period, there were four instances in which a mainstream media outlet took a story or scoop we (and by this I mean the two reporters who put out TPMmuckraker.com, Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) had first published and ran it as their own without crediting or mentioning that TPMmuckraker.com had originally broken the story.

Members can already use RSS to keep an eye on the Announcement Board, the eBay Discussion Boards, or listings from specific eBay Stores. This week we're adding RSS support to our eBay Search pages. With this enhancement you can create a custom RSS feed that will deliver the results of your eBay Search to you via any RSS reader. Since we are integrating the RSS support with our Advanced Search pages, you'll have complete control over how you narrow down your search.

To subscribe to a RSS feed, you'll need an RSS reader or aggregator to gather and view the updates. Several free and commercial RSS readers are available, and some examples can be seen here (provided by dmoz.org). Once you have an RSS reader, simply go to the bottom of any RSS-enabled page you are interested in, click on the RSS button, copy the URL from the page that opens, and paste it into your reader to display the content in RSS.

RSS continues to penetrate the mainstream market, as companies like eBay educate their users to the value of search syndication. These actions continue to validate the collective cause of what many start ups have been pushing for some time now-Feedster included.

2. What is Blog HOT or NOT?
The idea of this site is twofold. One reason is to get some sort of ranking system on weblogs just like we have for people's pictures. The other reason is to create a system that helps weblog writers find an audience, and for that audience to find new weblogs.

Bloggers
Pay someone to write snarky comments? Do you think we're getting paid for this?

Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

Baghdad Burning, a first-hand account written under the pseudonym Riverbend, is one of 19 books in contention.

Others include Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, a biography of 19th-Century cook and author Mrs Beeton and a study of post-war US-Soviet relations.

The winner of the ?30,000 prize will be announced on 14 June.

Professor Robert Winston, chair of the judging panel, said this year's longlist contained "an exceptionally wide variety of genres".

Three years later and the nightmares of bombings and of shock and awe have evolved into another sort of nightmare. The difference between now and then was that three years ago, we were still worrying about material things- possessions, houses, cars, electricity, water, fuel... It's difficult to define what worries us most now. Even the most cynical war critics couldn't imagine the country being this bad three years after the war... Allah yistur min il rab3a (God protect us from the fourth year).

It took students one day to hack their way back to blogging Web sites after technicians blocked them on school computers.

But Fort Wayne Community Schools will keep trying to keep students away from the popular sites, spokeswoman Debbie Morgan told The Journal Gazette for a Sunday story.

School officials say blogging not only distracts students but makes them vulnerable to online predators.

"We don't put all these thousands of dollars of equipment out there in the schools for personal use," said Doug Coutts, the district's chief operations officer. "They're out there for educational purposes."

Students had been able to log on to popular sites including Facebook and MySpace during school, though they were not supposed to do so. Technicians started blocking the sites Thursday, but students had found ways around the new blocks by Friday.

"Four years ago we did a very small blog about the World Cup and attracted attention from all over the world. This time we wanted to take things to the next level and to cover every aspect of this global event from a perspective that you rarely find in mainstream media: the fan perspective. The response thus far has been amazing and we expect things to explode as the start of the tournament nears in June," said Sean Keener, President and Co-Founder of BootsnAll.

Employers, bankers, insurance brokers, and college admissions officers are becoming wise by using social networking and blogging sites as an addition to traditional background checks, such as credit and criminal history.

The more than 70 million people using these sites make it easy for anyone who wants to learn about them.

"Unfortunately, I think most of the people who are posting those are only thinking about their intended readers," said Steven Rothberg, president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, the highest traffic career site used by students, recent graduates, and employers.

"If you're a 20-year-old college student and you like to get drunk on the weekends, you're probably going to put that on your profile because you want to hook up with other people that do the same."

Pennsylvania State University police used Facebook to identify 50 students who stormed the field after the football game against Ohio State this past season.

Naively, the students formed a Facebook group that university police said was titled something like "I stormed the field after Ohio State game."

Police officers were searching for another student who was accused of online harassment when they stumbled upon the group, complete with university e-mails and pictures that clearly incriminated the students.

Punishments for the students ranged from warnings to suspensions.

On the right hand menu bar, below our prospects, you'll now find 'Recommended Reading'. This is a list of the most recent articles I've marked with a 'star' in Google Reader, the RSS reader I use. I'll be sure in future to mark the items I think are worth reading with a star, and they'll turn up on the right hand menu bar automatically. You can click the links to read the original articles, or follow a separate link to the home page of the website the article came from.

The other reason this doesn't quite suck on the same level as 3Bubbles is that they're not trying to put these boxes on blog posts (which, as I mentioned, rarely have the traffic to sustain these things). The interface is nice and the functionality is good - you can also subscribe to chats via RSS. Nonetheless, this is just a bit of tech-wizardry on top of an old idea - will it be enough to distinguish them from the crowd?

Essentially you create a profile, upload a little photo, and if you show up at a site that has Mobber-code (tiny bit of Javascript really) embedded, then you can be visually identified in a little slider bar. You can click to browse people or chat with them. Sort of trying to add visual depth to the community of readers on the site.

An MSN spokesman said the company will gradually add Windows Live features, rather than relaunch the site. "MSN Spaces will focus on building Windows Live innovations into a ready=for-market product, rather than shipping as a beta in the Ideas site," the spokesman said. "MSN Spaces will seamlessly transition to Windows Live Spaces as we add new Live features to the service later this summer."

Microsoft first declared its intention to add new functionalities, along with new advertising opportunities, to its Web-based software offerings last November. At the time, Eric Hadley, MSN's senior director of advertising and marketing, told OnlineMediaDaily that the booming ad market created opportunities for ad-funded software.

A 24-year-old conservative blogger hired by The Washington Post Co.'s Web site resigned today, three days after his debut, amid a flurry of allegations of plagiarism.

Ben Domenech, an editor with Regnery Publishing, relinquished the part-time position hours after a liberal Web site posted evidence that he had plagiarized part of a movie review he wrote for National Review Online. Previous allegations of plagiarism about Domenech's writing for the College of William & Mary student newspaper surfaced Wednesday, but the 2001 review was the first instance found since he attended college.

While liberal bloggers objected to the fact of Domenech's hiring and his inflammatory language, such as calling Coretta Scott King a "communist," it was not until they gathered evidence that he had repeatedly used material without attribution that some conservative bloggers joined in the calls for his firing.

Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, which operates independently from the newspaper, said he would have dismissed Domenech if the former Bush administration aide and Republican Senate staffer had not offered to quit first. He said there was "enough smoke" in the allegations of plagiarism "that we needed to sever the relationship."

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.

When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity.

Plagiarism is perhaps the most serious offense that a writer can commit or be accused of. Washingtonpost.com will do everything in its power to verify that its news and opinion content is sourced completely and accurately at all times.

Q. How do I block a user?
A. To block a user you will need to visit that user's profile click 'Block User' (found underneath 'Send Message').

Clicking 'Block User' will block that user.

Blocked users can still view your profile, but they cannot send you a message or communicate with you. There is no way to prevent someone from seeing your profile.

myspaceWatch.com is a service that allows you to monitor login activity, track profile changes, and keep a running history of up to 3 myspace.com profiles. Are you a parent who banned your child from myspace only to see that they keep logging on, or keeping multiple accounts? Is your significant other living a double life? We keep track and monitor activity so you don't have to. We also don't ask for any of your personal information.

The blog was the brainchild of Alex Georgiev, a graduate student in anthropology who was working with Gilby last fall to update the Kibale Chimpanzee Project's Web site. Georgiev argued that the Web site ought to have changing features that bring people back again. The blog was one way to do that, Gilby said. Web site statistics through March 9 show that the site has been viewed some 2,800 times.

In addition to drawing people to the Web site, however, Gilby said the blog is a new way for scientists to communicate to the public. Details of the life of a field scientist are typically missing from the scientific papers summarizing research findings. An account of what chimpanzees are like when you're sitting next to them may give readers an entirely different feeling about the animals than they would get from reading about the latest discovery of chimp behavior or anatomy.

"It's important for chimpanzee conservation, even though that's not the primary goal of our research," Gilby said. "If a reader suddenly feels like they made a connection, maybe that's one more reason for them to give money to an organization that protects chimpanzees."

Scrapblog, said its developer, "goes beyond the status quo of online photo-sharing sites to incorporate the tradition and storytelling capability of scrapbooking and the power of blogging." Users start with a blank page and then can select a theme or mix-and-match elements from several themes to create their online scrapbook. Features will allow users to upload, move, rotate and resize images, group and decorate photos and pages to create online scrapbooks for individual events, tag photos by using keywords for easier finding and sharing and create blogs so visitors can post comments for others to see.

Each Scrapblog has a unique URL, which users can share through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and email notifications, or keep private for viewing by invitation only. Scrapbloggers can also contribute creative content for other users or borrow designs from other users for their own use.

The navigation of content leads the reader to a subdomain of wireless-watch.com, rather than to the creator's blog. Here are some screenshot examples with the URL magnified and highlighted. It's a bit blurry from magnification, but the urls can be discerned.

"The current version of the site is online at the link below; it is NOT publicly available and will not be so until **** -- and then only with content provided by contributors who have given us authorization. We will not, at any time, republish any content for which we do not have a duly signed agreement from the original contributor."

"In other words, if you do not wish to join the W-W.Com platform, any and all content from your RSS feed that we have cached during our test and trial phase will be deleted (with no hard feelings from us!) before the public launch so as not to violate your copyright."

Considering our obvious concern regarding privacy and copyright contained therein, any neutral evaluation of the materials (including the required Community Agreement contract) would reasonably conclude that due diligence was clearly demonstrated in the process we have taken.

Ana Marie Cox, the former editor of Wonkette.com and the author of Dog Days, has signed to be a columnist for Time and Time.com. She will file a weekly column on politics for the Web site and a monthly column in the magazine. Her first deadline is this week; this past Thursday, at the D.C. bureau offices, she had the photo taken that would accompany the column.

A press release will be issued by Time early this week, for which Cox submitted a quote. It is: "My only regret about selling out to Time is that it didn't happen earlier. I hope to put the 'stream' in Mainstream Media."

Steve's online diary is full of reflective musings, both on weight loss and the quest to live a better life in a car-dependent society where, in many areas, junk food has become almost a staple diet.

When he left San Diego last April, he passed 21 fast food restaurants in a four-and-a-half mile stretch of road.

"I thought when I got out into the country, I'd leave all that behind," he said.

"But I've walked through the Midwest, the breadbasket, and it is one of the most unhealthy places on earth.

A new study concludes that whiny, paranoid, insecure kids who crave authority grow up to be conservatives. Children who were confident, resilient and self-reliant grew up to be liberals. This is the second study that has concluded that adults' political leanings may have more to do with a genetically-programmed personality type than with the type of family the adult grew up in.

The CIA's Publications Review Board is sending out terse reminders to agency veterans reminding them of the rules requiring that any writings--even blogs--must first get agency approval. Among those getting the warning is outspoken blogger and ex-agency man Larry Johnson, who smells censorship. "It's very selective," says Johnson, who has been critical of the CIA's failure to defend outed ex-spook Valerie Plame. His note from CIA brass referenced his blogging. A CIA spokesman described the reminder as standard operating procedure. "Should anyone be surprised if CIA reminds people of the obligations they voluntarily assumed?" asks the agency in a statement. Exempted from the review list: radio and TV appearances -- unless written notes are used.

Think for a moment of what might have happened had we had better (really, any) coverage of Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were cooking up a second attack after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Could we then have been so amazed by 9/11? Wasn't it criminally irresponsible to be so amazed?

Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world -- the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week -- it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.

1. You have always been able to run non-Google services on your blog. In the same way you can use Yahoo's Flickr to post photos to your blog, you can include an MSN Search box in your template. We consider it a violation of the terms to modify the Blogger navbar, but that's not what was reported to have happened here.

2. We did not send a request to have the MSN Search box removed. We reviewed the information that's been made available, and we found no such request from our support teams.

3 .We did not delete nor remove the blog in question from Blog*Spot.

While there has always been arguments, fights, flame wars and snarkyness in the wider blogging community I wonder if it's gone to new levels in the last year. Perhaps it is just me or the types of bloggers that I've been reading lately (and it could well be) - but I've noticed a significant increase in the mob mentality among some bloggers of late. Link baiting with 'attack' and/or 'shock' tactics has been used quite successfully by some bloggers to build their own profile with little (if no) regard for the impact that these strategies have upon those around them.

individual's rep - bloggers wanting to build a reputation on the back of attack need to be ready for the consequences of their own actions. For starters - 'what comes around goes around' and an attacking blogger can expect those they target (and their friends) to fight back and for their own blogging to come under intense scrutiny. Secondly blogs tend to attract readers that are like their bloggers and an attack blog can become a pretty negative and cynical place. Lastly - the web has a very long memory. Your written word becomes a permanent part of the web and can (and will) be used against you at a later time if you are not careful.

There once was a router so crappy
That it made all the Bloggers unhappy
It caused pagers to be beep
And kept us from sleep
So we smashed it on the ground with golf clubs and threw paving stones
at it and kicked it and someone filmed part of it but that's
not up yet and then we dropped it off a dumpster and kicked it again
and gathered up the parts and sent them to be recycled quite snappy

A clarification about the filer we restored yesterday: This machine is indeed up and functioning again, so the affected blogs are no longer entirely inaccessible. However, it is still not in great shape and we are in the process of moving all the data off of it and on to better machines. So over the next few days there may still be lingering and intermittent problems for some blogs. This includes the "forbidden" errors we're all getting tired of, as well as occasional publishing errors, or incompletely published pages.

Bloggers at the Washington Post are wondering if they should be paid extra. (ex BusinessBlogWire) This made me think about... myself. I'm on unpaid leave from BusinessWeek, and I'm continuing to blog on this commercial site. Is there something wrong with that? True, I'm continuing to receive benefits, including health insurance. But other journalists get the same benefits when they're on leave, and they don't have to blog.

Here's the key: I don't want to stop blogging. If BW kicked me off this site during this leave, I'd start another blog where I'd also blog for free--presumably, with less traffic.

Joga is a members-only portal community that will require an invitation to join. There is very little content right now, but Nike officials believe that will change shortly as word of the site spreads. So far, it is filled with profiles from Nike-sponsored soccer players and Nike employees who have created their own pages to get the network rolling. Based on how well Joga.com does, Nike and Google will likely create social-networking sites for basketball, baseball, skateboarding, and other sports, Nike officials say.

Comment is free is a major expansion of Guardian comment and analysis on the web. It is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.

The blog is updated regularly through the day, with best blogs featuring on our pick of the day. We also carry all the comment from the Guardian and Observer newspapers, giving readers the chance to comment on these articles directly for the first time.

Comment is free is the home of If, the cartoon strip by Steve Bell - Britain's most celebrated political cartoonist - making its debut on Guardian Unlimited after 25 years in the paper. Dan Chung, our award-winning photographer, also has his own photo-blog. And we regularly podcast Guardian and Observer political and cultural debates.

A BlogSpot blogger claims that he received an email from Google saying that the MSN Search box he had placed on his blog violated Blogger's Terms Of Service. The reasoning was that the box was "obstructing Googles services from operating efficiently and effectively". The blogger, Roberto Dohnert, was told to remove the search box, and plans asking Google the question on everyone's mind, "What the hell are you talking about?"

I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post but was pieced together from previous interviews.

I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier. But I see it now and here is what I'm going to do about it:

1. Going forward, any time the HuffPost uses repurposed material we will identify it as such and source where it originally appeared and link to it. (Thank you Jeff Jarvis)

2. Even though the point of providing George Clooney a sample blog was to show how it's done and encourage him to join the blogosphere, I will curb my enthusiasm and not do this in the future.

3. When I read something or hear something in an interview or have something said to me in person that I think is really important and should have as wide an audience as possible, I will put it in my own blog, becoming Boswell to all the Dr. Johnsons out there just as I did once with Arthur Schlesinger.

Search engines make it possible for employers to scour all manner of digital dirt to vet employees. Online profile company Ziggs.com CEO Tim DeMello fired an intern after he discovered that on the intern's Facebook profile he divulged that while at Ziggs he would "spend most of my days screwing around on IM and talking to my friends and getting paid for it."

Schools are warning parents about Google's danger to the MySpace generation, for whom the Internet functions as a virtual diary-meets-barstool confessional. Adolescents try on identities and new behaviors like sweaters. Only now they are trying them on in front of the world. A Pew Research survey found that more than half of all online teenagers are ripping, mixing, and burning their own content, usually placing their creations right alongside their names and photos. The teenagers on the "companies and co-workers" section of MySpace who are talking smack about employers like Blockbuster (BBI), Target (TGT), and Gap (GPS) are clearly unaware of the implications. "People need to realize that this is like putting stuff up on the 6 o'clock news," says employment lawyer Garry G. Mathiason, a partner at San Francisco's Littler Mendelson. "Once you've opened the drapes, people can see everything. They can see your past life."

That's why Dave Fonseca, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, pulled his Facebook profile down in December. "Employers are looking at these things," he says. (It's easy for people to get passwords and noodle around on the site.) Fonseca even knows the verb for people who get fired for what they put on their Web sites: "dooced." The name comes from Dooce.com, the blog of Heather B. Armstrong, who got canned after writing about her job on her blog. Even Friendster, a social networking site that thrives on getting people to reveal everything about themselves, has been insistent on old-school discretion in-house. The company terminated esteemed engineer Joyce Park 18 months ago for mentioning Friendster on her blog, Troutgirl. The rumor on the Web was that the offending entry referred to Friendster's earlier sluggish performance. But the info was already widely known.

Some have described the situation in Iraq as a tightening noose, noting that "time is not on our side"and that "morale is down." Others have described a "very dangerous" turn of events and are "extremely concerned."

Who are they that have expressed these concerns? In fact, these are the exact words of terrorists discussing Iraq -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates -- who are describing their own situation and must be watching with fear the progress that Iraq has made over the past three years.

The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. I believe that history will show that to be the case.

Fortunately, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on Web sites or the latest sensational attack. History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately.

1) He will be hiring a full podcasting news team, a sort of National Public Radio for podcasting.

2) He'll build out what he calls Infotalk. This is where other people produce podcasts in partnership with Podtech, and there will be some sort of split of the revenue generated from advertising running alongside or within the podcasts.

3) He'll build out a sponsorship network. These will be businesses like Intel (you will see Intel's feature channel on Podtech's homepage) which will pay Podtech to produce and host podcasts.

Editors at the Washington Post are wrestling with discontent from reporters who think they should be paid extra for contributing to a group Web log. The Washington City Paper reported staffers on the Post's metro section asked for extra money after learning some prominent byliners were being paid for Web logs while they would not be.

"What they told us was that a single marquee name like [Marc] Fisher or [Joel] Aschenbach, who has sole responsibility for doing this -- they're the ones who get compensated," said Eric Weiss, a D.C. government and politics reporter.

A metro-section editor, Robert McCartney, told reporters the Post's attorneys had determined it could compel employees to blog, the City Paper added. A representative of the Post's Newspaper Guild unit said the question of whether blogging is mandatory remains "unsettled."

In the name of privacy and completely invading it comes Gawker Stalker Maps! Brought to you from gawker.com, the site has people send in celebrity sightings which are then posted immediately on a map. So basically, if you have no shame or conscience whatsoever, you can pinpoint the location of a celeb and then go follow them around like a lovestruck teenager.

ndustrious Kid's charter is to develop premium online products and destinations that are purpose-built for the rapidly growing population of children and tweens now accessing and using the Internet. The company's goal is to enable children to learn and grow as they use the Internet, while simultaneously ensuring a greater level of creativity, excitement and personal security for each child's online user experience. Industrious Kid's age-appropriate products, services and destinations strike a unique balance between the fun and stimulation that children desire and the safety and guidance that parents demand.

"Industrious Kid is filling a critical gap by providing children with a more satisfying Internet experience by developing products with far more intelligence and security features than currently exist in many of the products offered on the market today," said Lynn Beebe, school counselor in Scotts Valley Calif. "For example, there is a growing concern among parents and educators about the involvement of kids on MySpace.com and other social networking sites. These destinations expose children to either adult-oriented content or to people who do not have a child's best interests at heart. Industrious Kid is building a compelling alternative for a particularly underserved age group, and I am delighted to be collaborating with its founders."

Let's hope that Industrious Kid is just the parent organization's name and that the specific blogging tool will be better branded. We'll see to how functionally limiting systems like this get in the name of security. Don't know that raising kids to prefer walled gardens is the best way to keep them safe, but I suppose that's an age old debate.

Industrious Kid has not yet announced its products, but one will be a social networking site along the lines of MySpace.com but with distribution controls so the blogger or the blogger's parent can specify the recipients of the blog.

"There will be several different sites that will be created through this year, all of them targeted at an audience of 8 to 14 year olds," Symons said.

The first is going to be a social networking and blogging network, in the genre of MySpace but targeted for younger kids.

The key difference, she said, will be that the Industrious Kid site will authenticate the recipients to be real people that the blogger or sender knows.

The original Netscape division has been more than decimated over the last few years and layoffs have been almost routine these last few months. The new Netscape.com will be headed by Calacanis, who came in through AOL's acquisition of Weblogs Inc. Not clear what role Weblogs, Inc.'s blogs would play but both divisions would report in Calacanis, according to the sources. He already reports to Jim Bankoff, executive VP of Programming & Products, who would also oversee the Netscape.com changes.

Calacanis has been a big Digg fan and has written about it on his blog a few times. He has yet to respond to our query about these details, but said on his own blog in response to rumours: "There are no details to share right now, but if that changes I'll certainly let you know."

"She said some things that I won't share, but she did tell me that this could be bad for me -- bad for my career. Well, screw you!" the movie star told me yesterday about a conversation he had with the doyenne of Huffingtonpost.com. "I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Clooney, in his only interview on the subject, took off the gloves in his fight with Huffington over a blog purportedly written by the "Syriana" Oscar-winner and posted on her Web site Monday.

"I feel abused," he said.

But Huffington insisted (and forwarded me E-mails that seemed to back her up) that she believed she had explicit permission from one of Clooney's PR reps to publish his disparate quotes as a single piece of writing. "This was a misunderstanding," she told me yesterday, as the disputed blog was removed from her Web site.

Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."

Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."