Reserved mostly for mocking the misfortune and mistakes of others, FAIL has become the fastest, most to-the-point way to express a sentiment such as "you utterly screwed the pooch on that one" or "this is by far the best example of human stupidity I have ever seen."

It's one word. It's incredibly fun to say - especially high volume and elongated through the vowels: "FAAAAAAAAAAAAAIL".

While the headline in this newspaper is a fail, something even worse - the included Youtube video perhaps - would be labeled an EPIC FAIL. A FAIL to end all FAILS. A FAIL from which nobody ever recovers. One that will live in infamy.

It's nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game's obvious draws-among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes-its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: "You beat it! Your skill is great!" If you lose, you are mocked: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!"

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Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind--for the laughs--we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. We acknowledge you as a serious opponent, and we are prepared for a long, long campaign. You will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your methods, hypocrisy, and the artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell.

One of the moderators on 711chan.org thought he had learned from a friend what the real server's address was on Friday.

The user, who was using the handle Splongcat, uploaded DDOS software configured with the supposedly secret address and urged others in an internet chat room to download and run the software. The software was intended to flood the specified IP address with rogue traffic in order to bring the server down.

But within minutes, users began complaining the software was crashing and others analyzed the traffic and found that the IP address didn't belong to the Church of Scientology, reporting that that the software was actually targeting a school in the Netherlands.

Immediately the IRC chat room hosted on 711chan.org (currently down) was filled with calls to stop using the program, and the 900 people in the chat room returned to their disorderly conversation about whether they should be flooding Digg with anti-Scientology links or making harassing phone calls to local Scientology branches.

Anonymous generated a powerful attack against Scientology.org, which was hit with several DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks over the past few days. According to Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, a company compiling data on Internet attacks, it seems that Anonymous' attacks flooded the Church of Scientology's web site with as much as 220 Mbps of traffic, which indicates that the group itself is based on some sort of organization.

However, shortly after these attacks, the Church seems to have moved its web site to a server hosted by Prolexic Technologies, a company specialized in protecting other companies from DDOS attacks.

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I'm not. I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I've been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that's not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs... blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you've probably heard of.

I'm physically ill after reading what happened to Kathy Sierra. Maryam and several others here at PodTech asked me about it and are concerned since the same sites that are attacking Kathy also mentioned me and Maryam. Maryam is really freaked out about it. So am I.

It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don't care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man.

Anna Wintour is as picky with words as she is with her wardrobe. According to one Vogue-er, "They are expanding the Vogue Web site and getting more involved with the Internet. But Anna hates the word 'blog' so much, she refuses to call anything on her site a blog and has charged her staff with coming up with a new word that isn't as garish-sounding. She wants it ASAP - in time for launch." However, a source close to Wintour said, "Anna just doesn't want people to refer to stories as blogs, because they're not. It's an improper use of the word." A rep said, "Anna has nothing against blogs."

"She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It's intense. For right now."

I wasn't sure what the "technosexual generation" is either. Lucky, he goes on to explain. "Technosexuals" is apparently a new marketing buzz word for young people who use text messaging and blogging in order to meet and arrange hookups.

Yeah, yeah, I know. All the cool kids are doing it these days. But ew. Something about that description kind of makes me want to stop blogging forever and communicate with others only through Morse code. I feel, I dunno. Dirty.

A recent government report forecast that robots would routinely carry out surgery by 2018.

The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.

Other bodies are also thinking about the robotic future. Last year a UK government study predicted that in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings.

The European Robotics Research Network is also drawing up a set of guidelines on the use of robots.

This ethical roadmap has been assembled by researchers who believe that robotics will soon come under the same scrutiny as disciplines such as nuclear physics and Bioengineering.

A draft of the proposals said: "In the 21st Century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with - robots.

"It will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems."

"Through a series of highly sophisticated and complex algorithms, this system has determined that you are not presently authorized to use this system function. It could be that you simply mistyped a password, or, it could be that you are some sort of interplanetary alien-being that has no hands and, thus, cannot type." (See screenshot on 2nd page of this post.)

But wait, it gets even weirder:

"If I were a gambler, I would bet that a cat (an orange tabby named Sierra or Harley) somehow jumped onto your keyboard and forgot some of the more important pointers from those typing lessons you paid for. Based on the actual error encountered, I would guess that the feline in question simply forgot to place one or both paws on the appropriate home keys before starting. Then again, I suppose it could have been a keyboard error caused by some form of cosmic radiation; this would fit nicely with my interplanetary alien-being theory."

Once you write enough blog posts, and read far too many blog posts, you acquire an instinctive sense for the principle ingredients of an audience-pleasing offering. However, rather than itemize those ingredients, it's far easier to discuss this magical formula in terms of the instinctive emotional responses you hope to conjure in readers. The broadest of those responses are indignation, titillation, stimulation, and affirmation.

Photolurkers spent most of their time online flicking through photograph albums posted by strangers

Then there are photolog sites like Flickr. While most of us would rather die than be caught surreptitiously browsing through someone else's photos, there need be no such qualms about the private pics people put up on these sites. Haliyana Khalid and Alan Dix at Lancaster University in the UK have studied this new practice of "photolurking". Most people they interviewed who used Flickr and similar sites spent time each day browsing albums owned by people they had never met. They do this for emotional kicks, Khalid and Dix suggest: flicking through someone else's wedding photos, for example, allows people to daydream about their own nuptials.

Blog streaking: Revealing secrets or personal information online, which for everybody's sake would be best kept private.

At the stroke of midnight on January 11th, 2007, every town in the United States will go on sale on a first come, first served basis (for the duration of the Landrush period). Those who Claim a town (zip code is used to define each town) will have an exclusive right to that town, and all the benefits that follow upon it, including the right to create and maintain their town's only Claim Owner's page.

The cost to claim a town is $100, and each Claim Owner has the right to sell it, use it to make money (generate income through advertising), tell the world about their town, product, service, art, life, thoughts, political opinions and much more. Each Claim Owner also is granted the right to vote on issues that impact our virtual United States, including which charities will benefit from the funds generated here, as 10% of each dollar taken in will be set aside for charitable giving.

The first come, first served Landrush period will only last for the month of January 2007, after which time, our policy of granting Claims only to verifiable residents of the town will go into effect. We believe this policy to be very important for the integrity of the content on the website, and in the best long-term interest of our Claim Owners.

In a recent post on TechCrunch, for instance, founder and blogger-in-chief Michael Arrington posted a summary of recent shake-ups at file-sharing site BitTorrent. The only problem is, the spelling of the site's name fluctuated between "BitTorrent" and "BitTorent" throughout the post--with the misspelling in the headline, even. (If it's been corrected by now, check the comments for evidence of the mishap.)

We'll forgive Mr. Arrington for this one and spare him any jabs that involve removing one of the r's from his own name. After all, it's morning, and when I don't have enough coffee in the morning I do dumb things like confuse TypePad with MovableType. And yes, typos do get through even at professional news sites with lots of writers and editors.

That's ok, I can take a jab from them. While CNET writers were all cozy in bed last night, Om and I were competing to break the Bittorent story. That's why blogs will win, and CNET will lose.

On Tuesday, a lawyer for the Universal Music Publishing Group, a catalog owner and administrator, posted the text of a cease-and-desist letter in the comments section of Stereogum.com, a Web site carrying the video. It contended that Bank of America had violated Universal's copyright of the U2 song.

The two employees featured in the video were the guitarist, Jim Debois, a consumer market executive for Manhattan, and the singer, Ethan Chandler, a Manhattan banking center manager, who provoked much of the ridicule with his earnest interpretation and also for straying a bit far from U2's lyrics with lines like "Integration has never had us feeling so good/and we'll make lots of money."

Mr. Chandler, who has independently released an album and is working on another, said he was asked to write and perform the song for an August meeting of credit card division executives at MBNA headquarters in Wilmington, Del.

He said he was surprised to learn about the cease-and-desist letter, stressing that his performance was meant for an internal audience. "There was an approved list of songs to use," he said, "and as far I knew, that was an approved song."

I stopped in at Wal-Mart today after I got off work. I had to pick up a few things. As I was walking past the men's clothing area, something caught my eye. I noticed something weird over at a wall of t-shirts. One of the t-shirts had a design on it that looked remarkably like something related to Nazis. Specifically, the Totenkopf or "Death's Head".

I took a picture of it with my camera phone.

The Death's Head symbol was worn by the members of the German Nazi SS. The Totenkopf on the Wal-Mart t-shirt looks very similar to the divisional insignia of the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf. As you can see, It's almost an exact copy.

WeeWorld is the only online personalized identity provider that enables users to carry their alter-ego with them throughout their online and offline lives. For example, international mobile partnerships such as Motorola and Vodafone enable users to extend their digital identity to cell phone picture messages, caller ID alerts and wallpapers. As the company continues to cultivate strategic partnerships with companies such as Skype, MSN and AOL, WeeWorld is poised to become the standard for online/mobile digital expression and personalization.

In addition to WeeMee portability, WeeWorld.com provides interactive games and personalized ecards to send to friends. Users can create WeeBuddies for their friends, keep their own blog and continually update their own WeeMee to express their current mood or daily attire. WeeWorld also plans to evolve into the broader social networking realm by allowing each WeeMee to create and personalize their own space.

With billions of possible configurations, there is a WeeMee for everyone, as users choose their body shape, skin color, hair style, emotion, clothing, accessories, pets, pastimes, passions, pursuits, sports, backgrounds, moods, emotions and feelings.

Graphically, many MySpace pages look like a teenager's bedroom after a tornado--a swirl of clashing backgrounds, boxes stacked inside other boxes, massive photos, and sonic disturbance. Try loading a few of those pages at once and watch what happens to your CPU. Watch out for spyware, too, since it turns out that MySpace has become a popular distribution vector for drive-by downloads and other exploits. And in a place where "U are soooooooo hot!!!" passes for wit, MySpace isn't doing much to elevate the level of social discourse.

In response to a public backlash and some well-publicized lawsuits, MySpace has begun modifying its policies--for example, limiting adults' ability to contact minors. That's hardly enough. Requiring some kind of authentication from MySpacers--or their parents--to validate their ages and identities would go a long way toward scaring off the creeps and making the site a kinder, gentler social network

Is MySpace totally bad? Not at all. Are we old farts? Yeah, probably. But the Web's most popular site needs a serious security reboot. And probably a makeover. Until then, MySpace won't ever be OurSpace.

My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the person who took the phone. I'm not sure they knew what was happening (they replaced the SIM card with their own, clearly, but probably didn't notice ShoZu), I have no way to find my phone with these pictures.

Update: I still have many people saying that this episode is a hoax, and/or I am a marketer. Please, this was not marketing, I have no connection to Shozu, the story is accurate and happened exactly as I've recounted. I simply posted the story to my blog, that's all. I really am just some guy that this happened to. Thanks.

And what citywide art installation would be complete without a little blogging? Some of the cow artists are keeping people informed with blogs of their cow decorating process. So, enjoy the parade and let us know if you come across any must-see cows.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

Unless someone held a meeting without me, BLOGS = SITES. On these websites we call blogs, we make blog posts, blog entries, post stories, log posts, ramble, scribble, or just about anything....

We do not, however, publish blogs on our blogs. I make this point today b/c of the Office Pirates launch, brought to us by TimeWarner. On the shiny new Office Pirates site, individual blog posts are referred to as 'Today's Blog', and the archive of old posts is called All Blogs.

Burnham's Beat today reported record results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2005. Revenues for Q4 2005 were $168.64 up 176% compared to $61.08 in Q4 2004 and up 27.3% sequentially vs. Q3 2005. Earnings before expenses, which management believes are the most cynical results we can think of, were also up 176%.

Commenting on the results, Bill Burnham, Chief Blogger of Burnham’s Beat explains "This quarter's results continue to demonstrate that blogging is a complete waste time. While we did not achieve our previously forecasted results of 100 billion page views and 'Google-style cash, Baby!', we remain hopeful that people forgot about those projections. There are several reasons for missing our projections including an outage of our hosting provider in late Q4 which cost us a least $1.00, the continued poor quality of the writing on the site, high oil prices, several deals that slipped to next quarter, and uncertainty created by the war in Iraq."

To date, votemerich.com has relied on word-of-mouth advertising to attract attention. Thirty-six bloggers have registered, all vying for a shot at the prize.

The site works like this: contestants tell tales of woe, spin laughable yarns, poke fun at other contestants and even resort to begging to convince others of their dire need for the cash. Adbright.com, an online advertising agency, tracks the number of bloggers who link to advertisers on the site. Every link means a few pennies added to the jackpot. Once the kitty reaches $1,000, contestants will be asked to vote for the top bloggers. After a round or two of voting to narrow down the best of the best, a winner will be chosen.

Here are a couple of small pointers to existing candidates and future candidates. Just like launching a website, launching a candidacy will require some work, in addition to blogging. You'll probably need to get your friends to sign up so you can get an initial core set of constituents. They will be your primary advocates, helping get out the word about your candidacy and giving you feedback on your Vote Me Rich approach. Also, you need to actively seek new advocates, either through registered users of VoteMeRich.com or through other sites that encourage community. I believe it will take someone active in the online community to win this competition.

The idea for this geeky theme came a few months ago when someone known as ZF from Littleoslo posted a funny remake of the Monopoly board with properties like Google, Yahoo, Flickr etc. Popular IMs took there the roles of what was previously known as rail stations while Wikipedia and Creative Commons became the public utilities. For a geek like me, there was no better theme for a Monopoly-like game that I planned to add (even Ghettopoly couldn't compare).

AP reports that **** Cheney was not the anonymous source who told Bob Woodward Valerie Plame's identity, according to an anonymous source. Jeez, those guys sure can keep a secret. Now.

Of course, some are saying that the anonymous source ruling out Cheney is Woodward himself. He didn't want to be named as the source because then the information wouldn't be credible.

That is, however, until "she" was outed in this week's issue of The New Yorker. It turns out the voice behind A3G is a 30-year-old assistant federal prosecutor in Newark. His name is David Lat.

Lat, who sounded uneasy with his newfound fame Monday, quickly said he would need to check with his employer this time around before talking. A few minutes later, he politely declined to comment.

Michael Drewniak, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, also declined to comment.

Odoevsky suggested in future there would be a kind of connection between houses that would allow people to communicate quickly and easily, the way they do now via the Internet.

"Houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate," Odoevsky wrote.

Even more interestingly, Odoevsky suggested every household would publish a kind of daily journal or newsletter and distribute it among selected acquaintances, a habit which Russian bloggers immediately recognized as blogging.

"You can read the reasons over there but basically I've come to the conclusion that (maybe) I'd rather be a part of a network than writing about one - and damn it, you can't do justice by doing both. I don't want to be in a position of conflict-of-interest, and that's exactly what I'd be in if one day I were to join a network and continue writing about them all. So it's best to pull the pin right now.

No matter what anyone says, individuals who continue to write about blog networks (usually with that bloggers critical eye) and also own or be a part of one have a serious conflict-of-interest, even if their intentions are A Okay. Sometimes, right or wrong, it's the perception that matters over the reality."

How does Chitika determine what product to show in the eMiniMall?
At first, eMiniMalls will display products that are extremely targeted to your website's content. Then, over time, the content and behavior-based Feedback Loop intelligently learns what products are working best for a particular website and will prioritize those products for display.

The potential pitfall of this approach, of course, is how well context can be inferred by examining keywords. This was gruesomely demonstrated in the early phases of an implementation with the New York Post when an advertisement for luggage appear in next to a story about a murder where body parts were stashed in a suitcase. Google states that it has since made improvements to AdSense designed to prevent such inappropriate placements.

I remember posting how the stats have 'gone through the roof' on more than one occasion, but they really have this week - with over 200,000 unique visitors in the last 3 DAYS! 91,000 uniques on Monday alone. Currently 3rd in Alexa's movers and shakers list, and ranked in the top 1000 sites on the internet in terms of pure traffic / visitor numbers.

I'm still facing a huge backlog of e-mails, like 2,000 or something, so I'm afraid it will be a while before I can reply to all of them, but once again thanks for all of your messages and enquiries, and I promise to respond eventually. Also got lots of site updates coming in the next couple of weeks; I know a few pages on the site have some cobwebs that need to be swept away, apart from the homepage of course which I think is looking great!

Zuilkowski - who only rates men's rooms - did a slate of radio interviews yesterday morning and was scheduled to appear last night on MSNBC and WB56-TV. More media appearances are on his docket today to promote The Restroom.

Meanwhile, the Park Plaza Hotel e-mailed Zuilkowski yesterday with thanks for a recent rave review of its upscale bathroom. And the Boston Billiards pool hall bravely asked him to check out its toilet.

But Zuilkowski, an intern at a local law firm, said he's fighting to keep his mind on his real job.

"It's been hard," the 24-year-old said of juggling his internship and his newfound glory with The Restroom. "The most important thing to me right now is my job. In the end, I'm going to be a lawyer."

And what of blogs?

Kenealy tosses out another analogy: "Every blogger is a rock band without a record contract."

I guess he means weblogs will continue to be free.

AP: Do you read blogs?
Hilton: What’s that?
AP: Um, they’re these things on the Internet where people write about news and stuff. Hilton: No, I don’t really read anything on the Internet except my AOL mail. I don’t like people who sit on computers all day long and write about people they don’t know anything about.
AP: Paris, you just described my job.

Back in the 1990s Drudge was a believer in the empowering potential of the internet. In a speech he said, "We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be." Now he sounds disillusioned and says that the "din" is growing into a cacophony: "There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention." He is no fan of the blogging phenomenon (weblogs linking sites): "I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don't exist."

This Internet stuff has gotten out of hand, and just because widely available, simple-to-use technology makes it possible to share your goofy opinions with billions of people doesn't mean you should. Blogs -- Web logs -- are sources of rumor, innuendo and downright lies, and there's no control over what goes into one. Doofs too naive to discern ravings from reportage cite them as if they were factual. There are enough misinformed people already, thank you. Blogs are also a lot of work. Oh sure, it sounds fun, ragging on Ryan Seacrest one day and posting your plan for Mideast peace the next. But then you realize that if you don't keep updating the blog, the pack of dimwits hanging on your every word will dwindle.

"The metric is what the person has to contribute, not the person's rank, age, or level of experience. If they have the answer, I want the answer. When I post a question on my blog, I expect the person with the answer to post back. I do not expect the person with the answer to run it through you, your OIC, the branch chief, the exec, the Division Chief and then get the garbled answer back before he or she posts it for me. The Napoleonic Code and Netcentric Collaboration cannot exist in the same space and time. It's YOUR job to make sure I get my answers and then if they get it wrong or they could have got it righter, then you guide them toward a better way... but do not get in their way." (empahsis added)

First find a party.. It doesn't matter if you’re not actually invited. Second, exude confidence. A "Do you know who I am" attitude has an uncanny way of getting you past bouncers, dress codes and hosts. Always works for me. Third, show up at the door and say you know "Scott." There's always a Scott at the party, you can count on that.

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web."

"It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief."

"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."

"a) he's simply a very, very bad writer, or b) he lacks any skills of a diplomatic nature, or it's just c) he really believes that statements like "Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts" are somehow going to disabuse people who keep blogs, journals and such from believing or repeating the calumny that "Michael Gorman is an idiot" (someone apparently said this on a blog, he tells us, expecting us to feel an outrage on his behalf I somehow wasn't able to muster)."