Though it is unlikely to surpass Scrabulous in membership, John McCain’s new Facebook video game Pork Invaders which turns the Republican candidate’s campaign against pork barrel spending into a lunch-hour escape for would-be Internet predators. This is proof that Mr. McCain, like Barack Obama, gets Web 2.0, hurrah! [Joystiq]

“China’s YouTube,” the website 56.com, has been offline since June 3, with this notice, which says something about a service upgrade, the only evidence it even existed. Some might point the government’s regular crackdown on Internet content, which runs afoul of its standards policies, now extending to online video. Or maybe they’re just getting a head start on keeping any unauthorized Olympics broadcasts off any site that isn’t stamped with NBC’s seal.

The New York Times, always striving to do something to impress the geeks, is getting itself into the business of social networking. Their little toy is called TimesPeople (no space!), and it’ll let you do things you’re already familiar doing, such as saving articles to your TimesFiles, commenting on stories, and emailing their most ridiculous trend pieces to friends (and Jossip editors). But now you’ll be able to share your favorite items with your friends. The final product is very Facebook — at least when it comes to the newsfeed you’ll begin spitting out as you start recommending stories to your friends — and, thanks to the millions of user accounts it already has, will immediately become one of the Internet’s largest social networks. Unlike Facebook, however, you will not be able to throw vampires or sheep at the Thursday Styles section.

There once was an innocent time in the celebrity industry, where actual D-list stars were bumped up from their status of hangers-on and has-beens by a new crop of attention whores: reality television cast members.

That innocent time was upon us not even a decade ago. And now it’s been threatened, nearly to extinction, but another underclass: the microfamous. This class of cewebrities is composed of MySpace celebrities (who get their own reality TV shows), YouTube stars (who get their own cable network deals), and blog boldfacers (who get their own magazine deals, then lose them).

Rex Sorgatz, who had his own bout of microfame, now provides a handy how-to guide to becoming one of them, a primer that should be treated like those nuclear bomb building guidebooks circulating the Internet: buried at all costs.

Michael Agger’s exercise in explaining how we read things online goes like this:

• Keep it short

• Put it in bullet-pointed list form

• Use bold when necessary, even when it’s not necessary

A handful of years ago, we remember reading some obnoxious story about parents buying the domain names of their children’s names — before they were even born. Oh wait, it wasn’t that long ago — it was last year! There’s the case of baby Bennett Pankow, whose parents refused to even name him until they were sure BennettPankow.com was available. (Bennett’s parents are also the answer to the question, “What’s more annoying than parents with double-wide Bugaboo strollers?”)

Now comes a new, barely exciting twist on the whole “web URLs for kids” trend: Parents who buy their children domain names, and then get sued for copyright infringement!

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Because Rickrolling is all the rage with the kids, some pranksters had the bright idea to create the website FightTheSmears.org, a, um, companion site to FightTheSmears.com, Barack Obama’s homepage for fending off Internet falsehoods. Except the .org version was a hoax site and, rather than come to Obama’s defense, it perpetuated the rumors. (It’s since been replaced by an explanation message.)

Clever! So clever, in fact, that MSNBC got caught up in the fake version of the site. While all this gets sorts out, we’re going to long for the days of WhiteHouse.com, when it was a porn site. [video via NB]

With its revamped website and Graydon Carter’s video introductions to each new issue, Vanity Fair clearly considers itself a major player in the Internet leagues. That VF grasps so desperately at each new meme, however, isn’t a publishing industry triumph; it’s a sad little whimper from inside Conde Nast, where they’ve been unable to trade up their celebrity currency for online relevance.

And then came “How the Web Was Won,” the lengthy “oral history” of the Internet, which debuted online as the biggest piece of link bait yet. (You know how us Internet types like to link to things that talk about our own kind.) And with it, a Web 2.0 sidebar: “Blogoptican,” which throws a few dozen Internet titles – many of them not even blogs – on a matrix, measuring them vertically between news and opinion, and horizontally between scurrilous and honest.

That Jossip appears toward the scurrilous pole is not so much an honor, but an expectation; of course we’d end up there.

And then there are the celebrity gossip titles, which generously populate the list, and go a little something like this:

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And so here’s the homepage of Fight the Smears, the amply titled aggressive defense site from Barack Obama’s campaign that aims to be a clearing house for refuting rumors, denying myths, and respinning the spin about the Illinois senator. It’s sort of like hoax-busting site Snopes.com, but, you know, with actual pressing issues. It’s also yet more evidence that Obama’s camp “gets” the Internet, and understands its power to disseminate information. So, as John McCain continues to get slammed by things as simple as YouTube searches, Obama is purposely fighting Internet rumors that claim, for example, “Barack Obama Won’t Say The Pledge of Allegiance/Won’t Put His Hand Over His Heart.” How to prove the critics wrong? YouTube, y’all.

“Starbucks said Wednesday that it had resolved a dispute with T-Mobile stemming from the coffee chain’s recent launch of free Wi-Fi through AT&T. Details of the settlement were not made public, but a Starbucks spokesperson said the coffee chain will continue to offer customers up to two hours of free Wi-Fi each day via AT&T.

“Last week, T-Mobile sued to block the deal. Starbucks had announced in February that AT&T would replace T-Mobile as Wi-Fi provider for the coffee chain, but the process was supposed to be gradual, according to T-Mobile’s lawsuit.” [MP]

While the press dissects the forced resignation of Barack Obama’s VP selection committee member Jim Johnson, whose receipt of $7 million in Countrywide loans (thanks to his being a friend of the lender’s co-founder Angelo Mozilo) cast him under a bit of a controversial light, Obama’s camp will be doing something else entirely: trying to quiet down the web fallout. That’s thanks to the campaign’s newly installed Internet Smear Defense Unit, or so we’d love to know it’s being called. So whenever right-y bloggers or John McCain Operatives find an opportunity to drum up falsehoods, or spin the facts against Obama, his team will move into action to counter the smear. Which will probably include issuing a press release, posting a statement on his website, and texting Arianna Huffington.

Unlike, say, Nine Inch Nails, which has embraced every facet of the Internet and exploited it to great reviews and returns, the band Metallica carries a reputation for hating the web. Not only did they single-handedly ruin Napster by suing it into obliteration (slight exaggeration?), but they have refused to put their music on iTunes, effectively ignoring an entire youth fan base that more than happily downloads their tracks on BitTorrent.

Now, with a new album out, it’s only appropriate that Metallica find a new reason to hate all those 1s and 0s floating around.

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That will do nothing to boost productivity:

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After the back page Cartoon Contest and glancing the table of contents, the first thing we read in The New Yorker is James Surowiecki’s excellent Financial Page column. Generally, he’s penning a consumer-oriented story. Even when he’s talking big picture things, like the credit card industry or free-trade, Surowiecki always brings the conversation to the person level: How does this affect you?

Not in this week’s issue, which makes his topic choice – CBS’s foolish decision to buy CNet for some $1.8 billion – all the more interesting. Clearly, this subject stuck out to him: Why would a giant media conglomerate feel the need to spend billions on a digital content company.

He does not write with any less vigor.

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After Bill Clinton and Angelina Jolie, Vanity Fair has at least one more enterprising story up its sleeve: The history of the Internet. “How the Web Was Won” is a blowjob piece to the web’s pioneers — not that they aren’t deserving of respect, but this article is pure link bait.

Why now? Because 50 years ago, the U.S. government set up ARPA, the precursor to the thing you use today to receive email forwards from your mother and find one-off sex partners. So it’s very milestone-y.

And already, the critics are lashing about:

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