It’s certainly not our personal mission to make Google a cause célèbre, but we have a special place in our hearts for any company that challenges Nielsen Media Research, the bumbling audience analytics firm headed toward further catastrophe by David Calhoun, the former General Electric vice chairman. Google recently unveiled Google Ad Planner, a new framework that combines website metrics with media buying, which is supposed to replace the guesswork employed by companies like Nielsen and comScore, which use a complicated and mostly flawed mixture of audience panels and computer logging to tell clients how many people visit a website, and what type of people they are. Google, which collects metrics data itself, directly from websites that carry its tracking code, wants to challenge these industry leaders in a market they’ve long owned, and which media buyers have always had to rely on to know where best to spend their millions in ad buys. Except now that the service has debuted and the biggest media agencies have had a look, it appears Nielsen isn’t in much danger of no longer holding clients hostage.

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SOHH, the enormously popular hip-hop website, was 0wnz0red during the overnight. In its place, oh so clever hackers claiming to represent Ebaumsworld.com (itself an enormously popular “funny video” dumping ground), plastered various racist and anti-Semitic hate speech, Nazi logos, and horrific sex pics (think goat.cx, if you’re familiar). While one blog has screencapped the takeover, the website is still in disrepair, so if you’re of the faint of heart, at work, or not a morning person, we don’t suggest you visit. [SOHH, Street Knowledge - NSFW]

You know how blogs have let any would-be writer spew their deep thoughts onto the Internet, regardless of taste or talent? Some call the medium a tool for the democratization of ideas. We call it the worst thing to happen to our leisure time.

So we’re troubled by a new platform for would-be publishing mavens that takes the whole “barrier to entry” thing — which has kept the financially, and talent, deficient off the cultural radar for so long — and throws it out the Microsoft Windows.

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China has given the OK to 247 video-sharing sites to resume operations after shutting them down earlier this year. Curiously not making the cut? Tudou.com, Youku.com and, yes, 56.com. [Variety]

While airplane passengers will normally have to pay $12.95 for in-flight Internet access, a special trial group of fliers will get the service gratis in a single round-trip American Airlines flight from JFK to LAX and back. American is testing the capabilities of the service and eventually expects to carry it as a regular offering — you know, one more thing to nickel and dime you on as you lose the right to check bags, receive nutrition on board, and, probably somewhere down the road, are forced to bring your own toilet paper. Supposedly, passengers today won’t have any idea that they are among the lucky few to try out the service. Learning they’re American’s guinea pigs, then, will certainly alleviate their stress as they’re stranded on the runway for an hour and a half before takeoff.

You know who would’ve benefited from seeing this pair of creative ads for Porn Blocker software? Clinton Raymond McCowen, who’s on trial in Florida for distributing porn that qualifies, prosecutors are arguing, as “obscene,” that nasty over-the-line definition that means whatever the hell you’re doing is not protected by the First Amendment.

(This is not to be confused with a similar obscenity trial underway in Los Angeles, where pornographer Ira Isaacs is defending his human-on-animal flicks, and where the Hon. Alex Kozinski recused himself after he was found out for posting some of his own borderline-acceptable porn on what he thought was a private web server.)

McCowen is on trial for producing group sex porn, raking in an estimated $1 million per year from 5,000 subscribers who pay $30/month for their orgy fix. (Also, prosecutors say paying the “actors” amounts to prostitution.)

What constitutes obscenity hinges on the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, which puts forth a 3-part test to determine if material is obscene based on “contemporary community standards”; that is, does the community think the material is obscene? And to argue that it’s not, McCowen’s attorney is turning to Google — and its cache of data on your search history.

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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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