Life Magazine has made over 250 years of their photo archives available online, which is honestly the best magazine/Internet hybrid photography resource ever. (Sorry People's covers, you are still awesome!)

(Image: Carl Mydans, Life Photo Archive)

Some rumblings of discontent over at Gawker Media this weekend, when one of the Internet Detective-ing commentators on Nick Denton's masthead site noticed a striking similarity to one of culture writer Alex Carnevale's posts. The story in question involved one of those glossy-esque celebrity couple rundown listicles that bloggers are so fond of, precisely because they don't take much time to make and generally receive a lot of feedback as commentators provide their own input.

Carnivale's post, entitled "Five Celebrity Couples We Can't Believe Are Real," got the typical number of yays and nays, before someone mentioned that they had seen the same article "verbatim" on another website. Carnevale denied that he had "borrowed" anything more than one joke about Tina Fey's husband from a previous posting he did for his old blog, The Recording, which would have been hard to verify because the other site's post disappeared. But that's what things like Google cache are for.

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MTVmusic is the new website that plays all your favorite songs from the channel, before it was just a host of television shows about overprivileged kids and their acne problems.

But now Viacom's gone one step better and archives all of the music videos that MTV has ever aired, as well. Good job, internet! Pretty soon you might be at the VJ-necessitating status online that your television channel made famous in the early 90s.

This is the end result of trolling emotionally unstable teenagers: a 19-year old user on Justin.tv recorded his suicide note and ate pills on his webcam for a body-building forum, then went and lied down to die. The video shows the boy, Abraham K. Biggs lying still, and later on, police busting into the room with their weapons drawn.

Some people still think that the video is a hoax, but as of right now it's being posted on Drudge Report as true.

Sad, sad day.

With all the phonies out there (as Holden would say), how can you ever make sure if the person you're talking to on the 'net is really who they claim to be? Sure, sure, that's why we have awesome shows like To Catch a Predator, and now video gchat (holla!), but when it comes to celebrities, it's best just to assume the worst: that your I_Am_Paris superfan on MySpace is actually a 45-year old guy named Norbert from Wisconsin.

But once in awhile you get a legit celebrity, trying to take back their good name on the blogosphere, will actually come out and confirm their identity with a phone call to a reporter.

Which is how we now know that Shaquille O'Neil is now an avid Twitter-er.

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PC Magazine publisher Ziff Davis wants you to know that it's not the economy, stupid, that's behind the transition from paper to web-only for its computer title.

"Moving our flagship property to an all-digital format is the final step in an evolutionary process that has been playing out over the last seven years," said Ziff Davis Media CEO Jason Young.

Seven people were laid off as a result of the switch.

First of all, isn't it a little anachronistic for a computer magazine to exist in well, magazine form? This isn't exactly the Christian Science Monitor we are talking about.

Secondly, if this transition really has been in the works for so long, you would think that the PC people would have been able to find a way to spare the layoffs. Or maybe by "playing out over the last seven years," Jason Young is talking about the state of the world's financial market, as it relates to obsolete magazines about computers.

There are two things that mark the success of an online venture: how many unique page views the website gets, and how long individuals spend on each page. Advertisers can pay by the page view, sure, but think about sites like NBC.com or Hulu, where the commercials run in accordance to how long you've been at the page.

What's tricky is in one of these respects, top Internet sites are doing better than ever. But in the other, they are doing significantly worse. Care to journey a guess?

Are people spending more time on their favorite sites, or less time on more sites?

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Bald Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff isn't afraid to be asked the tough questions. That's why 10 lucky winners will be pulled from the Internet to ask Michael Wolff questions about media, life, and his new biography on media mogul Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. But not in person, natch. Wolff will be answering the questions online, as well. New Media!

Then again, it's Wolff himself who will be picking which questions to answer, so you know that at least nine of them are going to be "Why is Tina Brown such a bitch?"

To enter your question to Wolff, go here.

Back when the Drudge Report was a relatively new concept, and media watchdog groups were mostly confined to zines and the occasional Angelfire-hosted website, it seemed a novel idea to have a group of young professionals work entirely on the Internet, fact-checking the mainstream media against possible bias.

Now, at least 8 years later, the zeitgeist has come and gone. Well, not gone, exactly. Watchdog groups are still found mostly on the web, and Huffington Post was accredited with more political coverage this election cycle than any other organization in previous years.

But the thrill, the novelty, and the sheer naivety in thinking that these websites can survive and flourish simply because they are not print journalism but "new media" is increasingly harder to swallow. And during a time where gossip and snark rule most of the sites covering media, is it profitable to be an earnest blogger?

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Hmm…interesting. So today we had that study that showed that most of the featured writers drawn on by Huffington Post are male, and a disproportionate number of the ones written by women were actually written by site owner Arianna herself. Meaning that only a small percentage of women get the top-trafficked hits on Huffington Post.

So with all that gender imbalance in the Op-Ed blog, why is Huffpost getting more traffic than ever?

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See? There isn't much difference between traditional journalism and web blogging: A study done by an ex-Huffington Poster showed that the Arianna-owned site actually favored male bloggers for the front page-selected stories. Only 23% of the 1,125 posts featured during that period were women bloggers, and 57 of those 255 women posts were written by Huffington herself.

So, gender bias? Or just an elaborate form of payback by a disgruntled ex-employee?

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Google fell below $300 yesterday, in the first time since 2005. Today isn't looking much better, either. Solution? Using Google-owned YouTube to start selling ad-supported pages, a la Google's own search engine.

And don't worry advertisers, your ad dollars will most certainly be well spent!

An advertiser — or a video maker who wants to promote a work — can bid on keywords like “silly cats,” “financial crisis,” “James Bond,” or anything that strikes one’s fancy.

Perfect! My James Bond cat/ mortgage crisis business would like 1,000 pages of YouTube, please.

Understandably, some potential clients of the site are wary about marketing their product on the DIY video producer:

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You just can't have any of that print baggage: "According to [media broker firm JEGI’s Scott] Peters, the highest-growth categories right now fall into four core buckets: consumer online (“big growth with lots of interest”), b-to-b online (“smaller than consumer, but growing nicely”), interactive marketing (“one step removed from magazines but has high deal flow”) and database information (“driven by subscriptions, data analytics and mission-critical information”)."

CNBC might be kicking the life out of News Corp.'s own business network in the ratings, and the channel might be hemorrhaging money faster than Palin with PMS, but the FBN's website actually saw a relatively huge increase of unique visitors in the last month, and had the 21st largest unique users according to Nielsen's, which does Internet counting now, I guess.

NPR just drafted two major web gurus, Vivian Schiller from NYT.com and Kinsey Wilson from USAtoday.com to help relaunch the public radio station. Schiller will be acting as the new CEO, and Wilson is head of the digital content of the station. Which obviously makes a huge push towards the idea of a bigger, better NPR website, making sense of the otherwise inexplicable announcement that the radio station that carries All Things Considered was going to start a social networking program on their website. Especially since that announcement happened only a day after New York Times announced the launch one of their Facebook-ripoffs. Guess Schiller isn't the only thing NPR is biting off of the Times.

But is it really necessary for a public radio station, that relies on fundraisers and listener money, to create an elaborate (and expensive!) web presence? Is the middle of the Venn Diagram between people who listen to NPR and people who spend all their time surfing the web really that large?

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Ah, white-knighting. The favorite activity of reporters trying to be edgy or politicians trying to be benevolent. Which is great: currently Obama is white-knighting Lieberman, while the Clintons are trolling him. Internet happenings in real life!

But one person who doesn't need any heroic gestures made on his behalf? Matt Drudge. People have been calling for his head since the conception of his website back during the Lewinsky scandal, and the fact that it's still trooping along, despite, or perhaps because of, Obama's victory should be proof enough that the man isn't going anywhere.

But Jack Shafer, he of the DNC party-pooping brigade, thinks that it's of utmost importance to specificly define what makes Drudge Report so necessary, despite the fact that he most likely disagrees with 99% of what is written on the conservative site.

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The U.S. Army is going to start a webcast straight from Iraq, so potential recruits see that it is still possible to host a vlog while in the midst of an unwinnable war against an ill-defined enemy in an unfamiliar land a million miles from home.

The Army's retooled website is a project for the new focus of recruitment: the Internet. The GoArmy.com site also hopes to "connect with young Americans on a closer, more personal level."

But since websites and overseas real-time feedback aren't cheap, how is the Army paying for all these fancy new gizmos?

Don't worry dad! Your son isn't going to lose his expensive gun because he spent five extra minutes video-chatting with his sophmore girlfriend.

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Despite the recent mocking of their U.S. Editor at FHM.com, Bauer Publishing thinks they've really hit on something with this whole 'net phenomena. Next up for the German conglomerate? A website for der kiddies!

Says Bauer New Media Director Sebastian Ratz:

Our official mission statement: “4TNZ.com is a first-of-its-kind, online-only humor factory for American teens.

Hmm…that's coming off a little less Wonka and a little more Pink Floyd's The Wall. Pray tell, what does a "humor factory" consist of, nowadays?

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While standing in the unemployment line has been the fate of most magazine worker drones these days, it's nice to hear a success story once in awhile. Except, of course, when the success is come by in the most egregious, unwarranted way possible.

FHM is a Bauer-owned mag, sort of the British answer to Maxim, a direct relative of the original "lad's mag" Loaded. In 2007 FHM (which stands for For Him Magazine) became online only, and most of the editorial staff was nixed.

Except, according to a little birdie, for a former FHM office assistant who was hired to be their U.S. Editor, and now is living the sweet life with a sweet salary and paid-for apartment (since he works from home, get it?).

Which is fine: everyone needs editors, and god bless Bauer for treating their employees right and hiring from within their own ranks.

Except, once you skim a couple of these editor's writing samples, those cheers quickly turn into baffled moans of frustration over broheim here landing such a sweet gig with no writing skills to speak of.

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MSNBC, ABC, and CNN all reported their largest online traffic ever in the minutes leading up to Barack Obama's win for presidency. According to the people in charge of keeping track of the Internet, the 'net saw their greatest surge ever with "average of 8.5 million visitors per minute" on news sites that generally average 3.0 million.

And that's so good! And even more amazingly than everyone simultaneously going on the Internet on a night that's previously been held dominance over by television news networks, is the fact that none of the websites crashed. That is particularly astounding, considering that websites like Twitter have a hard time carrying even their normal load on their server, but somehow MSNBC and other networks were able to make it work.

Just goes to show, some things are better left to the big boys.