Time.com has an exclusive and engaging profile of Rupert Murdoch.

Quoted: Why does he want the Wall Street Journal and what will he do if he gets it? Eric Pooley got the answers from Murdoch himself

Spam King arrested at the Harbor Steps here in Seattle. Yay!

Quoted: One expert estimated that the man agents dubbed the "Spam King" when they arrested him Wednesday sent billions, perhaps even tens of billions, of e-mails a day.

Best Buy just bought Speakeasy. Noooo! I've always liked Speakeasy but my expectations are now appropriately and cynically lowered.

Quoted: Speakeasy offers superior Voice over IP (VoIP), T1, DSL and a range of broadband services customized for small businesses.

I started using reinvigorate to track all of my blog stats today and it is a truly impressive stats package. I hope they keep it free for a while longer!

I like the idea of Spotplex - instead of doing voted news like DIgg, they allow users to put a piece of code into their templates and then the track clicks. Popular stories make their homepages inan automated, hopefully less gamey, way.

Quoted: A new site called Spotplex launched today that arguably sorts news in a better way than Digg does. I've been testing the service ...

I really like this high-level piece in the NYT re: the "online disinhibition effect." When I used to moderate large communities of users who were mostly anonymous and invisible to each other, social interactions degraded to the point of childish absurdity. Once we instituted less anonymous community (users had to have a registered credit card and use their real name) much of this moderation was minimized. Wild.

Quoted: Social neuroscience offers clues into the neural mechanics behind sending messages that are taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

Vint Cerf is awesome. I like his quote buttressing his argument that by design the internet is a reflection of society.

Quoted: "If you stand in front of a mirror and you don't like what you see, it does not help to fix the mirror," Cerf said.

I don't think that this is as ground-breaking as the author claims it to be. If you can't figure out that MySpace is a marketing operation, you're really dumb.