This is either genius or a disaster in the making. Gawker is becoming a full-on blogging platform, starting with their car blog, Jalopnik:

You'll also notice your Kinja blog has the ability to compose. This is so you can use your page like an actual blog, creating original content to be shared, commented on, and viewed by others in the community.

Have you always wanted a blog in our network? You can do that, too...Your blog will look similar to our flagship sites and will have all the same tools, including image annotation...If you want, you'll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we'll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you'll get the byline, the credit, and it'll be clear where it came from.

In a lot of ways, this is supposed to be what the internet is about, right? Everyone creating content on a platform that treats everyone equally, and so on. But what happens if Gawker republishes too many posts by one of their amateur bloggers (note that there's nothing about compensation for Gawker bloggers in this post) and people start feeling used? What if one of the reader blogs outpaces the regular writers? Will the paid Gawker writers have to compete with thousands of other Gawker bloggers who are out for their jobs? Will the signal-to-noise ratio get completely fucked? Or will this all just blow over once it becomes obvious that most Gawker readers don't want to be bloggers?

I'd have had more faith in this idea if it came before last year. Gawker's nearly year-old revised commenting system, is still a terrible, disjointed clusterfuck. If this revised blogging platform makes the sites even more difficult to follow, I can't imagine this being a good idea for the Gawker empire.

Geek.com says:

If you take a look at regularly produced content on YouTube in the past few months, like Felicia Day and Will Wheaton’s Geek and Sundry or the made-for-YouTube series H+, it’s entirely possible to fill your subscription bar with multiple hours a week of great original content. Maybe not quite enough to watch YouTube in the same way you watch cable television, depending on your preferences, but there’s been a significant boost in quality all the same. This isn’t by accident, Google has been working hard with content creators to help them form several channels of great unique material that can only be found on YouTube.

Ad revenue from a healthy YouTube channel can be enough to keep an operation of 2-3 people happy, but these new channels are significantly larger scale operations with budgets that can only be reached with the help of some guaranteed monthly cash. To help keep the quality of this new content trending upwards, Google plans to offer certain channels the ability to charge a monthly fee for their content.

On the one hand, I love the idea of a small progressive television news channel with blue collar reporters that survives on memberships. On the other hand, YouTube's free model has been so successful that it seems like it would be difficult to overcome. What do you think?

The unmoderated (and therefore quite possibly NSFW) Vinepeek is a live feed of six-second videos people are posting to Vine right now. I like to just leave it on in a tab on my desktop and listen to the world as it passes by, just outside my window.

The Chicago Sun-Times says:

Aaron Swartz was “killed by the government,” his father, Robert Swartz said at a memorial service Tuesday morning for the 26-year-old tech genius who killed himself in the face of felony charges he’d stolen millions of files from MIT.

Swartz said his son was “hounded by the government, and MIT refused him.”

Everything about this story makes my heart hurt.

The other day, Warren Ellis wrote this paragraph in his e-mail newsletter, Machine Vision*:

I cannot, lately, shake this peculiar sense that the net is quieter than it used to be. Possibly because email is less of a thing? Because I don't live on Facebook? And social media is technologically privileged over, say, news or RSS?

This is something I've been noticing lately, but I haven't been able to articulate the thought. I follow a lot of blogs, and they're still publishing. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, and they're still tweeting. But whenever I spend time online now, I get a sense that the lights are off and nobody's home. I wonder if it's because I'm a text-centric person and the internet feels like it's moving more toward photos and video than text? Or if it's because there are more people online, but they're all staying within their carefully defined niches and sharing the same content?

This is a frustrating thing to discuss because it's entirely anecdotal. I'm sure all the facts and figures indicate that more people than ever are spending time online. But everything feels so small and predictable, now. Maybe now that I've been online for over a decade—I was a late bloomer—the sense of novelty is gone? Where the hell has the internet gone?

* If you're interested, you can sign up for Machine Vision at warrenellis.com.

September's XOXO fest was an amazingly cool thing. A tech conference focused on innovation and the arts, it brought a dizzying array of high-level talent to town, and supplemented the conference itself with a range of free, open-to-the-public film, music, and video game programming. One of the festival's highlights is now online: A keynote speech from Community creator Dan Harmon.

Check out YouTube for more XOXO highlights, including speeches from the Atavist's Evan Ratliff, MythBusters' Adam Savage, and 4chan founder Chris Poole. I particularly enjoyed this presentation from locals Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom, founders of CASH music, an opensource toolbox for helping musicians promote and distribute their music. (Those guys are badass, and Maggie gets big points for referencing Bikini Kill at a tech conference.)

I was downtown past midnight recently and was surprised to see this eerie line of empty chairs outside the Pioneer Place mall. What was this? A Rose Parade flashback?

No, said a friendly security guard doing his patrol, this was people waiting for the Apple store to open in the morning. The line has been there every night for the past three months. Instead of waiting on the curb, people set up the lawn chairs, then park their car right next to the mall and stay in there all night, keeping warm and vigilantly watching their spot. In the morning, the professional Apple hoarders get first into the Apple store and buy as many iPhone 5's or iPad minis as they can. Then, they can turn around and resell them for more.

Apple tries to deter stockpiling and reselling its popular products by rationing purchases: At Portland's store, you can only buy two iPhones at a time—when they're in stock. I just called the store and they have neither iPhone 5's or iPad minis. The clerk encouraged me to call back daily to check if they're in stock. This has spawned an industry all itself of Apple flipping. If someone in the Portland line is rewarded for their night-long wait with the luck of being first into the Apple store on a day it actually has iPhone 5's, they could buy two for $200 each and easily sell them for four times as much. It's a gamble, but a quick way to make $800 a night by gaming Apple and its hype-hungry buyers.

I lingered too long by these chairs—as a friend and I stopped to take a photo of the seemingly empty street, suddenly three people jumped out of cars on the block and ran over. "You in line?!" one man asked quickly. No, no, no, no thanks.

So right about now you're thinking... man. I really need to run to the store to stock up on drinking water for when WE get hit by a natural disaster not unlike Hurricane Sandy. BUT MY BACK HURRRRRRRTS.

Well, save that aching back and buy The Water Bob instead! It's a giant rubber bladder you put inside your tub, fill it up with 100 gallons of water, and then drink... drink... DRINK your way out of a dehydrating natural disaster. Or you could put vodka in it—which is what I would do. WATCH.

It's been a big couple weeks for tablet computers with the Big 3 all announcing new products. Tablets are the fastest growing segment of the computers-without-practical-uses market. But how should you decide which tablet to spend a few hundred bucks on and then leave sitting around the house? With this handy guide, silly!

Of course, you don't have to drop big money on a tablet you aren't going to use. You can always just buy a Kindle for $69 and then feel guilty you aren't more into reading books.

Facebook has largely survived the great momalanche of 2007-2008. The rest of us didn't leave in huge numbers like we promised. When the moms showed up, though, they brought with them their own set of mom-behaviors that, while harmless, should nonetheless be stopped.

Moms sign their comments and messages. "Looks like you're having a great weekend. —Mom" It's very useful in case Facebook doesn't properly load her picture, name, or profile link. Or in case you forget that she uses her maiden name so her elementary school friends will find her.

Moms share images with text on them. I'm not talking about the racist Obama-related images. That's something aunts and cousins post. And not that Ira Glass quote that resurges every few weeks. Mom's are big fans of single-panel comics that aren't funny (isn't it funny how kids are always saying "like"?) and happy thoughts so generic they'd make Hallmark vomit.

Moms' walls are like the ceiling of the dentist's office. Happy Thursday morning, everybody. Don't forget to hang in there.

Moms post non sequitur comments. Moms have not yet realized that other people can see your Facebook posts. No matter what you just posted, they pick up on your previous conversation. You share an awesome picture of the donut burger you're about to eat. She says, "Have you seen your sister's new kitten? So cute! —Mom"

Moms ask why you didn't wish your cousin a happy birthday. Because, mom. Facebook isn't about other people and their stupid birthdays. Facebook is about me telling people funny things. Oh, and looking at wedding pictures.

Moms get upset every time Morgan Freeman dies. They're so bummed! He was such a great actor. "I loved him in that penguin movie and The Matrix. —Mom" And then a week later, they're bummed all over again. This time it must be real. "Happy Thursday, everybody. Hang in there, Morgan Freeman's family. —Mom"

I don't think moms should leave Facebook. I love not having to call my mom to tell her that I'm getting over my cold, had a great audition, or got engaged. She knows because she checks FB regularly. But it's also pleasant to spend time on Twitter because mom stuff doesn't happen there. Or on Google+ where nothing happens at all.