1) Will Wright Is Back. Whah! “If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don’t just mean where Starbuck’s is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness.” And maybe it includes a TV component! (His 2007 SXSW keynote is still my all-time favorite.)

2) Just.Me. Looks interesting, love the name.

3) Denton’s Memo. Okay, this commenting system (Pow-Wow) could be the real deal. However, I doubt that the product itself will be that revolutionary — I mean, how much can we do with comments? But the power will be in pairing it with an editorial agenda. Imagine if something like Reddit or Metafilter were more programmed, had the power of a media enterprise around it.

4) Newsright Launches. Sigh. These guys keep trying.

5) VYou 2.0. VYou comes out of Beta on Monday.

1) North Koreans weeping hysterically over the death of Kim Jong-il. THEY ALL DESERVE OSCARS. (This video will be a pervasive meme in 5… 4…)

2) WHERETHEFUCKSHOULDIGOFORDRINKS. (dot-com)

3) Distrust That Particular Flavor. William Gibson has a book of non-fiction coming out next month.

4) Rob Delaney’s new Comedy Central Show Using Twitter. Also, the design of those new FastCo pages!

5) Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.

1) The Spielberg Face. Once you’ve seen it, you can never not see it.

2) The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists. Yes.

3) WhoSay Strikes Deal With AP. The future is celebrities owning and distributing their own gossip.

4) Ebert’s Best Films of 2011. Someone kept Drive on their list!

5) Jack Shafer: Are you reading the best magazine in America? I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Bloomberg Businessweek is my favorite magazine right now. (Also, props to Reuters for hiring Shafer and letting him write so glowingly about their primary competitor.)

1) 25 Most Viral People. (On the internet.)

2) VCs Predict What Will Happen In 2012.

3) CNN: A Social Media Addict Tries to Disconnect. Day 1: “I land at Antigua’s airport, where I’m greeted by warm sunshine, a long customs line and a man playing Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ on a tin drum. All of these observations are ones I ache to tweet.” Hrrrrm.

4) The Death of Television. From Evan Shapiro of IFC, who is probably the smartest tv exec I’ve ever worked with.

5) SAY Media. For most of 2011, Aol was the most interesting company on the digital media scene — every week was a new product launch, a new purchase, a new scandal, a new reorg. For 2012, SAY Media could take its place. For several years, people in the industry have heard various rumors of a “blog rollup.” It’s never happened because most of the time these companies stall after buying one or two properties. But SAY Media is really giving it a go. Sure, xoJane hasn’t performed that well, and the mishap with Rookie didn’t help, but by most accounts Dogster is doing well, and snagging Frommer with its purchase of Read Write Web is tantalizing. (And the reported $5M price tag indicates they’re being tactical and might not burn out.) Now there’s rumors of an IPO, plus some chatter about a revved up CMS. You never would have guessed that the merger of a blog platform and a video ad network would lead to anything, but prepare to hear endless stories about it in 2012.

2) All the End Of Year Stuff At Pitchfork.

3) Biz Insider Launched an Advertising Vertical Last Week. Servicey.

4) Best New Blogs of 2011.

5) P.R. Stunts in a Digital Era. “A lot of brands are seeing the value in a P.R. rep who has an online persona that can be used to magnify the brand message.” Some boner actually said that.

1) Klosterman on Tebow. The interesting thing here is that it seems to start as another analysis of hater culture, but then it does a few back-flips and turn-arounds and, oh christ, its about faith!

2) WeedMaps Acquires Marijuana.com For $4.2 Million. You missed this breaking news over Thanksgiving.

3) The yearly Hood Internet dropped.

4) Pitchforks Top Music Videos of 2011. Best year for the medium since the 90s? Sure, lets try out that idea.

5) Did You Read? This. Is. Amazing.

1) You Say You Want a Devolution? Heres an interesting thesis from Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: While there have been massive technological changes in the past 20 years, everything looks the same. That is, he suggests, if you looked at a random snapshot from 1991, the people and buildings and cultural objects would mostly look the same as today. So? Well, that certainly isnt true if you looked at 1931 to 1951 or 1951 to 1971. This is one of the broad cultural essays that seems right though Im not sure why.

2) The .xxx top-level domain went live yesterday. You will know it when you see it.

3) Whos Afraid Of Lana Del Rey? Im glad someone wrote this, but isnt the artifice of authenticity itself the bugbear to be slayed?

4) Fast Co Design. Fast Company has a design blog that tries to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business.

5) New Walker Website. Waaaay back in the day, The Walker was one of the earliest organizations (and for sure, the first museum) to take up blogging, but the effort seemed to only get partial internal support. Last week, a site redesign revisited the idea of museum as a locus for content generation (or idea hub). Congrats, Schmelzer, nice work. (See also: The Atlantic & Artlog discuss the redesign.)

6) The Bitter Email Exchange between David Denby and Scott Rudin over the Review Embargo of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Rudin missed such a great opportunity to use a scathing Subject line!

7) Aaron Sorkins New Project: Newsroom. People who say they arent excited for this are lying.

8) Bjorks Favorite Recordings.

9) The Utne Reader to Leave Minneapolis. Sad. I used to have an office across the street from these guys in Loring Park.

10) JimRomenesko.com. Hello there, old timer!

11) Barney Franks Best Insults.

12) Richard Lawson in Atlantic Wire. How fast did this become the best writing online? In just weeks, weve received thought pieces like When Fans Attack and movie reviews that read like the best of the New Yorker (so: Anthony Lane not David Denby), while still satisfying us in that off-hand impulsive bloggy way. (See also, this post on Gawker that isnt at all about Lawson but somehow the commenters turned it into a rally cry.)

13) The Trailer to Shame.

14) @FAKEGRIMLOCK.

15) Pastes 50 Best Songs of 2011.

1) Willie Nelson covered Coldplay’s “The Scientist” for a Chipotle commercial. All those proper nouns in the same sentence!

2) Serious Business. That’s Alex Blagg’s new “intertainment firm.” (Oh how soon they become what they parody!) His partners include a former UTA agent. Their first video is Drive-Thru, an 84% funny parody of Drive that is an Arby’s commercial.

3) dumbdumb. Will Arnett & Jason Bateman made a viral video product placement company! Here’s the reel. Is FIAT Roadtrip and Denny’s: Always Open our future?

4) A supercut of all the product placements in Lady Gaga videos. It has only 946 views. Let’s make this famous!

5) The Greatest Movie Ever Sold box office totals. Remember that Morgan Spurlock movie from this summer? The amount of money it made wouldn’t even buy you a decent apartment in Manhattan. At the box office, at least — it made millions in product placements.

1) SPIN. For having the guts to do a Changing Face of Hip-Hop cover.

2) Azealia Banks Filthy Mouth.

3) Man or Muppet. The most fantastic moment in the new muppets movie.

4) The spooky video for M83s Midnight City. Also, the video for Vomit by Girls.

5) Rap Genius. Most people know about this already, but quickly: Its a wikipedia for hip-hop, but with the crowd supplying the meaning of lyrics. The interface is clever: line-by-line lyrics that you can click on and define. For instance, heres Kreayshawns Gucci Gucci which kindly explains that Chickenhead is old slang for a girl, sometimes an MC, who sleeps with a group of (usually popular/prolific) male rappers/emcees to get on their good side/get a boost up in their popularity and sales. See also: Rap Map.

1) Minneapolis Is A Startup Powerhouse! Sure, why not?

2) Lets Not Party Like Its 1999. All party reporting should be like Ricks.

3) Marc Maron Podcast. I finally listened to this over Thanksgiving. So good.

4) Those Pics of DiCaprio as Gatsby Floating Around the Internet.

5) YouTube Innovation. For the first couple years after landing into Googles lap, YouTube had essentially zero new product innovation, perhaps because they were busy fighting off lawsuits. But in the past year, numerous interface, design, and product changes have made it a surprising place of innovation  perhaps the most innovative department in all of Google. One very small example: You can subscribe to feeds of videos that appear on your favorite websites, such as Hipster Runoff, Kottke, TMZ, and Cute Overload.

1) Daughterly Nepotism. Oooooh, boy. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush, and Meghan McCain now all work for work for NBC. This makes me miss the 30 Rock cafeteria!

2) The Bipolar Reactions that Lana Del Rey Elicits. Watch the video and then look at those comments!

3) Slaughterhouse 90210 Entries Like This One. She’s still got it.

4) After 17 years on the web, Kottke finds the craziest thing he’s ever seen.

5) Social Media Pillows. There ya go, the beginning and end of the Fimoculous Holiday Shopping Guide.

1) This Appealing Headline. “The Atlantic’s online ad revenue exceeds print”

2) This sentence in Vanessa’s profile of Arianna Huffington. “It’s a feat — Huffington’s characteristic gift — to aggregate childbirth, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tiger Moms, a cow, Nancy Reagan, and unconditional love into one surprisingly intimate, seamless skein, and it makes spending time with Huffington a pleasure, even if interviews with her can be stultifying.” (Also, this accompanying graphic.)

3) UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles. Like if Time Code were a documentary.

4) eBay buys Hunch. This one’s about as obvious as it comes. I know nothing of the back story, but I’m sure Amazon had a chance and passed because Bezos doesn’t overpay for anything. While I hope Hunch still seeks a consumer-facing solution, I’m pretty sure it will end up being integrated into eBay and slowly disappear.

5) Startup Angel Funding Rap. Check please!

1) This NYT Map of NYC Startups.

2) How I Ended Up Leaving Poynter. Jim’s highly-detailed account doesn’t make Poynter look worse, but they sure don’t look any better.

3) Betabeat’s Most Poachable Players in Tech. The best thing about this is not knowing most of these people.

4) Sylo. I love when people do creative things with their VYou accounts.

5) Gawker Redesign Second Thoughts. Appropos of nothing, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Denton had gone in a different design direction. If, as he said, he believed so much that the traditional reverse-chronological order of blogs was broken, why didn’t he go with a information-dense gridded design (like Vulture and The Verge) instead of the two-pane iPad-inspired layout? That also seemed to have been Steve Jobs’ feedback. (Btw, traffic across Gawker Media right now is even lower than when he lost the bet.)

1) Reddit IAmA. Most people are pretty familiar with this amazing series on Reddit, but it’s interesting that content programming this precise and defined has emerged organically out of a user-generated platform.

2) Grantland’s YouTube Hall of Fame. On the opposite end of the spectrum is this highly programmed concept which is a goldmine of YouTube esoterica.

3) Video Beast. This will probably lose a million bucks per quarter, but it will be fun to watch while it lasts.

4) RecordSetter.com book. Can an open source version of record-making outseat the Guinness Book? I think so!

5) The Top 10 Reasons Lists Are Popular With Journalists. “There’s this form of nostalgia tied to them, but I actually think of them in terms of the future.” Someone said that.

1) Match the DeLillo to The Cover. 10 for 10.

2) Kabletown. Ive heard NBC employees  including executives  actually refer to Comcast as Kabletown, even at work. Ill be surprised if this will be allowed to continue forever.

3) Sarah Silvermans 13 Breakup Songs. I made it into a Spotify list.

4) Felix Salmon: The Future of Adverising and Mark Suster: The Future of TV. These two pieces say an immense amount about two things I am currently obsessed with talking about.

5) The Verge. The Verge is the tighest merger of magazine thinking and blog culture that weve ever seen. Its also proof that even crowded spaces can be broken into with the right execution.

1) This Nick Denton Quote. “The problem is the boring people online — they’re incredibly difficult to get rid of, because they’re often really nice.”

2) ThinkUp 1.0. Finally! (Sorry, Gina and Andy, but a lot of people are excited for ThinkUp, which allows you to back up all your personal/social data to a web server.)

3) Nymwars. Once it gets an official name, you know trouble is brewing.

4) ASOS iPad App. This is the end game of the merger of editorial and commerce. Amazing experience and content integrated almost perfectly into a purchase environment. (There are men’s and women’s issues.)

5) Uproxx. I suspect most of us wouldn’t know about it if Cajun Boy weren’t writing there, but Uproxx is the latest in the growing genre of web culture blogs. And judging from posts like Alison Brie’s GIF-Able Moments and Thirteen Movie Poster Cliches, it could be the best.

1) Jotly. So good. I almost dont want to tell you its a parody.

2) NYT on Reality Weekly. The amazing thing here is that no one thought of it before. It will be huge.

3) Don Draper at 84. I hope he looks more convincing than DiCaprio as J. Edgar.

4) Foursquare Badges Level Up. Smart. Its the little things.

5) Minneapolis, Mark Mallman. The amazing bit here is at 2:15 where Mark turns the city into a spaceship. (Also, Minneapolis people really like Minneapolis things, dont they? Its nearly as bad as Portland.)

(#Fun! I will try this for a week.)

1) The Atlantic Cities. Urban affairs microsite, yeah!

2) OKFocus. An agency-type-thing from Ryder Ripps. This is the other internet.

3) ScoutMob. The deals app that everyone suddenly seems to be using. Seriously, ask the person next to you  I bet theyre using it.

4) Pinterest. Everyone knows how fast this is growing, but its fun to wonder how Tumblr might react.

5) EW Viewer & TV Guide Watchlist. Sure, Umami and GetGlue have a head start, but it's good to see that the magazines arent just sitting around waiting for social tv to eat their lunch. Everyone seems to acknowledge this is going to eventually be a huge industry. My guess is that some futuristic AppleTV/Twitter integration takes the market, but maybe someone else can get a mindshare first.

(#Flashback! This is what blogging used to be. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's any better either.)

I thought it would be funny.

So I walked into Fimoculous on Christmas and started blogging anonymously, without telling Rex, the owner, beforehand. Which -- you guessed it -- means that pretty much everything posted here since then is by me, not him. (How: I spent time as a house-guest here about a year ago, and the keys were still under the mat.)

Just after I started, I learned that Rex had recently been in a kerfuffle in which someone accused him of saying "anonymous blogging is bad," and that he was later characterized as saying "blogging is dead." Even better. My Operation: Goldilocks was evolving into A Scanner Darkly -- turning against itself, or at least appearing to. It seemed like a good opportunity to indirectly engage both of these issues.

Is blogging dead? I don't want it to be, which is another reason I tried to revivify this blog, which was about 10 years old and staggering around like a zombie. In my opinion, there should be room in our online discourse for blogs like this one -- offering a consistent, often thoughtful perspective, collecting and observing things of interest to its readers. But being consistent, thoughtful, and observant requires effort and time, and it requires the same of its audience.

And that, I think, is why blogging, for the most part, appears to be moribund: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc., are media that have evolved such that there is no expectation of prolonged engagement with pieces of content on the part of their writers or readers. Consider the recent widespread use of the shorthand "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read). This dismissive assessment is commonly interpreted as fair, expected criticism of the author, not the reader who offers it because he couldn't be bothered to read the content simply because it was long, regardless of its undiscovered merits. The media that are replacing "traditional" blogging value brevity above all, so much of the incentive to write anything that is both long and thoughtful diminishes (since few will bother to read it), and the self-motivation required to do so will only increase over time.

It's funny to be talking about blogging -- which for its entire lifespan has been dismissed broadly for being superficial and narcissistic -- as being a besieged outpost of well-developed, thoughtful writing, but I think that's exactly what's happening. It's no one's "fault" -- it's just the natural evolution of popular content production and consumption towards the most frictionless state: from books to periodicals to personal websites to blogs to Twitter to the Like button. When a medium comes along that's easier than clicking the Like button -- maybe thinking you Like something -- you can be sure everyone will speculate about and then bemoan its death before moving on.

But, even blogging isn't dead yet. There are some people out there who are still committed to the form, even if it seems no one else is, regularly posting smart, thought-provoking analyses and observations of their respective interests. A few that come immediately to mind:

• Joanne McNeil at Tomorrow Museum
• The brilliant Danah Boyd, whose research and insight into social media and youth culture is unmatched
• Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG, who is at once reportorial and speculative
• The visionary architect Lebbeus Woods
• Errol Morris and his "too long," multi-part monographs, some of which are probably the best things ever published originally on the web

And there are others who take the time to put together coherent, original posts:

• Star Wars Modern, where I'm not always sure what's happening, but I appreciate the effort involved
• Nav at Scrawled in Wax, usually correlating academic concepts of post-modernism with pop culture
• Amy at Amy's Robot, who has been writing witty, thoughtful posts on pop culture and politics for NINE YEARS. Collaborators (like me) have come and gone at that site, but Amy is still there. Someone oughta be reading her.

A confession before I continue: for every one of those sites I mentioned, I have often found myself getting the gist of a post, thinking "that's a good insight," and then skimming the rest of it. Does that matter?

Continuing, let me also mention some more widely read sites that I think demonstrate originality and effort:

• John Del Signore at Gothamist, whose humor brings color to stories without obscuring them
• The Big Picture photo blog, started by a developer at the Boston Globe who is now launching a similar project for the Atlantic
• Yeah, what the hell -- I'm leaving it on this list: even Boing Boing can be pretty good sometimes, when it's not being a caricature of itself...
• Maybe you have your own suggestions to share in the comments

And lastly, if you miss Fimoculous now that it's zombified, just replace that section of your brain with Pop Loser, which I've been ripping off mercilessly for the last month and which strikes me as the blog that is the spiritual inheritor of this one.

Will any of these blogs still live in 5 years? Will new ones rise to take their place? So far, trends appear to indicate no: aggregation, automation, voting up, "liking," etc., seem to be resulting in a hivemind where thoughtfulness is replaced with promulgation and sameness. Maybe we need a "link aggregator in reverse" that shows the links of interest to you that everyone else like you hasn't Liked yet.

And what of Fimoculous? You'll have to ask Rex. I'm leaving the keys on the counter and heading back to my cabin in the woods. It's so relaxing there! Especially in the easy chair.

Thanks for reading, or skimming. And thanks, especially, to Rex. See you next time.

Update: Rex offers his take, on Tumblr.

• Scouting NY. A location scout writes about NY's overlooked places.
• Second Avenue Sagas. Some of the best analysis of NYC subway issues.
• Abu Aardvark. Thoughtful examination of internal and external politics of the Middle East.
• NYTPicker. Picks apart the NYT, sometimes taking it a bit too far.

...

Hm? Yes, I'm still plugging away over here on the old clickety-clackety. Stay tuned. It won't be long now.

Oh wait -- false alarm -- it's open access after all. And I didn't even have to buy an iPad! Or subscribe! [via]

• Egypt Shut Down Its Net With a Series of Phone Calls
• [US] Internet Kill Switch Legislation Back in Play

In such a case: Nothing but its own waste left to consume.