There is a corner of the internet where actors, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, bloggers, directors, people from all walks of life are creating over 2 million posts per day, and are often meeting each other around the world, from New York to London to Berlin to Tokyo. The place is Tumblr and it is quickly becoming the third member of the holy trinity of social media, along with Twitter and Facebook. Today, the New York Times’ makes it official with this headline: “Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival.”

It’s not exactly new – you don’t get to 6.6 million users overnight. In fact, Tumblr’s been around since November 2007, when founder David Karp launched it at the ripe old age of 19

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was killed in a plane crash early on Saturday morning at approximately 10:56 AM local Moscow time. According to the BBC, the plane, a Tupolev 154 bound for Russian province Smolensk, missed the runway, scraping against the top of trees in the highly wooded area, fell to the ground and soon after, burst into flames.

Gawker is losing one of it’s longest tenured writers, as Alex Pareene announced yesterday afternoon, after it was posted by John Koblin at the New York Observer, that he was leaving Nick Denton’s employ for Slate’s “War Room” blog. This is just the latest in a recent succession of departures from the influential blog, and has been raising questions about what’s going on at their Nolita offices.

While NBC was airing Ice Dancing, their sister network MSNBC was airing one of the most exciting hockey games in recent history. It didn’t take a genius to figure the matching of the home host Canadian team taking on a surging USA team would be a compelling match-up. NBC realized the error of their ways, cutting off the two-man bobsled to capture the final moments of the match, but by then they already missed a golden opportunity.

I saw the Sport Illustrated demo video long before the iPad was released. It was everything the iPad should have been on Day One. A mind-blowing demonstration of what the future of the magazine could be. The problem is, the iPad cannot do what the demo shows and it should have. Flash is the only current technology that would make that possible.

2010 will be the year when we begin to consume media in a whole new way. The so-called iTablet may revolutionize how we experience magazines, and Boxee stands to do the same for web-to-TV convergence. You know how the iPod changed how we consumed and paid for music? Right. Like that.

The latest episode of Frontline, called “Obama’s War,” is a harrowing document of the ground war in Afghanistan.  Correspondent Martin Smith takes us on the ground and before current and former administration officials weighing in on the purpose and realities of waging a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Here’s some of that reality: 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Seth Sharp [...]

The corruption sweep that put New Jersey under a national spotlight this past summer was massive even by the Soprano State’s standards. Citizens seem to be holding Gov. Corzine partially responsible for enabling a climate of corruption. His opponent, Chris Christie, who spent seven years as a U.S. Attorney in Newark, was largely responsible for the massive [...]

There is something a good portion of liberals and conservatives can agree on: Obama does a lot of talking but not quite enough following through. At the Human Rights Campaign 13th Annual Dinner, Obama reiterated his campaign promise to abolish “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  The reaction by some seemed to suggest that people thought Obama was repealing [...]

The days of blogger payola are over, if the Federal Trade Commission has anything to say about it. The Federal Trade Commission slapped down a new set of rules today that require full disclosure by bloggers when they receive freebies or payments from companies for reviewing their products. The rules take effect Dec. 1, and [...]

Newark is a city in transition and at the center of that transformation is its mayor, Cory Booker. Crippled by riots that took place in 1967, the city struggled to recover and it was only until recently, almost a half century later, that Newark has begun to rise again. Booker’s sweeping reforms in city government [...]

We live in interesting times. Today, you can take the entire world with you in your pocket, but few can be bothered to get off the couch. Increasingly, applications on the web are making it more difficult to ignore the call of the wild. Some of the coolest apps on your phone right now encourage you to get off the web and get a life.

It’s unlikely that the teens of Hughes’ films could exist today. Being stuck in a school library on a Saturday for detention wouldn’t be quite the same punishment – between iPhones and Blackberries they’d never actually have to talk to each other. Ally Sheedy would be updating her Facebook status and posting to twitter about how bored she was while Judd Nelson texted Molly Ringwald something creepy. The nerd would probably be in the back creating a new app.

Those teenagers existed in a snapshot of time – the 80s – but the essence of the characters remains relatable for anyone who’s been through it.

A rabbi, two mayors, an organ donor, and a developer walk into a diner…

It sounds like the start of a bad joke but it was all part of another dark day for a state notorious for political corruption. As the story broke – a sprawling case of political corruption implicating Three Jersey mayors, a deputy mayor, two assemblymen, a council president, and a bunch of candidates, political functionaries and local rabbis – the state and local media were all over it.

Policy isn’t sexy, so mainstream media outlets tend to package health care reform around personality and politics – and conflict, of course. Obama’s August deadline plays into this, adding an element of urgency to the mix. Combative comments like Jim DeMint declaring this potentially “Obama’s Waterloo” become the story. Well, if it is, the press could be seen as unwitting pawns to this battle.

Gawker stepped over the line with their Bloodcopy campaign, where they were not only guilty of blurring the line between advertisements and editorial but of nearly erasing it altogether. And yet, the entire controversy made Bloodcopy one of the most successful ad campaigns Gawker ever ran.

Outside of the rapidly growing but still relatively cultish world of social media, he’s some crazy wine guy people may have seen on The Today Show, Ellen, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, or, most recently, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Inside that world, depending on whom you ask, he’s either a rock star or the new media version of [...]