In case you haven’t yet heard, the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park is no more. However, in the hours since the eviction, a disturbing side story has developed. A number of journalists have alleged that the NYPD, seemingly on orders, violently tried to keep them from covering the event. No matter what you may have felt about the protesters or the camp itself, there’s something very unsettling about the idea that the police didn’t want the nation to see what happened last night in that park.

Between his Tumblr followers and his Twitter audience, more people see Anthony De Rosa‘s updates than attended that Mets game. That’s what you call a platform. Who is this once and future king of social media, and why should you be following him on Twitter?

Some, notably a blogger at DailyKos, have suggested that the screen shot that Andrew Breitbart‘s Big Government ran when it broke the Anthony Weiner Twitter story is a forgery. Our resident expert, Philip Bump, reviewed their findings, and newly-released data about the original YFrog photo, and found evidence that strongly suggests Breitbart’s innocence, and supports Weiner’s contention that he was hacked. Here is Phil’s analysis of the DailyKos findings, and the newly-released cache information on the YFrog photo.

A few months ago, Mayor Cory Booker jokingly sent Snooki a Tweet threatening to give her a ticket for texting while driving after she Tweeted about being stuck in Newark traffic. That was funny. This, though, is awesome. After a resident let him know via Twitter that his sister’s street was still snowed under and she couldn’t leave to get diapers, he responded that he’d deliver them personally. Within a half an hour, he’d actually done it!

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

The battle over the legality and ethics of news aggregation has been heating up all week. This morning we collected all of the punches thrown in the massive fight on Twitter between four journalists that went on yesterday afternoon. That all appeared to end amicably enough, with the main combatants, Nicholas Carlson and Anthony De Rosa, seemingly laughing about it this morning. Unfortunately though, the other fight on the subject, the one between The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff of Newser, has not ended nearly as well.

Yesterday, we wrote about the battle of words between Newser’s Michael Wolff and The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman, the ethics of news aggregation, and what constitutes stealing. But shouldn’t a debate about new media like this really be waged in a more modern way than Waxman’s and Wolff’s long (and abridged) columns? This is perhaps why four journalists took to Twitter to battle it out with brutal 140-character punches.

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 Yes Men‘s provocative anticonsumerist pranks tend to be hit-or-miss. But if fooling people is their measure of success, it looks like their latest hit the bullseye: Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNBC all took a Yes Men press release that claimed to come from the Chamber of Commerce at face value.

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.

A tourist helicopter and small plane collided in mid-air over the Hudson River on Saturday — showering debris over the area and sending horrified onlookers to their Twitter accounts. The mainstream media joined in with live breaking news coverage shortly thereafter. But when a story like this breaks there is just no beating Twitter.

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.

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.