Rex Sorgatz is Mediaite's site designer and an occasional columnist. This list originally appeared at Fimoculous.com. #main .slice .posts .d { border-top:1px dotted #CCCCCC; margin:0px; padding-top:10px; clear: both; } #main .slice .posts .post0 .i { float:left; border:2px solid #275f7d !important;; margin: 5px 5px 5px -7px; } #main .slice .posts .p { margin-top:0; margin-left: 70px; } While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?

Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous. Sigh.

Rex Sorgatz is many things: Writer, editor, blogger, developer, consultant, authority on microcelebrity, wearer of exotic t-shirts, former web TV show Svengali, proud dog owner and surely one of the biggest consumers of media I've ever met (and don't call him Shirley — though you can call him Fimoculous, online, if you're referencing the blog he's run for nigh on a decade now or his Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr). He's also part of the Mediaite team as our designer/developer and can frequently be spotted around our office, enough to have stolen the Mayorship of Downtown Records from me on FourSquare, but we'll see how long that lasts. If there's a word to describe Sorgatz it's prolific, or maybe polymath — having spent a fair bit of time with him (disclosure!), I can attest to the breadth of his expertise about music, TV, film, books, media, new media, and What The Kids Are Talking About (I am pretty sure he is a leading authority on Boxxy). So it makes sense, then, that he should be the self-appointed curator of all those year-end lists that run through the very best, most interesting, or insert-quirky-descriptor-here lists that are the media staples come December of any given year. Sorgatz's "List of Lists" every year is massive and meta, a great overview of the minutiae of the last 365 days as well as a document shedding light on how we collect, organize, prioritize and present information. There's a lot going on under that spiky hairdo, so as we look back on 2009 he seemed like the perfect person to wrangle for our 5QQ - Five Quick Questions. (more...)

Yesterday, MSNBC.com announced its plans to buy EveryBlock, an upstart young website that aggregates newspaper articles, blog posts, Flickr photos, and public records like restaurant inspections and crime reports city block by city block to create so-called "hyper-local coverage" in fifteen cities. Since it was founded two years ago, the site had been running on a grant from the Knight Foundation, which recently expired. EveryBlock's founder, Adrian Holovaty, told journalism.co.uk that in its current form, the site only does "five percent of what we want to do with it" and that it will "expand profoundly" with MSNBC.com's backing. (more...)

Rex Sorgatz designed Mediaite and Gossip Cop, the new site co-founded by Mediaite publisher Dan Abrams and Gossip Cop editor Michael Lewittes. Here is his explanation of the site, which launches today. Let me ask you, what kind of person do you think Scarlett Johansson is? You have probably never met her, and I definitely have not, yet we both seemingly feel like we could describe her personality with reasonable accuracy. This is peculiar. It's not shocking to learn that humans enjoy making personality judgments based upon scant evidence. But with celebrities it seems exceptionally dubious, since we actually know literally nothing about them first-hand. Lohan, Aniston, Springsteen, Cruise -- why do all these people seem to have well-formed personas? How much of it is real and how much is manufactured? What are the sources we use to scrape together these mysterious portraits? (more...)