Throughout the O’Reilly Factor last night, Bill O’Reilly repeatedly said that no liberal could draw a crowd like Glenn Beck did this weekend. Well, if the internet has its say, O’Reilly may get a chance to see his theory put to the test. The most popular post on Reddit right now is a request for Stephen Colbert to host his own rally in the nation’s capital. Is that in itself news? No but, hey, if this post helps in any way make it happen, so be it!

I’m not even going to bother with the label “this exists” because in a world where one frequently feels like the real news is straight out the The Onion it’s not all that surprising that an actual Onion story would be mistaken for the truth.

A couple of weeks ago, Oprah Winfrey started a contest to give one of her viewers their very own show on her new network. One of the contestants, a hilarious young man with cerebral palsy named Zach Anner, was heralded by the influential websites 4chan and Reddit (as well as celebrities like John Mayer) and rose to a seemingly insurmountable lead…until it was surmounted. However, Geekosystem writer Jamie Block used some great investigative reporting to find seeming proof that someone (quite possibly directly from Team Oprah) had rigged the contest to knock Anner out of the top spot!

Here is what passes for chivalry in the 2.0 age. Eli Roth, horror flick director, Tarantino star, and one-time Mediaite columnist has taken to MySpace to defend his girlfriend Peaches Geldolf, daughter of Sir Bob, from last month’s Reddit/Gawker scandal. Roth takes his criticism to the source. Literally. Here is the letter Roth posted addressed to ‘Big Ben’s’ mother.

In the year since Imgur was founded by undergrad Alan Schaaf, the minimalist image hosting site has sprouted into a hotbed of online culture, with a dominant presence on social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg and almost 20 million pageviews this past month. This weekend, Schaaf announced that Imgur had added individual user accounts and paid pro accounts.
Recently, Mediaite swapped emails with Schaaf about the rise of Imgur, the impact that personal accounts will have on the site and its vibe, and — yes — his plans when he graduates from college in June:

It’s time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title “Best Blogs” from this annual list and change it to “Most Notable” blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year’s list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

Today’s Gawker Media redesign unveils a new feature that attempts to optimize the loyalty of the network’s already robust fan base. Gawker Open Forums now exists on all of the group’s nine blogs, integrating social networking, crowdsourcing and standard discussion forums, leaving each blog as not only a conversation starter, but a channel where news can be broken, shared and commented on by readers, all in one place.

The viral posters that compared Obama to the Joker and to Hitler feel tame compared to the latest nasty meme to hit the Internet: insinuations that Glenn Beck “raped and killed a young girl in 1990.”


Update #3, 4:30pm: “Glenn Beck murder” and “Glenn Beck rapist” are now top suggestions when you do a Google search for Glenn Beck.