It’s with mixed emotions that I bid farewell to the thrilling role of Managing Editor at Mediaite. While I am very excited about my new opportunity on the digital side of corporate media behemoth Clear Channel (the details of which will be forthcoming in the next week or so), I am sad to walk away from this labor of love, overseeing an influential and successful site and playing the part of post-modern disc jockey to the daily political news narratives that makes up the media zeitgeist.

his past weekend, Gawker Media was dealt a damaging blow when a group that calls itself Gnosis successfully hacked into Gawker’s servers and thereafter released a torrent which contained Gawker’s source code and a database containing 1.3 million Gawker commenters’ usernames, e-mail addresses, and passwords, about a fifth of which Gnosis decrypted. Considering that many people use the same password for multiple web services, this is bad news. Mediaite’s sister site Geekosystem got in touch with members of Gnosis and discussed what the attacks meant for Gawker Media, web publishers, and everyone who shares unsecured information on the Internet.

I’ll be honest—each month, as we see record numbers at our young sites, I worry. I fear that the next month can’t possibly rival the previous one, that it will be nearly impossible to beat those numbers in the near future. After all, our staffs are about as lean as they get (some sites have just 2 employees), we don’t have a corporate entity or venture capital firm behind us, and we have already vastly exceeded any and all expectations. Yet here we are again.

This week marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Mediaite, and what a year it has been. As Dan Abrams notes, predictions of Mediaite’s doom were greatly exaggerated, and as Mediaite columnist and White House reporter from Day One, I have viewed the site’s successful first year from a unique perch. When Rachel Sklar pitched the site to me, I have to confess I was a little bit skeptical, but it didn’t take long for me to see that she and Dan were on to something.

It is hard to believe it’s been a full year since our newbie website with the awkward-sounding name was welcomed to the blogosphere with accolades such as “sounds…like something you’d give to a toddler suffering diarrhea,” or “no one really cares about the business and personalities behind the media,” or my personal favorite, “Mediaite feels a bit doomed.” Ah, yes — that honeymoon period was so sweet. We all love to curl up with the scrapbook and reminisce about the early days.

As reported by Robert Quigley over at Geekosystem, a pretty substantial change was reported as coming to a classic language-driven board game: the legalization of proper nouns in Scrabble. Robert was able to track down a Mattel rep to discuss the change (he’s a little shaken up about it), and he found some good news to assure purists that the traditional game is not being altered. The change seems only to apply to a more “family-oriented variant” of the game.

With the introduction of new geek culture website Geekosystem, the newest site launched by Mediaite founder Dan Abrams, the Internet just became both geekier and cooler at the same time. Geekosystem aims to celebrate and cover everything from technology and science fiction to video games and comics. The site launched with a Power Grid ranking of 30 Greatest Living Web Geeks, a post on the steady sales of Tiger Woods’ video games, and a piece on fighting spam with spam.

It’s hard to pinpoint when that the term “geek” stopped describing a carnival performer bit heads off of live chickens and started describing an intellectual who is overly obsessed with things that, well, intellectuals overly obsess about. But recently, “geek culture” started to connote something cool, curious, and perhaps most importantly, something that can be really difficult to explain to those who don’t “get it.” It is from this world that Mediaite founder Dan Abrams will be launching a new site covering geek culture on January 25th, aptly titled “Geekosystem.”

Keith Olbermann awarded the gold last night during his “Worst Persons” segment to Glenn Beck, again, the silver to Republican Sen. John Cornyn and the bronze to Mediaite.

But there’s much more to the story. Here’s how we got to this point.

Yesterday, Mediaite’s Robert Quigley posted a list of 8 gaffes (later reduced to 7) by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, along with the assessment that Gibbs “largely gets a free pass from the media for his many blunders.” Via an e-mail exchange with Tommy Christopher, Gibbs claimed to have “no real response,” and that he was “happy to get the criticism,” but he did have a few factual corrections for us.

Men’s websites waxing Shakespearean have decided that one can have too much of a good thing, and AOL man cave men’s blog Asylum has sparked the August 4th web phenomenon known as ‘Day Without Megan Fox’ that will undoubtedly make tomorrow’s RSS feeds 70% less attractive (if my math is correct). On July 28th, the Asylum staff announced:

On May 27th, two days after I graduated from college, I began my internship with Mediaite. That morning, on a glass table in the living room of Dan’s townhouse, I saw the two faces of the beast that would consume my waking hours for the next month-and-a-half.