Editing. Context. This is the true value proposition on the Net anymore. We’ve got more information than we know what to do with. Now we need curators. (We always did. This is what newspapers and magazines and record labels and publishers used to do for us — pick out the interesting things out of the shit pile and bring it to our attention. Of course, we didn’t always agree with them and there were never enough options. But there are now.)

This is what YOU do, my friend, on the Internet. People read your blog because they like your writing. They think you have good ideas about what’s interesting and good, ideas that extend beyond comics and novels. So you are a trusted contextualizer. When you post about a band you like or a blog you dig or what have you, your opinion is weighted by the whole context of who you are and how you think. Context is what you bring to the table, and that creates what I once called a “taste tribe” — people who respect your cultural context and trust you to tell them what’s good, at least most of the time. You’re a node in a network that includes Matt Jones and Ben Templesmith and the Coilhouse girls and me and Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling and all the rest of us who trust one another’s tastes and context, to greater or lesser extent.

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Robert Downey Jr. is aboard to play the titular coke-craving big brain of Baker Street in Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” over at Warner Bros

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The first thing Amanda Mooney, 22, does when she wakes up in the morning is fire up her laptop. She opens “a crazy amount of tabs” and checks in on her Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube friends. A self-described “digital native” who graduated from Emerson College in Boston this summer, Mooney contributes her thoughts to her new employer’s blog at Edelmandigital.com, as well as at Americanshelflife.com. She chats on AIM, publicly bookmarks favorite posts on Digg and Del.icio.us. And, of course, she twitters. And twitters and twitters.

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I was at Kuiper 1V last Tuesday and a man in line at the cafeteria
recognized me. We shook hands, our brass tags jingling, and ended up at the
same table with our respective snacks (mine plain tart frozen yogurt,
dressed up in mochi and raspberries, his some sort of vacuum-dried
cuttlefish import). I gave him the whole story, mostly. The storyboards,
the costume designs, the before and after photos. He nodded, understanding
that the music was brought up from the primordial gothness of the
organization, from before me, and not really any of my concern (with the
exception of Herr Drosselmeyer’s Doll, a song with the biblical power of an
abandoned music video [minus cherrypicked concepts seen at work even today,
orphaned on stage], several stunned emails, an incredulous dinner meeting
somewhere in San Francisco, and an absent author).

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Last week, Scott Beale tried snapping a picture of Google’s booth at a tech industry conference, only to be blocked by the company’s public relations team.

But that didn’t stop Beale. He shot off a quick one-liner about his displeasure to his Twitter account. Within the hour, Bob Lee, a software engineer at Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ), replied that he’d look into it. Soon, Google apologized.

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An elaborate array of mounted and handheld video cameras caught the crowd of 1,600’s reaction as the two men “went right up to the line” of the city’s morality laws, Holland said. The two men stripped down to their underwear, kissed and rubbed on each other, the sergeant said.

The audience, as well as local fighters drawn to take part in the show, became enraged. “It set the crowd off lobbing beers,” Holland said. “They had beers in plastic cups. Those things can get some distance on them actually.

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Alpher and his Palestinian partner exchanged puzzled glances at the comparison of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie fighting over Brad Pitt, but because they had both received a fee for their appearance, and still hadn’t completely internalized that their interviewer was not exactly who he seemed, they soldiered on.

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While FriendFeed and similar services focus on information aggregation via RSS technologies and links to original content, Swurl allows users to build a truly centralized, full-content blog that visitors never really have to venture away from if they don’t want.

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I don’t want to die. I want to spend the next hundred thousand years wandering around the Universe. I want to be there when and if they finally crack through the quantum foam and make a door to all the universes next door. If I die, I want to die with the Universe itself. I want to be the mortal enemy of entropy.

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Today, with 2.5 million posts a day and about 800 active boards split into thousands of threads, 2-channel is the biggest BBS in the world. And while the posts on 2-channel are often nothing more than ramblings of the average Joe, its scope is so widespread and its threads so influential that companies and authorities monitor it closely.

Dentsu, the world’s biggest ad agency, has a “buzz research” division that monitors 2-channel constantly to see what people are talking about, and there are several consultancies that advise companies on managing their online reps.

Even government officials are stepping into 2-channel forums to solve crime. After a bus hijacking and murder was discussed in 2000, police started monitoring the boards for leads and tips. So many arrests were made in the following months that posters stopped publicizing their desire to kill their infuriating parents or destroy their school, says Suzuki.

But like most web communities, 2-channel has its share of problems. On occasion, the 2-channel community behaves like a mob, turning on members who transgress with massive amounts of hate mail, the revelation of private information and stalkers monitoring their homes 24/7

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