Over at The Awl Choire Sicha talks with Paul Ford, the now-former web editor of Harper’s, about why he quit, what’s going on at the magazine (“Jennifer Szalai, a senior editor, who handled reviews, also quit this week”), his plans for the future, and his favorite Alex Chilton tale.

Well here’s some good news for all you short fiction writers: “The Atlantic is going to start publishing fiction again.”

We’ve previously mentioned the fascinating battle taking place in San Francisco between the city’s two weekly newspapers: The San Francisco Bay Guardian (who won a $21 million dollar judgment against Village Voice Media for monopolistic practices) and the VVM-owned SF Weekly.

Well The Stranger has the full scoop on the story, one which includes (but is not limited to) “seized delivery vans, murderous editors, irate blog posts, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more.” Read “The Great West Coast Newspaper War.”

If you subscribed to the Daily Rumpus you would receive messages like this via email throughout the week.

I’m at South by Southwest and have half an hour to compose this note. …more

So Google still hasn’t pulled out of China. But today the company unblocked previously censored sites:

“Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google’s Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing’s censorship rules.”

Learn more.

So when is that new facebook friend not really a friend? When they’re a law enforcement agent using your online info against you. Whether checking an alibi against status updates or looking at photos for signs of suspicious activity, the FBI and police have turned social media sites into citizen monitoring tools à la Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought on by The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internal Justice Department document on the subject is now public, and “offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.”

With the days of frantically clicking away pop ups behind us, ad-blocking software may seem like the perfect way to view your favorite sites in peace. And yet, as Ken Fisher explains, this software may be hurting your favorite blogs, new sites, and other interweb ventures.

Because advertisements pay the sites they use on a per-view basis, patrons running the software are actually denying more and more funding to sites they visit most. Fisher puts a plea out to the internet at large, asking visitors to ditch the software and tolerate the flashing banners and i-pod contest scams (or, god forbid, one could subscribe for an ad-free experience). For the good of the internet; for the good of the sites we all love and cherish.

One analysis of the Google Buzz mess.

Anyone following the fall-out over Charles Pellegrino’s Last Train From Hiroshima—here’s the definitive New York Times story—would do well to read Philip Meyer’s “Accountability When Books Make News,” first published in the Media Studies Journal in 1997. (You can read it right here.)

A terse tour de force, Meyer’s essay starts by outlining what keeps the mainstream media in line: its responsibility to advertisers and to the legal system. “Nothing works as inexorably as the twin forces of the desire to make money and the fear of litigation—the carrot and the stick,” Meyer observes in a nice phrase (and, it must be said, a better potential title for his essay). These factors don’t apply to books, of course—or, Meyer asks, do they? He goes on to discuss, carefully and thoughtfully, the audience, marketplace, and medium of books. He also shows how and why the media piggyback on questionable books—sometimes for the common good (demythologizing J. Edgar Hoover), sometimes not (the craven rumors about George H. W. Bush and a female aide).

None of this correlates to the Pellegrino situation in an A-A, B-B fashion. At the very least, though, it’s a useful antidote to the Kurt Anderson quote zinging around the blogosphere: “If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers, tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.” Anderson makes you nod; Meyer makes you think.

“The carbon footprint of data center server farms — roughly equal to that of paper mills today — is set to double in the next five years. And those server farms are often powered by coal, which tends to be harvested in far less sustainable ways than wood pulp.”

By way of an article in The San Francisco Panorama, Jennifer Schuessler makes an argument “In Defense of Dead Trees.”

Facebook is the largest, fastest growing social site on the web, and yet its concept started in a college dorm room, and was (in part) modeled after one.

Charles Peterson’s essay for The New York Review of Books, “In the World of Facebook,” chronicles the history of the site, from ramen noodles to multi-millions, explaining how social hierarchy and exclusivity bore and bread the most successful social network in recent memory.

Expounding on its simplistic design and content shifts over the years, Peterson discusses how everything from color choice to the invention of the News Feed led to Facebook’s unprecedented success.

[For more read the The Rumpus interview with an anonymous Facebook employee.]

“I don’t think paper has hit bottom by any means, but I also don’t think it will be a quick or simple fall. There will be bumps and twists and surprises on the road down. Print on paper will never go away, because some people will love it and be willing to go to the effort and expense of keeping it alive. I mean, horses aren’t extinct, right? But I’m not holding my breath for them to retake their position at the forefront of transportation, either.”

Gerard Jones (who will be reading at the next Monthly Rumpus) talks print media, comic books, immigrants, imaginary violence, and more.

A spokesman for Wenner Media has told the New York Times that the RollingStone.com outage we reported on earlier today was just “a glitch.”

The spokesman did not explain how the “technical problem” resulted in a mysterious ad replacing the magazine’s website, but claims that Rolling Stone did not neglect to renew its domain name. The site, while up, is still not functional.

Russ gets a question answered, but won’t say which. Baronetess hopes it’s the Britney one. Daniel Nester complains about reviewers. DominaM had a dream she could turn socks into jellyfish. @nosowsky to edit 20 years of Geoff Dyer criticism. Love is an unsecured network. Twitter hits 50 million tweets per day.

What is going on at RollingStone.com? The magazine’s website seems to have been taken over by a very lame ad. Has the magazine lost their domain name? (via @MacMcClelland)

Update: Looks like RollingStone.com is back up (to view a screenshot of the mysterious ad that replaced the magazine’s entire site click here), but none of the links on the site are working. Also, still no word on what exactly went wrong? Did Rolling Stone forget to register their domain name? And, if so, did the magazine have to pay big bucks to get it back?

The Awl has some information.

“The ideal tool for robbery has apparently become Foursquare, the iPhone app for sharing your whereabouts with your 900 closest friends.”

Gawker has good tips on how not to be a Foursquare jackass.

“But even before the official pub date, The Coming Insurrection benefited from an ‘endorsement’ from Glenn Beck. As part of a seven-minute rant on Fox News in July, he said, ‘I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book.’

“Since then, each time Beck has talked about the book, sales have spiked, according to MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner. It’s latest jump came after Beck devoted an entire segment to The Coming Insurrection, which he called ‘quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.’”

Thanks to Bookninja, I was delighted to learn that Glenn Beck is inadvertently helping a recent book of anarchist polemic, The Coming Insurrection, published by the respectable leftist house Semiotext(e) vault up the bestseller list.

Numbers from Nielsen prove what most of us already knew: “Facebook is the web’s ultimate timesink.”

That’s right, the average Internet user spends more time on Facebook “than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined.”

Meaghan O’Connell, Director of Outreach at Tumblr, has posted her response to a user’s accusation (plus an exclusive response to Tumblr users here on The Rumpus) that Tumblr “stole” their domain at “the behest of a corporation.”

For those catching up the “corporation” in question is Pitchfork, and they have now posted their own response: …more