Along with its fellow South Park startups, web development company Adaptive Path has become the reluctant poster child for the bubble. Today, COO Bryan Mason has a special request for his friends.

Sixth borough advocate Jessica Pressler has abandoned her dreams of legitimizing Philly and instead turned her attention to the revival of the zine, those lovingly crafted obscure magazines with miniscule circulations and offbeat content. While the zines of old were likely pasted together in basement bedroom (or Krucoff's apartment), nowadays they're high-design productions with significant cover prices. There's also heavy advertising, which defines the difference between these small, independent publications and their bigger counterparts. Swindle mag's Shepard Fairey explains:

Oh BBC, aren't you above this sort of thing? Not just running a four-year-late trend story on blogs' influence — "The impact of blogging has reached a tipping point, argues Julian Smith, senior analyst at Jupiter Research" — but tying it to the recent We Media conference.

A media reporter we know sends this plea:

Mayor Bloomberg has signed a proclamation honoring Sigmund Freud here in town, which provides The Times' Take-A-Senior-To-Work-Day columnist Clyde Haberman yet another opportunity to dial it in. Haberman, who's never met a bad joke he didn't like or an easy assertion he wouldn't make, turns his laserlike acuity on the fact that, well, a lot of New Yorkers are in therapy. He suggests a variety of reasons, including the predominance of shrinks who settled in town during the war (World War II, that is, although he probably remembers the shifting demographic patterns of the city after the War of 1812), the stresses of living in such a hard-charging city, and, of course, New Yorkers' natural introspection and curiosity about themselves. Not mentioned: Having to read crap like this twice a week. Can we get someone to take Clyde out for a ride into the woods already? Just be sure you don't turn on your cell phone until he's completely out of the car.

A reader sends an update on the whereabouts of Sun Microsystems CEO Jon Schwartz, the man John Markoff treated in the New York Times as a non-conformist indie-rock kind of guy.

The subjects of yesterday's SF Chron story on video blogging come from all over. Some are nearly mainstream, some known only to hundreds. But everyone in the piece falls into one of two major categories:

What did Google threaten offer ABC News to score a "Google does much more than search" puff piece? (Why else would "Ahead of the Curve" willingly run this story, um, behind the curve?)

If there's one charming detail about the political bloggers at the Huffington Post, it's their knee-jerk righteous anger. Eric Boehlert dismisses Wired Magazine's Al Gore cover story (complete with hero cover shot) as a "make-good" for a little incident in '99. Way back then, Wired News quoted Al Gore's "inventing the Internet" line, sparking (according to Boehlert) that whole PR debacle. So the HuffPo writer writes, "Wired Owes Al Gore an Apology."

It's dead, Jim. Several reporters and spam fighters have checked on the Alan Ralsky story and told me it's false. The FBI's Detroit field office told one journalist that the Spam King was not arrested or held, is not in custody, and has not been indicted.

Online video! It's hot! It's new (except for Star Wars Kid and the hillbilly montage and Numa Numa and the Crazy Frog and—)! It's the way to market Firefox or report on the Maker Faire. And it's the center of a slow news cycle.

Another chapter to the scandal that rocked a nation (wherein Valleywag actually used a PR-pitched story! OMG WTF): Another pair of passes sold (a $3,000 Buy-it-Now purchase), and the auction was confirmed as real but PR-spun.

It's not in the papers yet — damn those lead times — but a media frenzy is frothing around the fresh meat of the Spam King's arrest. (The backstory: Alan Ralsky, pictured, is in the DOJ's hands, and they're grilling him for info on other hackers and spammers in a plea-bargain session.) Ralsky's quickly becoming a useless pressure point for the DOJ as reporters blow up the story, alerting everyone in the spam and hacking world and sending them scuttling out of sight. Major media contact for the hacker community, MemeHacker, sends this chat log from a conversation with another hacker:

Far from the innovative leader the media treats them as, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe were just "cabin boys" for MySpace, says blogger Trent Lapinski. The 19-year-old journalism student blows open the scandalous story behind MySpace — the story every major paper missed. The makers of MySpace included an ex-con and a whole family of insider traders.

Readers of the New York Magazine (ones who don't read Slate, the New York Times Styles, Forbes, the San Francisco Chronicle, or Wired) now know there's a boom on. Writer Kurt Andersen spends three pages (well, the last page is two lines, like the last page of a dictated-length term paper) telling the same story as the other papers, but with the cluelessness with which the New York media glitterati always approach the Internet. It's like seeing USA Today redo a trend piece, but without the humility. So spare yourself the read and use the Valleywag Lazy News Edition.

It's a busy day in People with Two Monitors News.

The Washington Post ran a nifty little article last week about new names for The Artist Formerly Known As Web 2.0. But something seemed familiar — especially to Slate, who ran the same piece last month. In fact, it's time for another fun chart!

How does the longest-tenured anchor of a dinnertime entertainment roundup program know when it's time to step down from behind the translucent desk and pass the Teleprompter-reading torch to one of the twentysomething newsbot clones being groomed to fill her pantyhose? Perhaps this is how:

Are we back to sniping Bill Gates with press photos again? Through his career at Microsoft, coverage of Gates moved from "Nerdy young Gates" to "Lurking evil Gates," softening to "Old and feeble Gates," before honoring him as "Wise and wizened elder statesman Gates." But with one little defeat for Microsoft in Europe, the BBC picks its favorite AFP photo: "Shrieking crypt-keeper Gates."

"...is like a Britney Spears hit without a dance remix."