If you see this text on your website or blog: “Today, I went to the beach with my children. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is entirely off topic but I had to tell someone!” ..your site has just been co-opted by a comment spammer.

Yesterday we mentioned that Facebook announced their new Graph Search, which is essentially a way to stalk your Facebook friends and family. In a fiery blog post, engineer and contributing Tech Crunch writer Steve Cheney went on to call it a con, saying that it is the equivalent of him yelling across an auditorium for a recommendation for a doctor to see for his cough.

Ann Coulter is drawing ire after publicly tweeting the word “retard,” in reference to Barack Obama. When Coulter not only used the word publicly, but then staunchly refused to apologize for it, the community fired back in outrage, calling her remarks careless and offensive.

Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger whom Fox News called “one of the nation’s most influential commentators,” died this morning, “unexpectedly from natural causes”. But already there is a whisper campaign: was it really natural causes? Or was he killed for what he was about to reveal?

Amina Arraf, the lesbian Syrian blogger and purported authoress of the blog ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’, has been unmasked and discovered to be a decidedly straight 40-year-old man named Tom MacMaster, who lives with his wife in Georgia.

Wow, it must really suck to be a student in Pennsylvania (at least the south-eastern part of it). First Montgomery county’s Merion school district spies on its students, now we find out that right next door, in neighboring Bucks county, they hire teachers who hate their students, and blog about it! Witness the tale, and blog, of one Natalie Munroe. Natalie Monroe is a high school teacher who clearly has even less respect for her students than they have for her.

The city of Philadelphia has taken that age-old pastime – trying to get blood out of a stone – to a new high tech high: trying to get money out of a hobby blogger. Philadelphia may be the ‘city of brotherly love’, but it’s certainly not the city of bloggerly love, especially not with Philadelphia charging bloggers what amounts to a $300 blogging tax. Oh sure, Philadelphia officials call it a “business privilege license”, but when you require it of someone who hasn’t monetized their blog at all, well, that’s not much of a business model, is it? Of course, it’s a dandy business model for Philadelphia, right up there with states charging an affiliate sales tax.

Every so often we come across a website so well done – so interesting – so darned compelling, that we have to tell you about it. Such is the case with the subject of today’s article, a history blog where every single day, without fail, we learn something new… something that makes us say “Hey! I didn’t know that!”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today published its updated rules governing the publication of endorsements and testimonials by “consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities” (in other words, everybody). The updated rules governing online testimonials and endorsements arguably now cover bloggers, Internet marketers, affiliates, and others who promote (including through endorsing or testimonial) products or services on the Internet. The bottom line is, if you talk about a product or service, and if you put it out on or via the Internet, and if you stand to gain on it, you’d better disclose that relationship.

The government of Vietnam is getting ready to clamp down on the thriving Vietnamese blogging culture. In fact, the Vietnamese government is putting in place new regulations aimed at curbing just about any form of free speech in Vietnamese blogs. The new regulations, approved this month, include rules that ban all posts that the government feels undermine the national security of Vietnam or that disclose Vietnamese state secrets. The rules, written by the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications, also ban any posts that contain “inaccurate information” that could potentially damage the reputation of individuals and organizations.