On a pound-for-pound basis, the average World of Warcraft junkie undoubtedly represents a much less destructive social force than the average meth head. But it’s not extreme anecdotes that make the specter of Internet addiction so threatening; it’s the fact that Internet overuse has the potential to scale in a way that few other addictions do. Even if Steve Jobs designed a really cool-looking syringe and started distributing free heroin on street corners, not everyone would try it. But who among us doesn’t already check his email more often than necessary? As the Internet weaves itself more and more tightly into our lives, only the Amish are completely safe.

Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, linked to the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.

But the use of search data has been limited more to the realm of “how to” topics like “How do I teach my dog sign language?” than questions about the news of the day like “Where does Elena Kagan stand on corporate campaign donations?”

Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers.

The news staff will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on readers.

“When you think about the entertainment trends of the past 10 years,” Szego reasons, “they have all been speculative in nature: the rise of online, multi-player, role-playing games, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Stephenie Meyer. And it’s not just about those books. I sell far more copies of the latest Cory Doctorow than I do the latest Stephenie Meyer.”

Clay Shirky is a guru, which is to say a con-man. He's similar to many of the Internet evangelists in that he takes a simplistic idea totally unsupported by reality, wraps it in an overconfident philosophy of human nature (almost invariably evolutionary psychology/sociobiology) and a few anecdotes, and, voila, a book deal (though print is dead, of course). Suddenly he is this great "thinker" and critics, because they are small-minded and easily persuaded by the aura of an intelligence they lack, fawn over his "big ideas."

But, of course, those ideas are pure pabulum. That's OK though. A guru's job, a con-man's job, is to make people think he is a big smart dude so they'll pay him and massage his ego.

via @artfagcity: 'Art Fag City dump.fm now in operation, pulling images from my blog every 15 min! Time to mix some pics!'

Fav quote of the day from Mitch Joel at #TAOM - Your brand isn't what you say it is, it's what Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook says it is!

Related: The Audience Conference!

Apple is causing harm

Attitudes have consequences and Apple are promoting attitudes which are known to result in widespread and often serious harm. Anyone who doubts that should look at the absolutely appalling figures for teenage abortion, pregnancy and STIs in the USA compared to less prudish countries. Steve Jobs is now exporting those attitudes, and those consequences, to the rest of the world. What is worse, it is the young people he no doubt claims to protect who are bearing the brunt of the harm. So Steve Jobs, is your body prejudice really worth the life of even one young person? The facts are crystal clear, that is what we are talking about and for you to export your prudery to us here is Europe is completely indefensible. It is no better than the censorship in China.

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zing! RT @nxnefest: Jake Gold just called brad scwartz from much on applying to cut music video programming by another 50 per cent #nxne

Some young New Yorkers have succeeded at mastering both domains. They are the envy of all their friends, and often find themselves being asked for reading strategy advice.

Brendan Curry, an editor at W.W. Norton, has a baroque system in place that has taken him some years to achieve. He goes through the feeds in his reader every morning, skimming blogs and tabbing open links that appeal to him as he goes one-by-one through high-minded aggregators like Longform and Bookforum's Omnivore. Once he's done opening everything, he goes through and tags the stuff he's really interested in using a service called Delicious; at the end of the week, an intern from Norton compiles everything tagged "to+read" in one file and sends it to Mr. Curry's Sony Reader so he can read it over the weekend.

People like Mr. Curry are living the good life. They are thriving online. They don't just stay on top of current events and pop culture ephemera, they read scholarly blogs and-weird but true-actual books, too. They've read Thomas Ricks's Fiasco, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side and even that long book about Sonic Youth. Last week, Mr. Curry was reading a 42,000-word article from Wired published in 1996, about the laying of an underwater fiber-optic cable.

Mr. Curry, who used to suffer from RDS, is proof that change is possible. But be warned: Most people should not dream of achieving his high level-statistically, it just does not happen that often. Most recovered RDSers finally cope by merely unclenching, and by giving up their completist inclinations along with their impulses toward rigor and cultivation. So what if there are 14 New Yorker articles you haven't read? Who can keep up, really?