A settlement has been reached in the case of Eric McKinley, a gay man from New Jersey, who filed a discrimination suit against eHarmony Inc. when the site refused to accept his same-sex personal ad and the online dating site has agreed to accept gay couples. Beginning in 2009, gays and lesbians can join all the desperate straight folk hoping that the site's patented "love of your life" algorithms will find them the man or woman of their homosexual dreams.

Neil Clark Warren, founder and owner of the site had previously come up with all sorts of fun excuses to exclude gay singles, the most popular being that the site was focused on finding a partner for life, but since most states didn't allow gay marriage, there was no point.

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Post tags: eHarmony, Eric McKinley, Lawsuits, Online Dating

Call it the Microsoft vision of marketing. Taking everyday folks, or people with one quirky talent, and using them to sell their computers. And hey, it's working out better than their ads with a traditional star like Jerry Seinfeld!

Now Dr. Pepper is in on the deal too. Knowing that their soft drink is prized among MMORPG nerds who need the caffeine and sugar to stay up late playing World of Warcraft, the label recently decided to sign "celebrity athletes" like the Tom Taylor, the 21-year old kid who has a three-year, $250,000 contract to play Halo 3.

And you end up feeling torn, right? Because on the one hand yes, celebrity athletes get an obscene money for their endorsements, just like they get an even more obscene amount of money to throw/kick/hit a ball around. So let's let the skinny ADD kids who can't concentrate on anything longer than three seconds unless it's on a computer screen have their shot at the big leagues.

But. And this is a huge but (just like the ones on the kids who play Halo all day!)…
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Post tags: Advertising, Dr. Pepper, gaming, Halo 3, promotions

Oh god, this is not a good sign. Prestigious, but previously free internships at Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair are now be auctioned off at a Christie's celebration on Dec. 2nd.

The good news? You don't need to be a celebrity like Francis Bean Kobain or Sean Avery to intern at these previously exclusive mags anymore.

Bad news? Magazines are doing so bad right now that you have to pay to work at them for free. You'll really be missing that $4,000 you plunked down for the honor of getting Ms. Wintour her double caf skinny latte when you're too poor to pay off your college loans.

Oh, and in case you actually wanted to make money while working at a paper, would you consider moonlighting as a valet?
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Post tags: Francis Bean Kobain, Rolling Stone, Sean Avery, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair

How much do Martha Stewart and Snoop Dog have in common? Well, they've both had jail time, they both have a predilection for a good clean pot, and they both "ball to they fall" which, as Snoop explains in this segment of the Martha Stewart Show, means they both gotta make as much money as they can before they die.

It's all hood, friends!

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Post tags: cooking, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart Show, Snoop Dog

There are two things that mark the success of an online venture: how many unique page views the website gets, and how long individuals spend on each page. Advertisers can pay by the page view, sure, but think about sites like NBC.com or Hulu, where the commercials run in accordance to how long you've been at the page.

What's tricky is in one of these respects, top Internet sites are doing better than ever. But in the other, they are doing significantly worse. Care to journey a guess?

Are people spending more time on their favorite sites, or less time on more sites?
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Post tags: Internet, New York Times, Politico

"WHICH talk-show host has a flatulence problem so bad, he's said to have an assistant follow him around with an odor-vaporizing spray can?"
-Page Six

Dr. Phil! I bet it's Dr. Phil!!!

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Post tags: blind item, Dr. Phil, farts, Page Six

It's taken just two weeks for the protests against Prop. 8 to go from historical moment to Weekly World News pop-culture parody, which has to be a record. There really needs to be some sort of index based off of the time it takes between an event happening and the moment a Bat Boy article is done about said event.

Or maybe this is how Neil McGinness over at Bat Boy LTD, who recently bought Weekly World News from David Pecker, is reinventing the rag as culturally ironic?

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Post tags: Bat Boy, Prop 8, Weekly World News

Nate Silver is finding new and interesting ways to continue his relevance after the election polls have become a thing of the past (for the next two years, anyway).

Silver's website, FiveThirtyEight is now going a different tactic than just analyzing poll data: he's gone straight for the inflammatory interview.

After conservative troll and documentary filmmaker John Ziegler found out that Silver was calling his anti-Obama questionnaires "push polls," the owner of HowObamaGotElected.com offered to grant Silver an interview, on the one condition that the whole transcript would be posted on FiveThirtyEight. Silver complied, and the results are hi-larious, as Ziegler starts out trying to bait Silver into a fight, and ended up blowing his wad with a heap of profanity.

Let's take a looksy, shall we?
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Post tags: conservative, fivethirtyeight, John Ziegler, Nate Silver, Obama

If you haven't realized already from my gushing posts about Watchmen and Star Trek, I'm kind of a huge nerd. But not one of those "purist" types that really care if they ruin Will Eisner's The Spirit (which they will, or already did) or if Art Spiegelman's name is never as famous as Tobey Maguire's or Christian Bale's.

But it does bear a little LOL at the news that Gossip Girl and OC creator Josh Schwartz will be writing the newest superhero film, X-men: First Class.
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Post tags: Comics, Josh Schwartz, Joss Whedon, Movies, X-men

Bald Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff isn't afraid to be asked the tough questions. That's why 10 lucky winners will be pulled from the Internet to ask Michael Wolff questions about media, life, and his new biography on media mogul Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. But not in person, natch. Wolff will be answering the questions online, as well. New Media!

Then again, it's Wolff himself who will be picking which questions to answer, so you know that at least nine of them are going to be "Why is Tina Brown such a bitch?"

To enter your question to Wolff, go here.

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Post tags: Internet, Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch, Tina Brown, Vanity Fair