Yesterday we learned that a link in a Gawker post can fetch $175; so how much do you think an A-list television star could get for a tweet? Last night, in between tweets about the McRib being made of people, washing his hair with baby urine, and recovering from the mental image of Bette Midler and Geraldo Rivera having sex, Rainn Wilson tweeted the above.

You can tell this is a joke because:

1) It is funny.
2) Consider that Ashton Kutcher's tweets are worth 13,000 eyeballs. Consider that most advertising rates for impressions (CPM) usually fall in the sub-$1 range for every thousand. Would you pay Mr. Wilson $12,000 for a tweet?
3) Mr. Wilson has not deleted the tweet.
4) Check your private messages. Have you ever included an @ sign?
5) There is no "Macho Bellgrande Burrito!"

But the real punchline--the Next Web ran with the story under the headline "You Might Never See a DM Fail Quite as Bad as This One." C'mon, Asia Editor Jon Russell! What about the time a guy named Weiner accidentally tweeted a picture of his wiener?

Apparently, Mashable also picked it up, as did the Boston Herald. Headlines "Rainn Wilson Caught in $12K Tweet For Pay? [VIRAL EMBARRASSMENT]" and "Comedy star’s tweet ‘disses’ taco chain," respectively.

UPDATE: Mr. Wilson copped to the ploy this morning in a tweet: "Joanne - please call @mashable & let them know they are a bunch of idiots. --Rainn." Mashable has updated its story.

Source: capitalnewyork.com

Rep. Anthony Weiner finally admitted to being the twit behind the crotch shot blasted from his Twitter account last week, but the story just won't die. "I am deeply sorry I lied about this, but at the end of the day, I lied because I was embarrassed,” he sniffed during a 27-minute press conference that was as excruciating for the audience as it was ignominious for the speaker, in part because conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who broke the story of the mistweet, hijacked the podium, Kanye-style, demanding "vindication."

Considering the tabloids this week, looks like the answer is no.

What makes Mr. Wolfe different from your average social media cyberstalker? Aggression, for one—and an agenda. After joining Twitter on Jan. 6, Mr. Wolfe immediately started criticizing both Mr. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin. By March, he had more than 1,000 followers. And it wasn't because of his sage maturity. On April 14, he tweeted:

“Weiner’s new follow is a high school girl. LMAO! Freak!”

Soon, other #bornfreecrew members joined Mr. Wolfe in tweeting out a warning if Rep. Weiner started following a young woman. Based on the fact that Rep. Weiner often unfollowed these women after being called out on Twitter, crew members suspect that he knew about their campaign, telling the New York Times, "He was paying attention.”

So the Congress obsessively monitors his @ mentions, but didn't realize he was making a dick pic public? If you have some free time on your hands and need a Twitter tutorial, Betabeat can hook you up. Until then, just remember, the direct message option is your friend. So is not documenting your erections.

Weinergate: The Impotence of Liberal Journalism

"Aside from the tawdry scandal itself, Weinergate showed how the story evolved in the blogosphere and the mainstream media. Much of the story was pushed by a small band of conservative & libertarian bloggers who not only pointed out problems in Weiner’s story but did technical analysis of the data," the project says.

The "technical analysis" a.k.a. amateur Twitter detective work lasted days, but ultimately the story was advanced when Andrew Breitbart got more sexy photos directly from a woman who had received them from Rep. Weiner. (Throughout the press, the crotch pic was referred to as "the lewd photo." What if we went back over all this coverage and just replaced the word "lewd" with the word "sexy"? This is why people think Americans are prudes.)

Rep. Weiner was mortified by the new photos and confessed in the most awkward press conference since Kanye West let Taylor Swift finish.

The creator is Lee Stranahan, "a writer and filmmaker who was intimately involved in the story almost from the start. I blogged about it extensively and I was in near constant communications with some of the story’s central figures, bloggers and reporters throughout. I’m also someone who has seen too many people burned by the liberal media... even though, ironically, I consider myself a liberal. " Let us get our wallet.

Image from CBS news

Weinergate came to a dramatic close this afternoon. The New York Congressman admitted to having sent inappropriate and X-rated messages and pictures to as many as six women he met on Facebook and Twitter.

The crotch shot that began the entire affair, says Weiner, was intended as a direct message. Realizing what he had done, Weiner says he panicked, and decided to claim he was hacked.

"This is a deep weakness and I have hurt the ones that I love," said Rep. Weiner.  "Some of these relationships date back as far as three years."

Weiner says his wife knew about these online relationships since before they were married.

It's not much of a tech story, so for readers who feel Betabeat is chasing tabloid headlines, we apologize. At the same time, these seem to be relationships that began on social networks and were carried out online. It is a product of the modern age.

"As I said in my statement, I never had any physical relationship with these women, I was never in the same room with them."

Asked if any of these women were underage, Weiner said that, "All I know about them is what they publish on social media." He noted that this was one danger of his actions.

"I never met these women and I never had any desire to," he said.

Social media, he said, made the actions seem more trivial than he realized once the story became public.

"I don't believe I did anything that violates any law or rule of Congress. I do not intend to resign."

At one point, a reporter in the audience shouted to ask whether the representative thought all congressmen should delete their Twitter accounts.

There is nothing inherently wrong with social media, Weiner said. "What I did with accounts was wrong."

Technology seems to support Rep. Weiner's story that some hacker was responsible for tweeting a picture of a crotch in briefs at a 21-year old girl from the congressman's official account, and the congressman has enterprising bloggers, Twitter users and commenters to thank.

We ran down the myriad web evidence supporting and contradicting Rep. Weiner's claim that he was hacked yesterday, but local Reuters blogger and hyperlocal Tumblr mogul Anthony De Rosa went even further down the rabbit hole. He compared the metadata of the alleged raw file of the crotch photo with a past photo from the representative's yfrog account, and discovered the two don't appear to match; at which point commenters jumped into the investigation.

"The one thing I would check is what happens when you use the phone's down-scaling feature," Nate Westheimer commented helpfully. "I would find someone with a Blackberry and see what happens when you use the native ability to downscale photos."

"Note the lack of date and time in the dick picture. Highly suspicious," another commenter weighed in. Another blogger got a tip from a reader demonstrating a loophole in the yfrog photo service that allows users to upload photos with just an email address.

Support from the Twitosphere! But the congressman keeps digging himself into a hole. An official statement claimed he had been tweeting about a hockey game minutes earlier and so noticed the photo right away; in fact he started tweeting about the hockey game after the photo, according to the current version of his Twitter stream. The congressman also admitted that the photo could be of him, as he's not sure if he's taken similar photos in the past.

Rep. Weiner has hired a lawyer but has not said he's pursuing any kind of criminal case.

Was he or wasn't he? The evidence:

1) How the photo was tweeted.

Rep. Weiner updates Twitter from a number of sources, including Twitter.com, the Twitter for Blackberry app and Tweetdeck, which all use the photo uploading service yfrog.com. The crotch photo was uploaded to Rep. Weiner's yfrog account, the contents of which he's now erased.

We don't have enough evidence to say what service--Twitter.com, Twitter for Blackberry or Tweetdeck, was used to send the tweet in question, but the fact that it was uploaded to yfrog is consistent with those apps as well as the representative's past photo-appended tweets.

However, Yfrog "authenticates" with Twitter, so it doesn't require a separate login. If a hacker had access to Rep Weiner's Twitter account, he or she would be able to upload to yfrog automatically.

2) The photo "file."

The alleged raw photo now circulating the internet is stamped as being taken with a Blackberry. A hacker would likely use a computer when breaking into an account, but could have taken the photo beforehand in order to lend veracity to the story.

3) The back-and-forth on Twitter.

Some have suggested that the fact that the tweet was only noticed by one of Rep. Weiner's followers is suspicious and suggests it was never tweeted, and that screen captures of the tweet were doctored. But Twitter only shows you conversations between users you're following, so only users following both parties would have seen the tweet.

One user, @patriotusa76, a Weiner-troll, had tweeted with the recipient before in the course of chastising the representative for following a lot of attractive girls on Twitter. The fact that they had a previous interaction suggests he might have been one of the few people following both parties--who else would be following a random girl in Seattle?--to whom Twitter would show the tweet. He also clearly keeps a close eye on the representative's account, having tweeted at it 287 times. He retweeted the crotch at 11:34 p.m.

4) Rep. Weiner's preceding and succeeding tweets.

The reference to Seattle in a previous tweet, as noticed by Mediaite, suggests a passive shout-out to the girl Rep. Weiner supposedly crotch-tweeted at.

The reference to having his Facebook hacked--which there is no evidence of now--is just confusing. But if Rep. Weiner used the same password for Twitter and Facebook, a hacker might have gained access to both at the same time.

5) It's easy to accidentally publish a private message on Twitter.

Users can add "d" and the username of the recipient in front of the message in order to send it to only that person. It's also very easy to forget to add the "d"--this happens pretty often on Twitter and is referred to as a "DM (direct message) fail."

6) It's also easy to break into a Twitter account--if the user has a simple password.

Back in 2009, a hacker gained access to several accounts, including Barack Obama's, after running a program that tested every word in the dictionary until it found a Twitter support employee who had used the word "happiness" as her password.

7) Conclusion.

The hacker explanation requires many more assumptions--that someone out to get Rep. Weiner either was savvy enough to run a program that could guess his password or hired someone to do this; that the hacker was thoughtful enough to circulate a photo that had been taken with a Blackberry; that Rep. Weiner was able to regain access to his account before the hacker could change his password; and so on.--than the failed-private message explanation. Add Rep. Weiner's dodginess with the press, and the case of the crotch controversy seems easy to dismiss as an instance of user error.

Rep. Weiner is consulting with a lawyer about civil or criminal action, he told the Daily News today, but said he's not devoting too many resources to the social media kerfuffle. "I'm focused on my work," he said.

No word on how the account could have been "hacked," although there is a proud tradition of successful "dictionary" attacks on Twitter. In 2009, an 18-year old prankster cracked into several accounts after running through the dictionary until he hit on the password of a Twitter employee: "happiness."

Getty Images

A year ago the fiery Democrat who represents Brooklyn and Queens famously told The Observer, “I follow Twitter for the Tea Party and just show up to fuck with them."

These days Rep. Weiner is getting way more proactive. Peep today's agenda:

2:30 Twitter Town Hall

3:30 Facebook Town Hall

4:30 Live Chat on Daily Kos

5:30 "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit

The man is an unstoppable social media dynamo. Redditors are already flooding his AMA page with bike lane screeds. Hope he's not worn out running between all these town halls. Check back at 5:30pm for his answers.