Mr. Schmidt. (Photo: flickr.com/jolieodell)

Now that he's no longer CEO, how does Eric Schmidt spend his days? Well, he's become really interested in expanding Google to "wacky countries -- you know, countries that have problems." [Foreign Policy]

The FTC is patient: After a minuscule fine for noncooperation with that StreetView investigation, Google is close to coughing up $22.5 million for tracking Safari users. [Businessweek]

The Pentagon wants some cybersecurity legislation. [Washington Post]

The Atlantic is welcome once more on Reddit, the beehive's point having been made. [The Daily Dot]

Is poor, beleaguered Microsoft facing Surface manufacturing troubles? [ZDNet]

Meanwhile, the Kindle Fire is slimming down to face its newest foe. [PC World]

America! (Photo: flickr.com/cristian_rh7)

It's election season, which explains the higher-than-usual incidence of poll-pegged stories we're seeing in our inbox. And hey, guess what? The Internet now has cultural relevance beyond enabling politicians to send citizens pics of their junk.

And so The Atlantic wound up with a couple of interesting little factoids, as part of its massive state-of-the-union study (co-commissioned by the Aspen Institute). The most alarming? Lots of youths are letting the Internet influence their ideas about morality.

From a post summing up the results: 

"On a question that asked people to rank different sources of influence on their sense of right and wrong, 59 percent of people ages 18 to 29 said that social media or the Internet had a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of influence. Fascinatingly, 38 percent of Americans older than 65 said the same."

We hate to sound technophobic, but given the amount of horrible and horrifying crap floating about the Internet, we can't help but clutch our pearls a little at this one. It's not all Indiegogo campaigns for bullied bus monitors out there, and frankly, it makes us wonder whether those rabbis might have a point.

Also, more than half of the 18-to-29-year-olds surveyed are under the impression that personal information shared on social media stays private. What part of "social media" isn't clear, guys?

(Source: Flickr.com/kinopix)

Seems like the folks over at Reddit don't take too kindly to spammers. The Daily Dot reports that at least five news source domains, including some media heavyweights like The Atlantic and Businessweek, have been banned from Reddit. That doesn't just mean employees at those companies can't post links--it means that users can't post links that include atlantic.com or businessweek.com domains.

The Daily Dot writes that upon attempting to post a link from one of these domains, Redditors are "greeted with the following message: 'this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.'"

Reddit admins are on the defensive: "This type of action is a last resort," wrote alienth. "Before taking such a severe action we make absolutely certain that the domains that would be affected are truly at fault."

Erik Martin, Reddit's general manager, also chimed in, writing, "These bans are temporary."

Redditors in r/BannedDomains are tossing around some interesting conspiracy theories about conflict of interest: "I wonder if we would ever see reddit ban The New Yorker (owned by Condé Naste/Advance Publications) based on the actions of one low-level editor working within extremely vague guidelines," wrote one commenter named cityroasted. "Seems like a conflict of interest for reddit to be owned by publisher and then banning their competitors."

As we wrote in today's profile of Reddit's general manager Erik Martin, Conde Nast has little control over Reddit, which was recently spun out as an independent subsidiary--but clearly the two are still experiencing some growing pains. Given the fact that the social news site nets 2.5 billion page views a month, and is a major traffic-driver, would Conde Nast really stand by if Reddit decided to again buck the wishes of its parent company and ban Wired?

(knowyourmeme.com)

"Are LOLCats Making Us Smarter?" asks a link-baity Atlantic headline that actually has nothing to do with the article it accompanies. The short answer: No, but that didn't stop the Atlantic from writing a think piece about memes anyway.

As a graduate of NYU's Gallatin school, where students design their own bizarre, mostly pretentious majors, this reporter is not really surprised that people are now writing dissertations about the cultural impact of LOLCats. After all, hasn't social media researcher Danah Boyd essentially built an entire career around intellectualizing Internet topics otherwise deemed too 4chan-ish?

Enter Kate Miltner, a graduate of the London School of Economics, who penned her masters thesis on the rise of memes, and what the Internet's penchant for weird cat pictures says about The Way We Live Now.

Writes the Atlantic:

According to Miltner, "When it came to LOLCats, sharing and creating were often different means to the same end: making meaningful connections with others." At their core LOLCats weren't about those funny captions, the weird grammar, or the cute kitties, but people employed those qualities in service of that primary goal of human connection.

Because nothing says "Screw you, loneliness!" like an image macro of a condescending Willy Wonka.

But really, we're kind of jealous of Ms. Miltner's academic pursuits. If only we had thought to use Reddit as legitimate source material in college. Guess we'll just have to stick to using Blurtt to communicate entirely through memes.

Screengrab from Mr. Keller's OKCupid profile

Media outlets should have learned a lesson when Village Voice Media got caught spamming Reddit and basically had to grovel for the Mechagodzilla of link aggregation sites' forgiveness, but they didn't. We know this because the Daily Dot ferreted out a new spammer, no less than The Atlantic's social media editor, Jared Keller--a.k.a. "SlaterHearst" during his time pimping Atlantic articles to the Redditorati, a.k.a. "redditors." Mr. Keller's skullduggery was revealed to Daily Dot by finding him on OK Cupid, where he used the same screen name, describing himself as an "Attempted journalist" and "lover of new ideas."

As "SlaterHearst," Mr. Keller was a highly successful redditor until the site banned him last month:

In his year on the site, Keller became a fairly influential redditor, collecting more than 176,000 link karma and, at one time, ranking in the top 30 among all users on a site that sees 35 million unique visitors a month.

Keller relentlessly shared content from The Atlantic, frequently posting three or four articles in a single day, which, all told, added up to hundreds and probably thousands of links—so many, in fact, that clicking through 10 pages and 250 submissions worth of content takes you just three months deep into his submission history.

In a statement to the Daily Dot, Mr. Keller seemed equivocal about whether he might deserve the feared "reddit spammer" label:

As you know, one of the community rules says that self-promotion isn’t forbidden but may put you on ‘thin ice.’ I tried to adhere to those standards, but as language like ‘thin ice’ suggests, there’s a lot of leeway in how one might interpret them. Reddit recently contacted The Atlantic and told us that, based on the frequency of my Atlantic submissions, they would be deactivating my personal account. I never had any bad intentions, but I understand and accept reddit’s position and remain a loyal member of the reddit community.

The Daily Dot suggests Mr. Keller may have had help with spamming Reddit from Ian Miles Cheong, a one-time Reddit moderator who was also banned for spamming the site. Both Mr. Keller and Mr. Cheong have denied any kind of formal arrangement, Mr. Keller telling Daily Dot correspondent Kevin Morris that they "know each other casually via Twitter and that's the extent of it."

Checking out what's left of "SlaterHearst's" history on Reddit revealed a little-noted nugget of irony he submitted 3 months ago: "Can't tell if Business Insider spammer or just really into Business Insider."

Ron Swanson of "Parks and Recreation," the manliest man we know. (baconwrappedshrimp.wordpress.com)

Did you know that sometimes guys use the Internet for things other than porn and perpetrating sexist stereotypes? Here at Ladybeat, we know very little about the Internet habits of the opposite sex, but luckily Jennifer Doll, she of single lady fame, bro-ke it down for us in a manticle for The Atlantic.

According to Ms. Doll, the rise of popular online communities like social news site Reddit and the XY's answer to Pinterest, Gentlemint, is ushering in a new acceptance of grownup man behaviors, like wearing matching socks and not smelling like the last car of the R train. Congratulations, gentlemen! You have now graduated from frustrating manchildren to fancy grownups in just one month, all with the help of "bropinning."

But what is bropinning, you might ask? Aside from being a terribly executed portmanteau, it's also a hashtag employed on dude-friendly websites to indicate manly content is ahead. Proceed with caution, ladies. Beers and mustaches and bizarre stock photos of a woman trying to eat a carrot off a stick are not for your delicate girl eyes.

Ms. Doll also argues that the rise of websites that encourage men to share their aspirations are leading to a resurgence in the metrosexual lifestyle. "McKay suggests we may (finally) be entering a post-hipster society in which 'men are interested in growing up and putting on the clothes of men instead of this extended adolescence,'" she writes. But what of the manchildren of last month? Has Gentlemint finally convinced our nation's porn-obsessed, basement-dwelling Peter Pans to suck it up, suck it in and iron their shirts? Is this truly an "anti-douchebag movement," a glorious "menaissance, a time of renewal in men's lives in which they take an interest in self-improvement and pop culture?"

If so, apparently some people didn't get the memo.

But we here at Ladybeat are in full support of the decline of douchebaggery (and brogramming, for that matter). Let the dudes have their manly enclaves, so they may do their manly things, like pinning watermelon salads and shit.

Mr. Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks. (betaworks.com)

Ever since news broke last year that satirical news source The Onion was shutting down their New York office and heading to Chicago, The Atlantic reports that the core team of staffers has pursued every avenue to keep the company from heading west. One bizarre but apparently legitimate option was to have startup non-incubator Betaworks buy The Onion.

According to The Atlantic, head of digital at The Onion, Baratunde Thurston, sought out an interested buyer in Betaworks, despite their seemingly disparate business visions. An editorial staffer at The Onion told The Atlantic, "[Betaworks was] an ideal buyer because you had this nurturing technology company that would let us expand in New York and do the things we wanted to do." Another editorial staffer corroborated the report, saying that Onion owner David Schafer seriously considered the offer for two weeks before turning it down.

John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, refused to confirm the failed deal to The Atlantic. Immediate requests for comment to Mr. Borthwick from Betabeat were not answered. (He is allegedly on vacation.)

The duo would certainly make for strange bedfellows, since Betaworks' ventures like Bit.ly and Chartbeat are more focused on data than editorial verticals. But it's kind of a shame the deal fell through. We'd rather have a Betaworks-owned Onion than a city without them at all.

We exaggerate--but there was a shiny, glittering feel to The Next Web's report on last Friday's "Let's Get Ready to Tumblr: Building community by reimagining and redistributing your content." The panel was part of Social Media Week and featured Tumblr notables from Buzzfeed, Flavorpill and The Atlantic.

The panel wasn't solely about sparkling Tumblr boosterism--there were straightforward insights as to why Tumblr simply works for so many who seem utterly addicted to the blogging platform. Buzzfeed's Lindsey Weber said Tumblr is all about ease of use and "observational humor." Ms. Weber and fellow panelists Russ Marshalek (Flavorpill) and Jared Keller (The Atlantic) listed some examples, including Gordon Ramsay and Das Racist Lyrics and Lisa Simpson Reading. There were also plenty of admissions regarding Tumblr's shortcomings:

If there was one theme that kept bubbling to the surface of our love of Tumblr teacup, it was that Tumblr isn't perfect. For all the raging traffic on the social platform, it lacks an analytical background. Platforms like Reddit and StumbleUpon have paid media buying programs because they can provide traffic figures, Tumblr doesn't. In essence, there's no way to find out who's looking at your Tumblr. For a marketing team, this is hell.

"From an operational and editorial standpoint, we adore Tumblr but from a business standpoint it's hard to go to someone in corporate and ask for more money for the platform when we can't even show them real analytics," says Jared.

While the panel addressed books based on viral Tumblrs (a perhaps complicated subject--GQ published some valid criticism of the phenomenon 2 years ago), Mr. Keller revealed that Tumblr has influenced sales of The Atlantic. Teens have written the magazine, said Mr. Keller, "to say that they've purchased the magazine because they loved the content on our Tumblr so much."

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal hit a nerve when he named this Thanksgiving "Update Your Parents' Browser Day." Lifehacker threw up a post, "How to Switch Your Parents' Browser Without Them Knowing," while TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsias blogged that "Nobody Wants to Feel Obsolete," which we thought at first was going to be the obligatory incendiary "quitting TechCrunch" post. Readers responded heartily with tales of parental cluelessness; Google's Matt Cutts described sneakily switching out Chrome for IE6 but leaving it in the same place with the same IE icon. Even Mr.Madrigal's mom chimed in the comments.

So the big day is here: how did it go? Aside from some "whose-browser-is-best" quibbling aside (one TechCrunch commenter recommended installing Linux, which sounds like a nightmare) and arguments over whether it's okay to switch brands, the internet seems generally on board with the idea of upgrading the 'rents. But we haven't heard any actual tales of the changeover (read: on Reddit, Twitter and in blog comments). Anyone out there in Betabeatland get a chance to do this?

Bonus! Betabeat browser stats:

Chrome 39.46%
Firefox 22.32%
Safari 15.52%
Internet Explorer 10.32%
Mozilla Compatible Agent 7.69%
Android Browser 2.99%
Opera 0.56%
Opera Mini 0.25%
RockMelt 0.23%
IE with Chrome Frame 0.13%

Of the IE users, 2.09 percent are using the soon-to-be obsolete IE6.

Mr. Unappreciated

The Atlantic's Nicholas Jackson wrote a curious post about Ashton Kutcher yesterday in which Mr. Jackson alleges that Mr. Kutcher's "smart decisions in the start-up space make most venture capitalists look like amateurs." Despite that, Mr. Jackson points out:

"But he doesn't get a lot of coverage. At least not as much, in the tech press that is, as Peter Thiel or Ron Conway or Paul Graham. And that's probably because he still describes himself as an actor."

Guess all that stage time about his approach to investment at TechCrunch Disrupt wasn't enough. If you ask Mr. Jackson, "Kutcher has invested in so many--and had so much success with-- startup companies, that he might be called a venture capitalist first and an actor second."

Let's look a little closer at this premise, shall we?

Actually, Mr. Jackson did some of Betabeat's work for us. He starts by pointing out that Mr. Kutcher had a number of failed investments before Marc Andreeseen, arguably one of venture capital's top one percent, convinced him to bet on Skype.  These days, through A-Grade Investments, Mr. Kutcher works alongside billionaire Ron Burkle. This is just hypothetical, but we have a feeling that if Topher Grace had the founder of PayPal and a billionaire advising him where to put his Hollywood millions, he might have an impressive portfolio too.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Sarah Lacy asked Mr. Kutcher to explain his newfound confidence in investing after a rocky start. His answer? Surrounding himself with smart people.

"I would go through different people's investment portfolios and I would say, 'I like this one' and 'I'm interested in that one' and 'This makes sense to me' or 'I don't get this, but I understand this. I think I can be helpful to this company through an introduction to these people.' There are certain people in the media world that can be really, really influential to a company. And I can kind of get a return phone call from most people that I place a call to. That level of introduction for people when they're first starting out a company can become extremely valuable."

Among the fifteen start-ups Mr. Kutcher is known to have invested in (there are at least a dozen undisclosed deals), there are a number of high-profile, potential success stories, like AirBnB, Foursquare, and Flipboard. But even the most promising of those 15 are still unproven and not without challenges and competitors, especially in a rapidly changing tech climate. Other start-ups, like Fab, have pivoted in a different direction after their first idea didn't pan out.

As our own Ben Popper wrote in the comments, perhaps "it would be more interesting to write about [Mr. Kutcher] as a new breed of strategic angel who can add his social media capital to a young start-up's arsenal." Mr. Kutcher should feel justified listing Angel Investor above Two-and-a-Half Men on his new business cards, but that doesn't mean he's up there with Peter Thiel and Paul Graham.