This weekend, the New York Times ran a piece on cyberspace’s “first great existential crisis.” Legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen tore a page out of of Dan Solove’s book and wrote about reputation in the digital age: The Web Means the End of Forgetting.

In fact, it felt like he ripped quite a few pages from Solove’s 2007 book, “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.” Rosen’s message was a condensed version of that book — essentially, that it’s scary that it can be so difficult to control the information disseminated about ourselves online, and that we as a society need to come up with ways to protect people. That would be protection from the reputation ruining that comes from someone tagging you in a nasty blog post and having it turn up as the first result in a Google search of your name, but also protecting people from themselves in this age of indiscreet Facebooking and Tweetaholicism.

The piece went online early last week, and many people sent it my way. When I opened it and it started with the “drunken pirate” anecdote, I closed my browser and decided to wait until the magazine came to my house on Saturday. I decided that if the article was using an anecdote from four years ago as its hook, it could wait a few days to be read.

I enjoyed the piece, but in many ways, it felt as dated as that lead.

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Britney Spears is the most popular person on Twitter

Last night at an East Village bar with two of my journo friends, we talked about our favorite celebrity tweeps. My favorite is Roger Ebert (@EbertChicago) — though some might argue that Ebert is a fellow journo, not a “celebrity.” He has excellent Twitter taste in both links and retweets, and is pithily wise. I’m also a fan of Conan O’Brien, who doesn’t tweet often but always tweets funny (@ConanOBrien).

One of my friends favors Mindy Kaling of The Office (@mindykaling). She’s humorous and a big basketball fan. The other friend drools over John Cusack’s dreamy tweets (who used to have the handle @shockozulu but has now converted to the more banal @johncusack).

None of these are the most popular celebrity tweeps. Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and Lady Gaga top that list. Sorry to break it to her fans, but reading her twitter feed, I think Spears may have hired a six-year-old to ghost-tweet for her.

This morning, I was thinking about what it is we derive from being able to follow and interact virtually with “famous people” we respect/admire/hate/love/obsess over.

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Growing up on the West Coast of Florida, I would sometimes go to random, spontaneous parties on the beach in my high school days. They were usually thrown by the revolving cast of tourists who visited my town year-round. My best friend and I would simply walk along the moon-lit water until we spotted a dark clump of people. We would mingle with strangers, drink warm beer, and hope not to see the flashlights of police officers make their way down the beach looking to scatter those of us who were underage.

For a long time, that’s kind of how the Internet has been: fairly anonymous gatherings with little emphasis on identification or regulation. But some would like to take the party to a bar. Blizzard, a gaming company that offers World of Warcraft, tried this month to make it a bar where everyone knows your name. Whereas the U.S. Cyberczar is just trying to ensure that everyone has to show ID to get in. The Cyberczar’s plan seems to be the more successful one, or at least the one causing far less public uproar…

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Should General Stanley A. McChrystal have been read his rights before being interviewed?

“I should have realized you were going to quote me. The concept of being prepared for everything you write to be viewed by the world is really starting to hit home for me.”

That’s a message I received from someone I wrote about recently. We had gone back and forth by email about a story, and then when I published it, I quoted parts of the discussion.

People are wary of talking to journalists. When they do overcome their fears and talk to us reporterly types, they are often taken by surprise when they see their words in print. Phrases sound different when cut off from their paragraphical pack and presented naked and alone in quotation marks.

I read of one journalist who starts every interview by quoting from Janet Malcolm’s Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Perhaps if Michael Hastings had started his Rolling Stone interview with General McChrystal this way, McChrystal would have been more taciturn around him. Or at least would not have gone bar-hopping with him.

Malcolm compares the journalistic-source relationship to a romantic one, with both the journalist and the source attempted to seduce one another: The journalist wants information and the source wants to control the story.

Given my legal blogger glasses, I see the the world of journalism as being more similar to the world of law. Like officers of the court, we do research, interviews, and fact-finding to build a case. Whereas they use the information to press charges or sue, we write a story about it. Given that, I suggest that journalists should also offer “Miranda warnings” before interrogations…

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Image from fake website

The Internet is dangerous in the hands of some deranged individuals. The law student who put my details into a Craigslist casual encounters ad struck again this month.

This time he lashed out against a female lawyer who refused to hire him. He created a fake website for her law office, hoping to wreak havoc on her Google results. Ironically, he labels her the Internet predator.

After I wrote about the fake website (but didn’t link it so as not to improve its page ranking) at Above the Law, the law school student took the site down (Yay for service journalism!), perhaps because of my pointing out that he was probably violating defamation and criminal harassment laws.

Apparently he wasn’t paying attention in his criminal law class.