There is a corner of the Internet where actors, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, bloggers, directors, people from all walks of life are creating over 2 million posts per day, and are often meeting each other in person in over 50 different places around the world, from New York to London to Berlin to Tokyo. The place is Tumblr and it is quickly becoming the third member of the holy trinity of social media, along with Twitter and Facebook. Today, the New York Times makes it official with this headline: “Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival.”

Here’s the gist of Tumblr: a dead-simple way to get out your ideas or inspirations, what you’re doing, what you like or hate, whatever snip of culture or sub-culture is engaging you at the moment, across any form of media – photo, text, quip, video, audio clip, chat transcript. The sum total contributes to a unique online identity through sharing what you gather on the web with  your followers, usually with your own two cents (even if it’s as simple as “LOL”).

>>>Read the whole essay at Mediaite.

In what’s being called “one of the biggest leaks in US military history,” whistleblower site WikiLeaks today posted tens of thousands of classified “military field reports” about the Afghan war. According to the New York Times, the Times, the Guardian, and the German newspaper Der Spiegel were “given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.”

Based on that access and reporting, which WikiLeaks was not involved in, the New York Times has published a series of articles today which are too lengthy to go through here in detail but, broadly speaking, conclude that the Afghan war is not going as well as official reports might lead the public to believe. And the White House isn’t happy:

>>>Get the full scoop at Mediaite.

The New York Times recently chose to investigate a new innovation in the remarkably cool world of artificial intelligence, and somehow manage to make it painfully awkward and really grating on the brain. Amy Harmon, New York Times national correspondent who lost some street cred over the course of this segment, sat down with Bina48 to have a little chat.

Bina48 is a robot project of the Terasem Movement Foundation. Situated in a quaint Vermont home, Bina48 is a robot implanted with the thoughts and memories of real person Bina Rothblatt. She is a new step forward in the science of artificial intelligence, though there’s obviously a long way to go.

The New York Times, like many print publications, is at a weird crossroads with respect to new tech: On the one hand, they’ve got a great digital operation and a lot of tech-savvy reporters; on the other hand, they try to maintain old standards which by definition conflict with newer terms and practices that weren’t around when those standards were established. Throw Twitter into the pot, and kaboom! Confusion.

A memo from New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett obtained by The Awl’s Choire Sicha puts some of that confusion to rest, although some folks may disagree with its conclusion: The Times is banning the Twitter-centric use of the word “tweet” as a noun or a verb.

Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut, is currently getting flambéed on the political Internet over a New York Times bombshell which charges that Blumenthal never served in Vietnam, despite his statements to the contrary in at least one speech. Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow as much as calls Blumenthal a liar.

True/Slant’s Michael Roston points out that as damaging as the Times‘ report may sound, it’s worth asking whether Blumenthal actually brought his supposed Vietnam service all that much: Aside from one 2008 speech in which he uttered the unfortunate words “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” the Times has no hard evidence that he serially touted Vietnam as a selling point for himself. Still, this all sounds pretty bad on paper, and Blumenthal — formerly the clear frontrunner — is in trouble unless he can seriously turn things around at his press conference at 2pm this afternoon.

What’s the geek angle in all of this, you ask? Well, gamers of all political affiliations may feel some bit of schadenfreude over Blumenthal’s current troubles when they remember that one of the ways he tried to make a name for himself was by leading a grandstanding campaign against the evils of Wii beer pong in 2008.

Facebook is definitely having a time of it these days. Amidst broad criticism from users, officials, and advocates alike regarding their privacy policy — you know, the one that, by default, makes your information public for the roving eyes of third-party businesses and curious exes — the New York Times recently published an interesting piece (with infographics!) giving credence to why this is such a big problem.

As it turns out, Facebook’s Privacy Policy, as of this year, is now longer than the U.S. Constitution without its amendments. 5830 words to be exact, versus the Constitution’s 4543. Comparing that to the just over 1000 words that existed in the policy back in 2005, that’s a 480% increase in complex language that details how your information is seen by the roughly 200 million people who use the site on a daily basis. Seriously?

This morning’s New York Times features a story on a group of NYU undergraduates working on a would-be Facebook killer called Diaspora*, the software for which “will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.” The article is a neat read both for the specifics of the proposal and the anti-Facebook sentiment it highlights amongst young’uns in the tech community; it also marks what may be the first time a dirty UNIX joke has managed to sneak into the hallowed pages of the Times.

A tipster draws our attention to the writing on the left side of the chalkboard behind the students: “TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT.” Wait a second: That’s not intelligible code! It’s almost as if it has another meaning.

Hallucinogens may have gotten a bad rap since the 1960s as anything other than a source of amusement and cheap dream sequences, but according to The New York Times, a number of doctors around the country are seriously reconsidering psylocibin — the ‘magic mushroom’ hallucinogen — and other psychedelic drugs as a means of treating depression and addictive behavior, with a particular focus on the treatment of terminally ill patients.

For a little while now, the elite of the tech journalism world have been behind closed doors, testing the Apple iPad ahead of its release this Saturday. And after sitting down with the device — which Apple is trumpeting as the future of computing, while critics fear it as foretelling the coming infantilization of user interfaces — they’re actually pretty impressed! Here’s what the Important Tech Writers of Our Time have been saying:

After trying its hand at countless desktop, mobile, and web apps and products, Google has ambitions towards shaking up yet another, historically difficult frontier: television. According to the New York Times, Google is partnering up with Intel and Sony to develop Google TV, a new, Android OS-based platform with a Chrome browser (currently not supported by Android) and aspirations towards “mak[ing] it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications … as it is to change the channel.” They’ve tapped Logitech to work on the peripherals.

Top-down attempts to hook up television with the web have not been especially successful in the past (see: MSN TV), and even Apple had what’s generally thought to be a clunker with its media-centric Apple TV, though TechCrunch’s MG Siegler thinks that Google TV could angry up Apple’s competitive spirit and revive its TV platform.

But the key idea behind Google TV isn’t so much “let’s figure out a way to bring the Web to your television set” so much as who would be doing a lot of the figuring: third-party developers.