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It's the ultimate summer Friday news story: CNN Webcasting a press conference hosted by the men who claim they nabbed a dead body of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot.

Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi held the press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., in conjunction with Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two men from Georgia who claim that they found the corpse while hiking. Biscardi wouldn't actually show the body, saying that he had invited Fox News reporter Megan Kelly to show it on-air and that a number of scientists would be performing an autopsy on Monday.

"… Read more

A couple of hunters in northern Georgia (the state, not the country) claim to have found a carcass of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, if you prefer).

The two hunters teamed up with a fellow named Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot; they plan to hold a press conference on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., to show off DNA evidence and photos--but not the body itself. That's apparently being kept under wraps. (Yeah, right.)

Biscardi's Web site, searchingforbigfoot.com, proceeded to crash under bandwidth pressures.

According to a press release, the … Read more

Timeline creator Dipity has finally been put to a completely awesome use: a user called "tatercakes" has created a timeline of fads and memes that have surfaced on the Internet since its earliest days. And, as far as I can see, almost nothing has been left out--if you're a Dipity member, you can add to the list.

Among the chronological listings are some memes that pre-date my knowledge of the Internet ("Trojan Room coffee pot"); a few classics like All Your Base, Hampsterdance, and Peanut Butter Jelly Time; and more recent ones like lolcats and … Read more

Blogged.com, a site that started off as a ratings-powered blog directory has branched out into new territory this morning. It's now compiling the hottest news headlines by hand. Competing news tracking services like TechMeme, Google News, and BlogRunner use automated systems or a slight mix of automation and editorial choice to categorize news as it happens. Blogged's will be entirely human-driven.

The move is a bit of a gamble to get people in the door. Once a user is looking at a story, they can dig into Blogged's directory and check out its rating, hopefully coming … Read more

This post was updated at 11:18 AM PT to correct the date of the announcement.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it has made some minor upgrades to Buzz, the social news service that it launched in February.

Most notably, the company has released a "Top Buzz" widget that site and blog owners can embed in their Web sites, displaying the top articles in Yahoo Buzz or those from a specific Buzz category. There are also now RSS feeds for stories submitted to Buzz as well as each of its categories, and "First Buzzed By" indicators much … Read more

If you're familiar with Techmeme, Tailrank, and other services that track content trends on the Web, you should bookmark a new service called Twitlinks. It uses a hand-picked selection of technology personalities on Twitter and compiles their tweets into a news feed. If there are news links or stories that come out of those tweets, they'll end up on the front page, in a reverse chronological view mere minutes after they're posted.

The list of tweet sources is made public, and currently comes in at just fewer than 100 bloggers, entrepreneurs, and personalities including my boss Rafe, … Read more

The title of this post was inspired by Deadspin commenter BlastItBiggs.

After April Fool's Day, it got horribly gauche to practice the art of "Rickrolling"--tricking people into watching the video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," or surprising someone by playing the corny pop song. The goofy Internet fad was so utterly overblown on 4/1/08 that the Web seemed to collectively agree that nobody should ever subject anybody to it again.

The New York Mets, however might have to deal with it for a little while longer.

Innocently enough, … Read more

UPDATE: Gossip blog Valleywag decided to out this for what it is--an April Fool's joke. Oh, well, it would've been funny to see people pick up on it.

With the rise of "microblogging" services like Twitter that limit the number of characters in a post, URL-shortening sites like TinyURL and URLtea have taken off. A new service that just launched, Urlrurl, promises to step it up a notch by tracking the popularity of online memes that are tossed around the Web through viral link-sharing.

"Urlrurl.com stands out from other link shortening services because of its patented Relay-Stick algorithm," a release from the new start-up read, "which dives into the links put through its shortener and exposes common memes across the pages people are clicking on." That sounds pretty cool. It's also connected to the Twitter API, plugging it into one of the biggest pools of URL-shortening activity on the Web.

And there's more: "In early June, a free stats program will launch, as well as a premium service for bloggers and publishers," the release continued. "The premium service will allow publishers to register their site with Urlrurl.com and receive deep insight into how content and memes have traversed the web." Considering that no one can really tell where Internet memes emerge these days--4Chan, Fark, Digg, iVillage--this kind of service, provided it actually works, could give some interesting and oft-hilarious insights.

Urlrurl is headquartered in New York with development offices in China, and counts TechCrunch czar Michael Arrington among its angel investors.… Read more

Two decades ago this week--on March 12, 1988--the corny pop song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

What does this have to do with the Internet? Oh, just about everything.

For those of you who actually have lives and don't pay attention to the latest iteration of goofy Internet phenomena (think "all your base are belong to us," "the Internet is a series of tubes," or lolcats), Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the Web equivalent of the … Read more