According to records released by the New York City Board of Elections, the cartoon billionaire received 27 write-in votes out of the 299 that were cast. … Burns and the rest of the write-in candidates ultimately lost to real-life billionaire and incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Disappointingly, CNN does not attempt to provide an explanation. It would not be hard to find: Montgomery Burns was the focus of an Internet-driven joke campaign this fall intended to parody Bloomberg’s third basically inevitable term (and shady maneuvers to secure it).

Even Monty Burns. would be a better mayor — I think that was the joke.

As of now, BurnsforMayor.com remains up, and if you have a few moments to spare, I suggest perusing “Monty’s Plan” for New York City. Oh well. Maybe in 2013.

Twenty minutes later, Treviño received a call from a producer at ABC News’ Nightline, asking for his source. As he put it in an e-mail yesterday evening:

The answer? Steven Seagal’s 1992 classic, “Under Siege.”

There is only one word in all of the English language which can sufficiently capture the essence of the intriguing though vaguely farcical nature of the mainstream media’s close observation of relatively well-known, if frequently land-locked, blogosphere and Web 2.0 media figures such as occurred in this particular case of a scoop-hungry television news producer tracking down someone with little probablility of special knowledge regarding said then-ongoing crisis, save a propensity to blog or tweet opinions about international relations involving mostly-unrelated countries: FAIL.

Update: Treviño just keeps breaking news:

Getting word that the Maersk Alabama affair is a ruse: the captain is actually trying to defect. Developing ….

And what’s this, just one story in the category right now? C’mon, Digg. You can do better than this.

And I don’t care where you go with it — 2012 presidential election? 2010 congressional midterms? 2009 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns? — but you’ve got to start living in the now.

There’s a tremendous amount of value to news collection: generating basic data, and massaging it with taste and with an informed editorial viewpoint, into information. A big part of this is cultivating sources. But a big part of it is constructing a narrative out of the data, boiling it down into bite-sized pieces.

Which reminds me of the RMN’s association with one of the most blackly comic examples of old media employees’ new media ineptitude, perhaps one of the worst media moments all of last year:

One could say the same thing for the Rocky Mountain News, if not just yet the mid-size, second-tier city newspaper as a genre. But we may get there soon enough.

Also instructive is the similarly empty Endorsements page.

This kind of thing is all too common in political campaign websites, even for members of Congress who are not a complete waste of an office budget. I suppose this persists because just about anybody can put up a campaign website which means anybody is hired to do so. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard an online campaign vendor complain about the numbskulls in their industry… well, maybe I could have bought a U.S. Senate seat.

One doesn’t need to click through to know the title of that post is not “Facebook Reddit Digg Print this article.”

P.S. Yeah, this is kinda ripped off Mickey Kaus’ “Nate Silver Infallibility Watch.” What of it?

Wait a minute, who was that first name on the list? Could that really be Andrew Sullivan? As in “conservatism of doubt” Andrew Sullivan? Author of “The Conservative Soul” Andrew Sullivan? The same Andrew Sullivan whose strident advocacy for the Iraq war made him one of the most influential voices among the online conservative commentariat?

Who among us could ever have imagined the day would come when Andrew Sullivan would break with his ideological compatriots and move to the left? I find it hard to believe myself, but if there’s one source we should be able to trust for the ideological affiliation of a blogger at The Atlantic, shoouldn’t it be a reporter at The Atlantic?

The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

If you’ve already forgotten the old version, compare with this, although it doesn’t show the two columns that may have saved space but ultimately produced a confused chronology.

More promising, Slate has turned its blogs-in-name-only (BINOs?) into real deal blogs, complete with permalinks. For years, the site’s handful of blogs were published using the same software as its news articles. In fact, it wasn’t really clear which were columns and which were blogs; until recently, only Kausfiles read as you would expect of a blog. Here is his page now:

This redesign is actually a throwback to the old Kausfiles.com, which Kaus published on his own in the late 1990s until agreeing to be acquired (and paid) by Slate. And it is Kaus who probably benefits the most; because Slate’s software couldn’t automatically create permalinks, if he wanted to make it easy for someone to link, he would have to build an anchor tag by hand. And making writers learn to code detracts from what they’re best at: writing.

There are still some kinks to be worked out. If you click on “Kausfiles” from the front page sidebar, it brings you not to the blog itself but to a list of recent headlines, some of which are oddly duplicative. Better then is to just type kausfiles.com into your address bar, which brings you to http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/default.aspx, which is the screen capped above. That’s still at least one /blogs too many, but at least the permalinks are now search engine-friendly (including words from the title as opposed to randomly assigned numbers).

And if you think you can prune that back to http://www.slate.com/blogs/ and find a list of Slate’s blogs, well, no… and you may see a little farther up Slate’s skirt than either of you had bargained for:

Thank you for being so welcoming! What’s that… join, you say? Well, why not? Here I am:

And in fact, I now have an account with Slate that allows me to… well, I’m not quite sure. Almost certainly nothing, I am fairly sure. But if Blog P.I. moves to Slate, you’ll be the first to know.

Monday update: Now that #RNC08 is over and my tweeting activity is back to normal, I’m moving the Twitter feed back to the sidebar (or it will be just as soon as I figure out why WordPress is balking). But the Flickr badge is just the St. Paul photoset (with more yet to be added) so I’ll leave it where it is.