Best in Blogs: Facebook Flap; Oscar Winners Leaked; Best/Worst Blogs Revealed

The dramatic Facebook "Terms of Service" flip-flop this week proved something about something, and bloggers were in the middle of it, whatever it was. To recap: over the holiday weekend, Consumerist revealed a newly modified codicil in Facebook's usage agreement that, to paraphrase, said: "Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want." The Face-o-sphere subsequently freaked out to nearly Scrabuloustic proportions. Facebook groups like Change Your Terms of Service Back Now and People Against the New Terms of Service were formed. From the outside there was a federal complaint in the works and even reasoned bloggers like PhD Amanda French wrote things like: "Go ahead and be outraged. Facebook's claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant." Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg explained on his blog that when you share a message or picture with a friend on FB, you "need to grant Facebook a license...so that we can show it to the other people." But when TV newscasts and newspapers started asking Americans if they could trust Facebook, the company killed the new rules. "The Facebook member community threw a wrench in Mark Zuckerberg's plans to control the universe," says Bright Hall.

Let's all learn from this, says Epicenter: "sites need make it easy for people to delete everything if they so choose. Few [people] will, but giving the option prevents posts like the Consumerist's from turning into a tedious three-day media affair." Meanwhile, VentureBeat thinks it's funny that amid the Facebook privacy flap, a million users are happily letting Google know exactly where they are via Google's new Latitude person-mapping service, which signed up that many people in one week.

In other news, a horrifying pet-chimpanzee attack in Connecticut apparently wasn't funny enough by itself, so a New York Post cartoonist Sean Delonas tied it to the economic stimulus news and drew a dead, bloody monkey on the ground with the cops who shot him saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." Uh—ha ha? "NY Post Cartoon seems to link Obama to dead chimp," was the AP headline, and bloggers manned their positions. "This is absolutely f***ing despicable," says Comments from Left Field. "You don't advocate shooting the president." "Stunningly racist," says The Brad Blog, agreeing with the responses from NY Governor David Patterson, Rev. Al Sharpton and others. Gawker put together past work by Delonas—ten all-time classics of hate—in a gallery that skews antigay more than anything else. Pirates Cove issued a "manufactured liberal outrage alert" and advised the leftosphere: "Lighten up, nutroots. It's not always about you." Sister Toldjah blogged "I hope like heck that the NY Post stands firm and doesn't offer the slightest apology for this non-racist cartoon, because if it does, it will just mean that white people will once again have to take a back seat (no pun intended) to race hustlers like Sharpton." Jonathan Chait at The Plank wrote: "Look, obviously the point is that the stimulus bill could have been written by a monkey...and the punchline depends on the monkey being dead and thus unavailable to write further legislation."

Over in Hollywood, it's Oscar time, and it really would be something if the list of winners at the Oscars Leaked blog turns out to be real (spoiler alert: Mickey Rourke, Kate Winslet, Slumdog Millionaire). Could it be true? Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily says it doesn't matter. "At this point, with so many of the categories locked as far back as December, I'm sure a chimpanzee could have come up with the same names." For a better cheat sheet, Moviefone's Inside/Movies offers tips on faking your way through an Oscars conversation with handy one-liner insights about nominees. (On Vicky Cristina Barcelona: "It's kind of like 'Wild Things' meets 'Hannah and Her Sisters.'")

In other awards, Time magazine has secured its spot near the cutting edge with its 2nd annual list of the world's 25 best blogs, and also the 5 most overrated. "It's a varied selection with something for everyone," says The English Blog. "Possibly it should be referred to as the "highest profile" rather than the "best" blogs, suggests the low-profile blog Disassociated.com. And Daggle is really upset that it's done as a time-consuming slide show rather than "an actual list." (Interesting to see a blog taking a print publication to task for trying to survive by generating more pageviews—but, yeah, those click-through slide shows always have been annoying.) There's been the requisite aw shucks self-congratulation at the "best' blogs, of course. Though VentureBeat says Time's reasoning is confusing: "Web 2.0 is taking off. Social networking is taking off. Google is everywhere. Silicon Valley is dead. Thanks for the enlightenment, Time Magazine!" But in what may be viewed as a general thumbs up, no one has suggested Time's list could have been compiled by a chimp.

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