I recently had the chance to interview Justin Kan, whose company Justin.tv is showcasing its Web-based reality TV show network by broadcasting just one show: Justin.tv, the tale of a straight, young, male entrepreneur who straps a vidcam to his head, streams its feed back to some servers over EVDO, and broadcasts his every move to you live via a Web site. There is a live chat session you can join to discuss the feed, and you can actually call or SMS Justin via his cell — he’s posted the number on his site, though I doubt this feature will last much longer due to pranking.

What strikes you immediately upon watching Justin.tv is just how boring his life is. In our interview, Justin said he was unlikely to have sex on camera (thus separating himself from the much more interesting 90s phenom JenniCam). He’s not going to have any personal drama. He’s just going engage in rampant product placement (that’s the biz model), and then hang out with his straight, male buddies who drink, play poker, talk about business, and then play Halo. Look, I love straight men as much as the next bisexual girl, and I love Halo as much as anybody, but do I really care about Justin’s life? No. And that’s pretty much the point of the article I wrote about Justin.tv for Wired.

I’ve just published a quick cultural analysis of the awesome Korean giant monster movie The Host over at Wired. This is probably one of the most original and compelling giant monster flicks since the first Godzilla, largely because it’s motivated by strong political feeling as well as the urge to entertain. Plus, the special effects are fantastic.

In my Techsploitation column, I’ve been a little goofy of late. I wrote a parody of new Web 2.0 crap called Web Trenz, in which I discussed fake “trends” such as “podthrusting,” a sex offender social network called “MyMirandaSpace” and a method of exploiting workers in the developing world called “Annoturk.” Sadly, I received a lot of e-mails from confused people who really wanted to know more about Annoturk in particular. I guess the urge to outsource is so strong that it defies logic.

I also wrote about the hacker practice of “exploiting” software code, and questioned whether there wasn’t a political angle to one hacker’s recent exploit, written to undermine the anonymizing tool Tor.

I’ve been a bit lax in updating this space with my latest columns, so here’s a quick rundown for you. I wrote about a cool new mapping tool, Safe2Pee.org, which allows users to share information about establishments where restrooms are gender-neutral. For trannies and gender-ambiguous people, going to the bathroom in a public restroom can be a frightening experience — sometimes they’re ridiculed, confronted, or even kicked out of a restroom because they don’t look like “proper women” or “proper men.” Safe2Pee is a high tech solution to this annoying social problem.

I was on a gender politics binge, so the following week I wrote about representations of astronaut Lisa Nowak in the media. I was pleased and surprised that nobody blamed her breakdown on her gender. Instead, her crimes were explained in the context of job pressure — just the way they would have been if she’d been male. It seems strange to be happy about sensationalist articles about a woman who assaulted somebody, but I thought it was a heartening moment in the evolving public image of a female geek.

Finally, I wrote about a bizarrely retrograde study out of Stanford that “proved” men act exactly the same in virtual spaces (like SecondLife) as they do in real life. The study made the New York Times and many other major media outlets, and yet nobody bothered to check on the researchers’ methods, which were shaky to say the least. Check it out if you’re interested in watching me debunk bad science made worse by gender bias.

Also, Charlie and I were on the Robert Scoble Show talking about our book She’s Such a Geek. We had lots of fun, and wound up talking a lot about how men and women need to network with each other more.

I’m flying out to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (whose hip acronym is SXSW). It’s all about BBQ 2.0. If you’re there, come say hi! I’m going to be on a couple of panels and will be doing a book signing for She’s Such a Geek — with ninjas! Seriously, I’m going to be sharing the book signing pavillion with the guys from Ask a Ninja. So if you don’t find me behind the stack of Geek books, I’ll be the dork over at the Ninja table asking the ninjas to sign my arm.All my panels and appearances are on Sunday, March 11 — here they are if you want to come:

11:30-12:30: “Non-Developers to Open-Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care.” This panel is sponsored by the excellent BlogHer. I am the “open source acolyte” on the panel, by the way.

3:30-4:30 (NOTE NEW TIME): She’s Such a Geek book signing. I will sign anything, including internal organs.

5:00-6:00: “I’m Good, Really! Self-Marketing for the Freelance Web Geek.” Kickass Gina Trapani (of Lifehacker fame) is moderating this panel, which will also include MetaFilter’s Matthew Haughey. Gina is also my roommate at SXSW, so if she doesn’t ask nice questions I can do the old “hand in ice water” trick on her that night.

See you there! Also, I’ll be in Austin Sat-Tues, so if you know of a cool thing that I should see, let me know!

Today my Wired article about “crowdhacking” went online, along with an investigative article I did for Wired News about how I paid people on Digg.com to “digg” an incredibly stupid blog I whipped up. Both articles focus on how easy it is to manipulate crowds online, especially when it comes to sites like eBay or Digg where we place trust in individuals based on how many other people have trusted their opinions.

Needless to say, my article on manipulating Digg has been dugg many thousands of times. Already, critics are saying that Wired did this story because Wired News owner CondeNet also owns Reddit, a small company that competes with Digg. This is absolutely not the case. I actually did extensive interviews with the founder of Reddit, and even spoke briefly to the one person who had ever successfully “gamed” Reddit. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the final cut in the magazine story for two reasons: 1. The person who gamed Reddit was already a top contributor even without gaming, so he was only gaming it for amusement (not a particularly interesting story); and 2. Reddit, as cool as it is, is nowhere near as popular as Digg and therefore there are few incentives for people to game it. So if we’d included Reddit in my original article, it might have made us look like we were promoting a Wired property and claiming it had the same influence as Digg, which it simply doesn’t.

So why did we target Digg and not Reddit in the Wired News piece? Again, the answer is simple. Digg is so big that an entire industry has sprung up around gaming it, and therefore I could hire a company that would pay people to digg my story. There is no such comparable industry or company that will game Reddit. Again, I love Reddit and I think it’s very cool — but writing about it in this context would have been like comparing apples and oranges.

Anyway, back to crowdhacking. Why is it so easy to manipulate crowds online? One theory is that people are easily swayed by crowd opinions, and so they jump on the bandwagon and “digg” a story on Digg just because other people have done it. (That’s why my scheme to buy diggs worked — once I had enough paid diggs, people thought it was popular and they started digging it too). Another theory, which holds more for eBay-style sites, is that people won’t give negative feedback to sellers on eBay because they fear reprisals. Thus the crowd inflates everyone’s reputation on eBay. Several weeks ago, I wrote my column about this issue, focusing on a company called The Gorb which is trying to solve reputation inflation by building more anonymity into reputation systems.