On Tuesday, the day when the HuffingtonPost‘s headline story was “SOTOMAYOR UNDER THE GUN” these were the site’s most popular stories:

Huffpo bills itself as a serious forum for liberal thinkers… I wonder what percentage of its clicks are purely skin? Huffpo’s always-sober lead story is a thin veneer of high-brow atop a smorgasbord of breasts, butts and assorted salaciousness.

This morning Perez Hilton launched the first major Twitterer’s ad campaign, for Sony Picture’s romantic comedy “The Ugly Truth.” As far as we know, Perez’s blast marks the first time a Twitter personality has leveraged his or her influence on behalf of an advertiser.

Readers will tweet their best dating advice to @uglytruthmovie. Their tweets will be featured on PerezHilton.com, where readers will rate the dating tips. The top 10 tips will be featured on the site this Friday. Perez is doing sponsored tweets (clearly marked) to promote the contest.

Perez began tweeting in early January 2009 and is currently the 20th most-followed Twitterer, with 1.2 million followers. Perez is the fourth most retweeted person on Twitter.

Just for the record…

Currently 218k views and 2700 comments.

Last week I tweeted this:

is Microsoft’s Atlas going out of business? e-mails bouncing, nobody picking up phone lines.

I thought someone at Atlas might get the message. Nope.

But today I got this from their able competitor Eyeblaster:

@hc Hey Henry, the phone is still getting answered over here. Anything that we can do to help out?

Eyeblaster is already ahead of its competitors in reporting and proactiveness, the SM focus just runs up the score.

BTW, I’m at twitter.com/hc and we’ll soon be pulling together a feed of staff twitter accounts.

I’m psyched to participate in a panel called “The Disruptors: Upending Old Media” sponsored by Mediabankers on May 14. Bonnie Fuller will be on the panel. And I’m looking forward to meeting Twitter-diva Martha Stewart.

I’m a sucker for start-up company tips and tales of failure. Some good ones in here, include a) content businesses suck, b) set a dollar value on your time, and c) the key to negotiating is having options.

For all his pursuits, Hilton keeps his goal simple: Media domination.

There’s been a lot of what the Hungarians call “hooo-ha” over Mark Penn’s recent WSJ article about the burgeoning army of salaried bloggers in the US.

The lede sets the tone: “In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.”

But the data just doesn’t line up with Penn’s assertion. First, we’re told that “20 million Americans” blog. Later, we’re told that “bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall.” That would be 40k bloggers. But somehow this number inflates to 452,000 people who “use blogging as their primary source of income.” Then we hear that “Most bloggers for hire … do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars.”

The final statement is correct. The rest is what we Americans call hooey.

The folks in Boston remind us:

The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That’s why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them.

But with the virtual collapse of AIG, Lehman, Citibank, GM, Chrysler, and many more — now even GE is in trouble — all that’s changed. Now it’s a risk to do business with the big ones.

We simply don’t trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it’s hard to even find a person to trust as we scream “operator” into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.

Jason Calacanis, the Donald Trump of the interwebs, has written an adrenalized chest-thumping column on living near the edge.

I’ve been to the precipice and faced the fall a couple of times. I’ve
learned a couple of things from the experience. I can tell you that
the first time it happens, you’re terrified, because everything you’ve
done–all the effort and dreams–will probably be lost (like tears in
the rain).

The second time it happens, you’re deeply concerned, but know it ain’t
over until you’re splattered on the boulders below.

The third time it happens, you smile and say “let’s get it on!”

Three?