Screengrab

The Huffington Post's Twitter account was hacked Sunday afternoon and it wasn't even fun, just offensive. In a rapid-fire series of tweets containing grandiloquent soliloquies like "hello gay boys" and "lol wes is a gay boy," a hacker who claimed the nom de hack "cloverfdch" locked the feed down tight, amusing and puzzling HuffPo's 1.5 million or so followers for several minutes until he was locked out again and HuffPo resumed tweeting links to its posts as if nothing had happened.

The closest cloverfdch came to having real fun may have been the tweet (not captured in the screengrab at the end of this post) that read, "Sup bitches??? Hacked by: New York Post."

It may have been a coincidence but Ashton Kutcher's famed @aplusk account was also hacked at the same time. Kutcher was quickly on top of the problem, even though his Foursquare account was compromised as well. Kutcher had a warning for the hacker:

Ok mr hacker, you only made one mistake. You hacked my Foursquare and I now know your address. Whoops.... This is gonna be fun.

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) January 15, 2012

If cloverfdch was responsible for both hacks, his or her response to Kutcher's warning is pretty easy to imagine.

Screengrab of compromised HuffPo account-click to enlarge

I get a little wistful when I think of my teenage home, Athens, birthplace of democracy--a system betrayed on a daily basis by our politicians. Of course, every house in Athens was run by a vast squadron of slaves. The Huffington Post is by contrast far more egalitarian. We have dozens of salaried employees; all of my assistants are paid a living wage; and those bloggers who blog without pay do so on a voluntary basis. I do not force them to blog; they are compelled to do so by the force of my charisma, and they are compensated--in memes. If you need any further evidence that they are not slaves, let me assure you that I could not sell them to Nick Denton or Carol Bartz or Tim Armstrong if I tried.

The greatest Athenian to come before me was perhaps Socrates. The journalists of his day were known as sophists. Their business model sent them in search of rich, fatuous and impressionable young men who would pay the sophists to tell them how to live, as if they were buying some kind of subscription. In a tremendous revolution, this model was overturned by Socrates, who created a new media called philosophy. Instead of asserting lessons, he would ask questions, just like a good blogger. He held his discussions in the agora, ancient Athens' version of the Internet. And his conversations were memorialized in dialogues, roughly similar to today's comment sections. His saying, "The life unexamined is not worth living," was one of the world's first memes. Socrates, however, died before he was able to monetize his revolution. Why take hemlock when you stood the chance to sell your little agora act for 315 million drachmas?

In Greek we have a wonderful word, eleutheria. It means freedom--what could be better? And under the new dispensation, AOL and the Huffington Post can offer our bloggers so many freedoms. They are free of the whims of editors. They are free of nit-picking fact-checkers. They are free of the contracts shackling so many magazine writers. They are free of the burdens implied by the payment of a wage. They are free, free at last, of the burdens of deadlines, style and grammar that turned so many journalists of the last century in places like Fleet Street and Times Square into hacks.

Paid Content reported today that Thrillist will be partnering with the Huffington Post and ESPN, taking its content beyond a newsletter and setting it live on the city-specific sites of these two major publishers.

The HuffPo partnership is kind of a no-brainer, since Thrillist founder Ben Lerer is the son of HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer. But it's interesting that Thrillist content will now appear, for example, on ESPN sites dedicated to Chicago, Dallas, L.A. and Boston.

Revenue at Thrillist comes from promotional partnerships instead of traditional advertising, so we'll have to see how they handle relationships with publishers who may have their own advertising or editorial commitments.

All in all, its a sign that Thrillist is going strong. The lone data point in the Paid Content piece was a doozy, but it's internal so lets take it with a grain of salt. "The number of subscribers across its 18 editions has nearly doubled to 2.2 million since last December, says, John Wiseman, Thrillist's VP, marketing and partnerships."

Anyway, various versions of the HuffPo story have popped on less rigorously sourced sites. In a jeremiad that bemoans the state of web journalism, he tosses some awesomely barbed metaphors at the HuffPo, calling it:

• "the internet Death Star"
• "an insolvent law student willing to dance for a few extra dollars"
• "a stripper wearing reading glasses"

It's a political site that pays its writers poorly/nothing, yet hawks Chevy Malibus in banner ads, and then it goes and publishes unbylined, unsourced celebrity gossip! He is extremely on point here. He concludes with a headline of his own: "JOHN MAYER SLAMS HUFFPO: "GO F**K YOURSELF!" The Huffington Post acknowledged his rant with an update noting that he did not deny whether he and Jennifer were getting back together... Sounds like they want to piss him off some more.

We're hoping that, instead of another impassioned rant saying that the Huffington Post is an avaricious hypocrite, though, John Mayer responds with a simple diss track. The refrain could go, "The Huffington Post is full of s**t / I wonder if they'll invite Jen to guest edit." Two birds, one stone.