Media Madness is a column exploring books, blogs, DVDs, movies, video games, podcasts and anything else in the media universe that strikes our fancy. Let us know what you think: Email editor@free-times.com.

What's the top brand name in the United States? It's Google, according to the 2006 ImagePower Newsmaker Brands Survey, a consumer survey released Dec. 29. Here's the rest of the Top 10: (2) Las Vegas, (3) iPod, (4) YouTube, (5) eBay, (6) Yahoo!, (7) Target, (8) Oprah Winfrey, (9) Sony, and (10) the NFL. The survey's "broad definition of brands extends to places or celebrities," writes The Guardian, "and the biggest losers were over-exposed partygoers such as Nicole Richie, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, all of whom are seen to have lost their way." Conspicuously missing: Amazon.com, which came in No. 7 on last year's list, popular social-networking site MySpace and any classic American brands. For another view of top brands, check out Nielsen's "Top 10 Brands" list (www.nielsenmedia.com), which is based on product placement on broadcast network TV. Among its winners: Coca-Cola, Nike, Dell Computers and Cingular Wireless.

We'd like to say this surprises us, but nothing about the Bush administration surprises us anymore. The New York Daily News reported Jan. 7 that when President Bush signed a postal reform bill on Dec. 20, he added a "signing statement" in which he asserted the right of the government to open private mail without a warrant in certain circumstances. "That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed," wrote the Daily News . A Bush spokesperson denies the president was asserting new authorities, but Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, says claiming the right to open mail without a warrant "would be new and quite alarming." The revelation comes about a year after news that the administration has an ongoing warrantless domestic surveillance program.

Mindless diversion alert: The following web sites offer online quizzes that assess your political philosophy Ла franz.org/quiz.htm, www.politicalcompass.org and www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html. All three do a decent job of matching your answers to the political philosophy that best describes you, but they go about it in different ways. Franz.org's quiz, for example, is funny but forces users to make absurd black-or-white choices (such as whether you trust the FBI or the IRS more), while politicalcompass.org's questionnaire is in-depth and somewhat tedious, but not as easy to debunk and more grounded in knowledge of political philosophy. For its part, the advocates.org offers the shortest quiz and gives users the option of saying "maybe" on controversial political questions.

The huge success of YouTube is giving momentum to the concept of online video in general and Internet TV in particular, which has existed for years but has yet to make a big splash in the mainstream. The latest news: Sony announced Jan. 7 that it plans to produce a module that will connect to its flat-panel TVs and allow users to stream content off the Internet. According to a new technology blog on the New York Times web site, Sony has inked deals with several content providers, including AOL, Yahoo and Grouper, a video-sharing site launched in 2005. For now, the module would be useful for music and other short-form videos but not for full-length movies. Future versions of the product could include a hard drive, which would facilitate movie downloads.

Goodbye Santa, hello Jesus: 25 percent of the American people expect to see the second coming of Christ in 2007, according to an AP-AOL News poll. No, we're not making this up. Now that the credibility of the American people has been established, here's a few more things your fellow citizens are expecting in the New Year: (1) 35 percent think there will be a cure for cancer, (2) 35 percent expect the return of the draft, (3) 60 percent anticipate a terrorist attack in the United States, and (4) 80 percent expect an increase in the minimum wage. Now, our take: No. 1, wishful daydreaming; No. 2, politically impossible; No. 3, scary as hell but it could happen; No. 4, the odds are good. As for Jesus, let us know if you see him.

While we're on the subject of 2007, Wired.com has compiled a list of "Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007," with ideas ranging from the absurd to the thought provoking. Among the absurd: The prediction that sex offenders will start their own social-networking site. (Not that they wouldn't want to, but they wouldn't likely try, as the feds would simply shut it down and arrest its users.) As for the thought provoking, Wired envisions a television network picking up an Internet TV series and MySpace splintering as teens go for niche-oriented sites. Check out the full list at www.wired.com.

Lists, lists, lists! Yes, we were just yelling about lists a couple of weeks ago, but we have even more reasons to yell now: Time magazine's "50 Coolest Web Sites" list is out. No need to review such mainstays as MySpace and YouTube, so let's move on. Podcast Pickle (podcastpickle.com) gets a shout out for its 10,000-plus directory of podcasts and weekly Top 100 list. Drawn! (www.drawn.ca), a collaborative blog for illustrators, artists and cartoonists, draws props as a welcoming entry point to a fresh and wide-ranging collection of work. Digg (digg.com) and Tailrank (tailrank.com) are lauded for helping readers keep up with thousands of news stories and blog entries, respectively. And there's plenty more, too, from the practical to the frivolous, which are grouped under the heading "Time Wasters" and include celebrity gossip and gaming sites. See the full list at www.time.com.

Want an especially thoughtful version of the year-end list? Check out "The Year in Culture" on Slate.com. Instead of yet one more list touting The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America as the best album of 2006, you'll get authors, an art critic and an economics professor holding forth on such topics as Pluto's "demotion," the Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and a new edition of Hamlet. Don't worry Лаthere's some pop culture, too, including Stephen Colbert and the concept of "truthiness," Kate Winslet in Little Children and Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Yay, I'm (60 percent) Superman! Or so says "The Superhero Quiz" at www.superheroquiz.com. The quiz asks about 50 questions ranging from whether you're an intelligent geek, like redheads and had a bad childhood to whether you like high-tech gadgets, have a dark personality and wear a pushup bra. After giving your answers, the site gives you a short description of yourself and a ranking of which superheroes you most closely resemble. My top three: Superman, Spider-Man and Hulk (yeah, right). Bottom three: Catwoman, Batman and Iron Man.

Three million hits per day for an art gallery web site? Um … wow. That's how much traffic the Saatchi Gallery in London is generating since it overhauled its site and created a user-generated section called Your Gallery, on which artists of all kinds can post their work Лаwith no curatorial oversight or quality control. Thus far, the site has contributions from more than 20,000 artists, according to an article in The New York Times. In addition to letting visitors view art by unknown artists, the site facilitates buying and selling. "With dealers and collectors scouring student shows for undiscovered talent and students hunting for dealers to represent them, Saatchi has tapped a vein that can't stop gushing," says The Times. Check it out at www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart.

There's no doubt that 2006 was the year of YouTube, with the video-sharing web site catapulting from startup status to a $1.65 billion sale to Google. But success breeds imitation, and the number of YouTube challengers is increasing. Already, MySpace is adding some 40,000 videos per day in its effort to get in on the action, and it looks as if 2007 will see new contenders stepping out, too. One such effort is The Venice Project (www.theveniceproject.com), a collaboration between Skype and Kazaa co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. (In case "Skype" and "Kazaa" mean nothing to you, the former is a pioneer in Internet-based phone service and the latter is a controversial peer-to-peer music file-sharing site.) Who else is gunning for YouTube? According to The Wall Street Journal, Fox, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal are also talking about joining forces to launch a competitor.

We've all been there before: You pull into a crowded parking lot and circle around for a few minutes, only to find that there would be an open space if not for that jackass whose car is taking up two or more spaces. Well, now there's a web site dedicated to calling these people out: www.youparklikeanasshole.com. The site not only posts pictures of cars parked by such jerks, but also offers downloadable fliers to be left on the offending drivers' windshields. Judging by the small number of photos posted on the site thus far, this is an idea whose time might not have arrived yet. But with all the egomaniacal SUV and Hummer drivers in Columbia, maybe we can give this little site a much-needed boost.

Flaws in a Microsoft product? You don't say. The New York Times reported Dec. 25 that researchers "have found potentially serious flaws in Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system." Among the problems is a "serious error in the software code underlying the company's new Internet Explorer 7 browser." The company said on Dec. 23 that it investigating the browser issue and that it had no knowledge of any attempts by hackers to exploit the alleged vulnerability. Despite the best efforts of Microsoft to build the safest system possible, computer security analyst Nand Mulchandani told The Times, "My expectation is we will see a whole rash of Vista bugs show up in six months or a year." The Vista system is available to corporate users now and goes to the general public early next year.

As the son of a fallen televangelist, you might think 30-year-old Jay Bakker would want to get as far away from the sins of his father as possible. And in a sense, Bakker is rebelling from his father Лаa punk rocker, the younger Bakker sports tattoos, dons a ring through his lower lip and readily accepts homosexuality rather than railing against it. But the offspring of the infamous Jim and Tammy Faye is also a chip off the old block, choosing Christian ministry as his calling. Preaching to young Christian punks at such places as the Masquerade nightclub in Atlanta, Bakker runs a ministry called Revolution dedicated to making Christianity accessible and relevant to the youth of today. Bakker's experiences are documented in the six-part series One Punk Under God, which airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on the Sundance channel.

It's been awhile since Media Madness used the phrase "smash your head on the punk rock" (the title of a Sebadoh album), but with two punk-oriented entries in a row, we think it's time to commence smashing. The occasion for such revelry is a video podcast/phone-text tour called Capitol of Punk put out by Yellow Arrow (a project of Counts Media). Here's the idea: the D.C. area gave birth to such seminal bands as Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, The Faith and Fugazi and such legendary music spots as the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat. But when you hop on a tour bus (why would you do such a thing?), it's all about monuments and presidents. Capitol of Punk sets the record straight, leading you on a tour of key D.C. punk locations, including the club D.C. Space, which is now, ahem, a Starbucks. Visit yellowarrow.net/capitolofpunk to check it out.

You win! And you didn't even know you were a finalist. That's right, Time magazine has chosen "You" as the Person of the Year, thanks to this year's Internet-altering trend of user-generating content typified by such web sites as YouTube.com, Flickr.com and Wikipedia.org. "[F]or seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you," says the magazine. But before you get all cocky, keep this in mind: "Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom ■ [it] is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail."

Lists, lists, lists! The end of the year is upon us, and that means lists are everywhere. Culling from reviews throughout the year, Metacritic.com lists the critical favorites in books (Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky in fiction, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright in nonfiction); music (Savane by Ali Farka Toure); video games (different contenders for each console); TV shows (winner TBA); and movies (The Queen, barely edging out United 93 and Borat). Of course, the fun thing about lists is comparing them. Amazon.com agrees that Suite Francaise is the best book of 2006, while AVClub.com puts The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America at the top of the music list and Rolling Stone says the best movie is The Departed. You get the idea: Find lists, read them, test limits of your friendships by arguing passionately about them.