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Are you ever on Twitter or Facebook and thinking to yourself, "I wish I was on Gawker"? Well don't click away, because we are actually on Facebook and Twitter. Magic, huh? A couple of things about how it works:

Whitney Jefferson grew up in rural Connecticut. In a town with only 4,000 people she had a choice: promiscuity or the loving arms of media culture. She would masquerade as a "late bloomer," A teen that couldn't get enough of message boards, geocities, yahoo pager, and the emo sensation that was rockingthescene.com.

Say hello to your editors: Mike Byhoff (left), Whitney Jefferson (center), and Richard Blakeley (right)

After terrorizing tech managers, Owen Thomas has decided to join 'em. Emerging from the shadows to replace him as the Valleywag is Ryan Tate, who's already relishing the idea of life in the sunshine.

Compete.com released their monthly unique visitor numbers today and Gawker had another strong month, staying ahead of old-line (and much larger) outfits like ABCNews.com and NYMag.com.

You may have started the day thinking you were reading any old gossip rag, but the people have clicked and Gawker is your best group blog of the 2009 Weblog Awards.

Here are snapshots of the world's biggest blog titles—as they are now and as they were at launch. Here's Gawker from 2003 when the gossip site was edited by Elizabeth Spiers—and from yesterday. Less change than one might expect: the logo has shrunk because the site has less need to trumpet its arrival; the ad is real…

Gawker has had a reasonably friendly rivalry with Bruce Wasserstein's New York magazine. At least three former editors of this site—Elizabeth Spiers, Jesse Oxfeld and Jessica Coen—have found refuge there after their sentence in the blogging mines. This history makes the latest audience numbers from Compete.com…

Without any breakout story, Gawker's pageviews last month were 16.7m. That's 108% ahead of the level at the end of last year. But now comes that slow-news time of year that-in ancestral Hungary-they call the cucumber season.

You might notice a small change to the design of this page: the 'skyline' array of top stories is now bigger and more easily clickable. With Gawker publishing up to 70 items a day, stories drop pretty rapidly off the page. So we're highlighting the day's top news more obviously than before for those readers who might…

"The higher the number of page views, the more accelerated the rate at which, say, the hydrochloric acid will be dispensed. (I believe this is analogous to how Gawker Media currently pays its writers.)" [From the AV Club's belated review of web snuff movie Untraceable.]

Thank you, Sue Simmons and Bill O'Reilly.

No celebrity deaths last month. But exhaustive coverage of the Eliot Spitzer's call-girl scandal helped boost pageviews in March. (A story that salacious is unlikely to be repeated in April but, then again, nobody expected New York's self-righteous Governor to blow up quite so spectacularly.) Anecdotally, Gawker has…

Time, belatedly, to update the Gawker masthead: Ryan Tate and Hamilton Nolan, bylines you've seen for the last few weeks, are joining the team. (Ryan is pictured below, and Hamilton above.) Ryan, who is based on the West Coast, will cover the overnight shift. He was a reporter for the boring San Francisco Business…