I’m surprised this merits a send-up from everybody’s favorite Taiwanese animators–on the level of their takes on enhanced TSA security screenings or Lindsay Lohan getting out of jail–but our friends at Next Media Animation are savvy about the power of hanging on to an Internet meme or, in this case, an Internet meme sweatshop.

NMA depicts Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh as an evil stealer of memes, over-worker of cats and receiver of Internet flames. It’s pretty funny.

The statement by Apple is the first direct public acknowledgment of the suicides by a client of Hon Hai, which along with its subsidiaries and affiliates also goes by the trade name Foxconn.

“We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn,” the Apple statement said. “Apple is deeply committed to ensuring that conditions throughout our supply chain are safe and workers are treated with respect and dignity. We are in direct contact with Foxconn senior management and we believe they are taking this matter very seriously.”

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“Ouch,” said Richtel about the reaction to the piece.

After its appearance in the Times, Richtel (pictured here) got flamed all over the Web by bloggers and mainstream media types alike.

His offense? Using two recent blogger deaths and a heart attack of another blogger, Om Malik (also at our dinner), as the whisper-thin thread he hung his story on.

Actually, Richtel did have a lot of caveats in the piece, whose first problem was probably its very inflammatory title, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” along with an admittedly purplish lede:

“They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece–not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.”

Well, I, for one, am pretty exhausted since I started blogging almost a year ago. But I am blaming that on my two sons, aged 3 and 6, whose perpetual-motion-machine energy is hard to keep up with at my advanced age.

A trend! Old-lady mothers of small boys who blog, attend a never-ending Little League game and never sleep! Get on it, Matt (who will know this cycle well soon enough–congrats)!

In any case, I think you pretty much have to give big mainstream media companies a semi-annual pass on three-examples-is-a-trend stories they so love.

And, at the very least, Richtel’s piece did result in some funny videos.

Like this one from BarelyPolitical.com (best known for foisting Obama Girl on the world), a comic investigative piece on blogger sweatshops: