Bieber’s post was removed hours later, but the damage was already done.  Kristopik was flooded with an estimated 26,000 text messages and forced to change his phone number and cancel his Twitter account.

But before doing so, he had a few last words for Bieber and the Twittersphere. “I never asked for it, @justinbieber is a dick,” Kristopik wrote. “I still like him, but this was so low.”

The prank may end up costing Kristopik more than just his old phone number. The teen’s dad, Mike Kristopik, is most worried about the cost of the incoming international texts.

“If it costs us $2,000 or $10,000, it’s out of line,” Mike Kristopik tells the Detroit Free Press.

The lesson? No one messes with the Biebs — or his friends — and gets away with it.

Here’s a video posted by Kristopik of his phone being barraged by text messages and calls:

Meanwhile, the singer has said nothing of the incident, opting instead to alert fans that he’s “OFF TO EUROPE! PHASE 1 of operation secret concerts!” The guy who spars with Mike Tyson is so tough that he doesn’t even acknowledge his alleged brawls.

It must be a particularly pugilistic time of year. Earlier this month, Will Smith slapped a Ukrainian television journalist who tried to kiss him at the Russian premiere of “Men in Black III.” Smith then told the crowd, “He’s lucky I didn’t sucker-punch him.”

Whatever went down, neither Bieber nor Smith are the first celebrities to get into it with an invasive press. Three years ago James Gandolfini hit a man who was videotaping him shopping in New York City. And Sean Penn has a long and storied history of mixing it up with the paparazzi – mostly recently in 2009, when he pleaded no contest to vandalism after allegedly “kicking and punching” photographer Jordan Dawes.

Whenever a celebrity loses his cool with a reporter or photographer, the story inevitably turns into an occasion for getting judgmental about both sides. You don’t have to look far in the comments of any article on the Bieber story to see a range of self-righteous responses — disgust at the invasiveness of the photographer, incredulity that the seemingly mild-mannered J.B. could take anybody on, the inevitable disdain for a famous person who dares to erupt in anger.

The fact that it’s Bieber makes the story so unique. It’s a reminder that everyone – even guys with soccer-mom hairstyles and Disney princess girlfriends – has their breaking point. It’s one thing when Nic Cage goes ballistic. What else is new? But there’s an assumption that nice guys like Will Smith and Justin Bieber never lose their cool. That they exist to blandly take whatever invades their orbit with the unflappable grace of Ryan Seacrest getting ashes tossed on him at the Oscars. Yet in an era of long lenses and the easy assumption that everyone in the public eye is fair game to be touched, to be thwarted in their movements, to have their privacy violated, it might be helpful for the gossipmongers and ambulance chasers alike to remember that everyone has a dark side. And that someday, Betty White just might haul off and belt you.

Late last month, Klout altered its ranking algorithm. The Twitter canaries promptly launched into alarm mode, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. An #OccupyKlout movement even sprang up on Twitter.

The reaction pointed out three significant shifts now occurring in social media. 

If you’ve been in the habit of checking your Klout, you likely saw a change in your score last month. If you had Klout anywhere above, oh, 55 or so, you may have seen a drop. The system ranks out of an ostensible 100, but it grades on what my undergraduate professors affectionately called “the British system”: Basically, nobody except a superstar gets higher than 75. Justin Bieber, King of Klout, hovers close to 100. Ellen DeGeneres, that teacher’s pet, has an 87. Poor Jon Stewart only scores 73.

Klout had suggested before the shift that the majority of users would see their score stay the same or go down, but a straw poll of the canaries tweeting out sturm und drang on my Twitter feed on Oct. 27 suggests that the people clipped hardest by the new algorithm were the bigger fish in the non-celebrity seas, the ones who’d actually noticed they had Klout.

Talking about Klout scores to a non-Klout-using audience sounds a bit ridiculous. Mind you, so did talking about Twitter in 2007. In the academic presentations I give, mentioning Klout is akin to bragging about the high score I got in Super Mario Brothers back in 1993. Except that unlike Super Mario, Klout and its ilk — the increasingly complex measurements of influence known as metrics — are poised for real-world impact far beyond social media. Like Twitter.

When Klout emerged, however, in 2008, it was something new. It was one of the first tools to measure both reach — how many people you influence — and scale — how much you influence them. Klout’s algorithms also take into account the influence of those you influence. Meaning, on the surface, if you engage with leaders in your community or little corner of the Internet, you yourself are more likely to exert leadership influence.

On Babble.com, the day of the algorithm shift, Cecily Kellogg wrote, “Whether we love or hate Klout, the brands and agencies we work with utilize Klout scores to make determinations about our perceived value, so this is an issue important to us.”

It should be an important issue to anyone using social media. Unless, of course, you believe in a world where Justin Bieber is actually the most influential human alive.

What Klout is good for is giving people a reflective surface on which to see their own social media activities and interactions, relative to themselves and the context of their communities. Klout is good for letting you know whether you’re succeeding in your efforts to improve: It is not and cannot be a measure of success.

Now, there’s an argument to be made that Vanity Fair’s audience of Christopher Hitchens fans and Maureen Orth aficionados doesn’t overlap much with the screaming tweens that lip sync to “Baby” on YouTube. But its not just Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter who has felt the Bieber dip: Teen Vogue and People both saw substantial drops in single-issue sales when they put the pop star on the cover, and ostensibly those readers would be Bieber’s fan base. If teens are reading Teen Vogue (and who else would be?), why would a Justin cover cause a sales slump?

Personally, I thought the Vanity Fair interview was fascinating: That’s the one where Bieber tells Lisa Robinson about his desire to drop LSD before a concert (he’s joking!), his obsession with Michael Jackson (he’s not joking!), and chronic insomnia. Then again I, like most of Bieber’s Internet-savvy fans, read the article online and passed it around to my friends without ever paying a cent.

So was it simply hubris for Carter to put a 16-year-old (at the time) covered in smooches on the cover of Vanity Fair? Depends: The other “worst selling” issues of the magazine had giant movie stars like Will Smith and Harrison Ford gracing the front page during their prime star years. Meanwhile another tween celeb, Miley Cyrus, managed to have one of the best Vanity Fair covers of the year when she drummed up controversy in 2008 with some scandalous Annie Leibovitz photos.

So does this prove that Justin Bieber is just one more “final nail” in old media’s coffin … which is already so full of “final nails” it’s almost surprising there is even room for another? Or could there be another explanation for the lack of interest in Bieber interviews?

3. South African hipster band of the day: Not today, Die Antwoord! I’m really digging the Parlotones, a rock band from Johannesburg. They are currently completing the American portion of their 18-month sold-out world tour, so catch them while they are around.

Bonus track: Check out their single “Push Me to the Floor.“  It’s so weird and creepy and beautiful.

4. Justin Bieber assault of the day: A man jumped over the police barriers and knocked the teen star to the ground earlier this afternoon outside of Macy’s. What’s even more bizarre is the fact that Justin Bieber was playing two blocks from my office and I had no idea. Guess my FindBieber app is broken.

5. The worst “favorite” shows … of the day: Warmingglow has compiled a list of the 10 most head-slapping responses to people’s favorite shows. Yes, someone on the Internet actually thinks “Burn Notice” is the best piece of writing on cable. Then again, there’s probably someone on the Internet right now writing an expanded universe story where the characters on “Burn Notice” hang out with Chuck, so maybe it’s best to just shut off your computer before the urge to Google that strikes you.

Still though, is Justin Bieber country music? His award came in the form of Collaborative Video of the Year for his song ‘That Should Be Me,” featuring Rascal Flatts. Does it fit the specifications required of country music? Hard to say.

Why “That Should Be Me” may be a country song:

1) It’s about breaking up

2) “Women are bitches” mentality

3) Chords sound vaguely ballad-ish

4) The appearance of Rascal Flatts

5) Sounds like something Taylor Swift would write about a recent break-up with a celebrity

Why “That Should Be Me” may not be a country song:

1) Rotoscoping

2) The line “Did you forget all the mem’s that we made” (Real country crooners would never try to shorten the word “memory”)

3) Too many appearances of malls, texting

4) Boy with long hair and girlish features pouting into camera hasn’t really worked for anyone in country music since Gram Parsons.

5) He’s Canadian (Though that can work both for and against him, as half of the “country” in “country music” actually refers to Canada. See also: Shania Twain)

I was surprised to see Justin show up and accept his award, since he was almost a no-show at the MTV Movie Awards on Sunday. But hey, maybe he is trying to be a crossover star. What do you think: Is “That Should be Me” country enough to win a CMT award?