Here is what Yahoo shouldn’t do:

* Not hire from within, for the current senior management has proven to ineffectual and share the blame for Yahoo’s current misfortunes.
* Sell out to Microsoft at today’s prices. ($20-a-share would be something the company should seriously consider.)
* Merge with AOL, for that would be like tying too bricks with spider web, hoping that it would float.

What it should do:

* Look outside for someone with spark.
* Replace the current senior team with executives.
* Refocus Yahoo on the very qualities that made it great – building technology products for the common people.
* Focus its energies on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search as well as Yahoo’s e-commerce platform.
* Keep building on its Mobile offerings, for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst operators who are worried about Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
* Yahoo’s ad-serving platform needs to become more real-time with a drastic improvement in customer service.

Look, Duncan. I read Boing Boing. I'm fully aware that net neutrality is the defining issue of our time, except for copyright law which is also the defining issue of our time. What I don't need is another overlong blog post endorsing a candidate who locked up the San Francisco/Brooklyn Web 2.0 voting demographic last year. At this point, the only good gossip is if there's a Mission hipster tweeting for John McCain from a table at Ritual Roasters — and I mean doing it 100 percent unironically.

Sugar's CEO may have aimed to put employees on notice, in hopes of motivating them to perform. But leaving a shoe to drop is the worst mistake one can make in cutting employees, the meltdown's self-appointed layoff pundits agree. Sugar Inc.'s real problem may be self-inflicted: It took ad sales in-house from partner and investor NBC this summer, leaving it with a sales force still in development, right as the online-advertising market got a lot tougher.

See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives.

Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones.

Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry.

This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.)

There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.

He's made Web 2.0 as much as Web 2.0 made him. Now, Arrington needs to cut his name loose before he becomes just another has-been journalist with a trade magazine. There's only one way to do that: Quit TechCrunch. Back away slowly. Keep coming into work now and then — preferably to a real office, rather than commuting from his bedroom to his living room, as he still does today. Post some of the biggest scoops. Talk up the next conference, party, or other cobranded event with Calacanis and Om.

I don't do predictions. I'm always wrong. But Mike, this is true: I used to get tips all the time that "Michael Arrington is doing some vaguely dishonest thing. I know, because I know someone. Run with it, Valleywag! Keep digging! Follow the money!" Today, Friday October 24, 2008, with everyone freaking out over money, with tech employees looking for the truth behind the phony all-Is-well messages coming from their leaders, Valleywag gets more tips than ever. I've noticed one undeniable trend: The number of rumors about TechCrunch I get has peaked.

It's over. Michael Arrington may end up on Charlie Rose again. Michael Arrington may get called "kingmaker" again. Michael Arrington, kingmaker! But TechCrunch? Mike, that's so Web 2.0. (Photo by Joi Ito)

The gravitation of people like Calacanis and Scoble to things like Twitter says more about the individual than about the product. They are mediocre journalists who at one time could draw an audience for reasons other than their journalistic skills. My guess is that they don't even understand their own celebrity status, and with it fading, they continue to shop for a way to get it back (Valleywag probably does more to help than anything they are doing).

I used to read Scoble because he was a good source of information about what Microsoft was up to. I used to read Calacanis because I thought he did something transformative at AOL (turns out I was wrong). They both have short attention spans, which think is a bad combination when combined with a journalism degree (or at least it should be).

Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user is, has adopted the "milliscoble" as a metric. One-thousandth of Scoble's average daily output on the 140-character-update service equals one milliscoble. By his own standard, Scoble has been falling behind; in the past 100 days, he's been running 32 percent below the 1,000-milliscoble mark. If it falls to zero, will he suddenly be three times as productive in real life? Nah. It will just mean he's shifted his timewasting entirely to FriendFeed.

An IAC insider ... tells me that it was budgeted, at least initially, to burn through $18 million in three years, with (wildly optimistic) hopes for advertising revenue of at least $10 million in that same time. More than half of Tina's 20 or so full-time staffers were budgeted to earn $100,000 or more a year.

Got that? Tina Brown's website will spend $28 million over three years. No wonder they call it a "beast." I thought blogs were supposed to be run on the cheap. (Photo by New York Magazine)

Because Quantcast places both Julia's personal site and her startup, NonSociety, at "fewer than 2,000 U.S. monthly people." Either way, Julia wisely lets her dinner guest publish the claim, giving her plausible deniability. That's part of Julia's cover-of-Wired appeal — she doesn't need a website. (Photo by Nick Noyes.

We sure do love to watch New Yorkers catfight on Twitter. But if you literally "let everyone get time on stage" you won't have a punk-rock utopia, you'll have a boring parade of bad ideas and worse PowerPoint. Think TechCrunch50 expanded to TechCrunch52,157 and you get the idea. Still, we sense it coming: Look for CenterNetworks' own startup event in early 2009. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Arrington headlined his own post about the news "GigaOm ignores my advice," linking to a long, telling post from earlier this year in which he attempted to explain why blogs should remain financially independent. What he really means is: GigaOm shouldn't take VC because TechCrunch is the only blog that's supposed to get VC, so Arrington can buy his competitors.

Arrington has said publicly that he wants to be the one to consolidate the blogging sector into one big Voltron-like online publishing empire. When he wrote this morning that "we are one of the last large blog networks to remain independent," he probably wasn't intentionally lying. But his Web-2.0-centric worldview ignores bigger non-tech networks such as the local Sugar Publishing and the British Shiny Media.

By taking on five million dollars in further investments, Malik hasn't just picked up capital to expand his staff and marketing. Like a pufferfish circled by sharks, he's made GigaOm a much bigger ball for Arrington or anyone else to try to swallow. (Photo by Brian Solis)

The business of blogging has been run into the ground by, as lovable former productivity fetishist Merlin Mann put it, "a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold." Competing with "thought leaders" in your "space" isn't just cocky, it's foolish dollar-for-dollar. Besides, as Agger points out, the hardcore blog audience of yore is migrating to Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook to discover blogs — not Google, and not other blogs. The audience a baby blogger has to impress has already said, "You know what, you get 140 characters of my attention." Good luck with that.

To answer Slate's question, it depends on what you feel you deserve. If you want to join the private jet-set class, you'd be a fool to take up any form of writing as a career. But if you are blogging for your own sense of intellectual and civic pride, as fast-fading and uneasily monetized as that may be, then forget about the Benjamins. (Diagram by Jay Hathaway)

February 23, 2008:
FlashMash Meet NYC

Februrary 25, 2008:

Valleywag

March 10, 2008:
SXSW '08

March 11, 2008:

Valleywag

March 12, 2008:
Rana Sobhany's Rock Band Party

March 13, 2008:

(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

March 18, 2008:
Tumblr/Rock Band party

March 31, 2008:
Mashable/Causecast drinkup

April 5, 2008:

Valleywag

April 11, 2008:
PopCrunch 2008

April 22, 2008:
Web 2.0 Expo/Digg party

June 7, 2008:

(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

June 18, 2008:

(Photo by Brian Solis/bub.blicio.us)

July 15, 2008:

Valleywag

July 18, 2008:
LA Mashable Tour

July 20, 2008;

SummerMash LA

August 21, 2008:
Mashable Monthly

September 20, 2008:
Blog World Expo

September 30, 2008:

(Photo by Mark Heithoff/DETAILS)
October Details magazine profile.

(Top photo by Caroline McCarthy)

Shown above is Jacob Mullins, the manager in question. He started at Microsoft last week, but is still listed as VentureBeat's ad-sales contact on the site. We take that to mean Marshall has yet to find a replacement.

Odd: Marshall seems eager to explain a now-irrelevant personal connection that couldn't possibly prejudice his reporting. But he's reluctant to come out and state the obvious: He's lost the only guy bringing in money for his blog. That's worth disclosing. Matt, consider this a gratis job listing.

1) Fox News, please let us post clips instead of threatening to sue.

2) Adopt a Digg-like voting system to let the audience choose the questions.

The first demand seems as easy as the second is sure to be rickrolled. (Photo by The Fun Times Guide)

Many popular blog services offer "bookmarklets" — software tools, installed in browsers, which allow users to quickly post an article they're reading online. The "Share OnSugar" bookmarklet's source code appears identical to the code Tumblr founder David Karp and engineer Marco Arment wrote for the "Share on Tumblr" bookmarklet. Compare the two, above: Sugar hasn't bothered to do much more to the user interface besided adding tags and categories, which are hidden "advanced options" in Tumblr's bookmarklet. The code is an even closer copy.

Here's the problem for Karp: Though popular with a certain crowd, Tumblr is far from mainstream. So users who fall in love with OnSugar blogs may never learn about the original.

We'd point out that Tumblr itself is just a happily dumbed-down ripoff of LiveJournal, which predates it by nearly a decade and offers all the privacy features Tumblr users have been begging Karp for, but after OnSugar's more blatant blow, that seems cruel.

"That particular blog was never about the money, but it definitely makes things more difficult if I have no chance of paying the writers," says White. "I’m torn because there’s so much news every day about them and I’d like to see someone cover it closely." We'll do what we can, Tim.

The site's disappearance is disappointing. But the whole episode served to reveal Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster as a control-freaky jerk who's sensitive to criticism, and not averse to litigation when he doesn't get his way. That's good information for people to have — and we wouldn't have learned it without White.

Lyons says he had intended to bring The Secret Diary to Newsweek, but lost heart after Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June, when it was apparent to all who saw him that the real Steve Jobs had lost a lot of weight.

So it wasn't because Newsweek ran afoul of Apple's top flack, Katie Cotton, in bringing Lyons on board, as the more conspiratorial rumors have suggested. Or it was, but then Lyons was introduced to Robot Steve Jobs and decided it was better to submit than resist the inevitable extinction of humanity at the hands of attractive, well-designed and verbally-abusive overlords from the Cupertino company. The reprogrammed Lyons now reports that Jobs looked better at the recent iPod Nano rollout event, and he may start blogging again.

(Photo by Mark Coggins)