Not if Facebook and MySpace hope to tap the kind of budgets large advertisers have ready. Procter & Gamble spends $300 million in a month. Big buyers like that are used to TV, where "you can get a million dollars worth of advertising in one phone call," Cisco's Web marketing director Michele Gibson recently told us. Dropping coin like that, these buyers want publishers — not a publisher's website — to explain exactly who will see their ads and how. At Ad:tech in San Francisco last month, ad buyers practically screamed for social networks to "educate" them on how they can spend more money to reach an audience obviously moving online. That means more steak dinners — and for Facebookers in particular, it means sending out fewer impersonal customer-service emails and picking up the phone instead.

AdWeek's Brian Morrissey explains with an analogy:

The ad world will end up looking a lot like financial services where lots of investors trade on their own, but big institutional investors go through Goldman.

Google does everything it can to coddle its engineers, both financially and physically. By shifting from stock options to restricted shares, it has made their compensation less dependent on the swings of the market, and thus discouraged departures that might otherwise take place.

The management pool at Google is deep indeed, and some find themselves drowning in it. Making a splash is harder and harder, as the company reins in its chaos; to those fighting to get unloved projects launched, a clique close to Larry and Sergey seem to be the only ones at the company who matter.

Human-resources departments pride themselves on minimizing turnover. But Google's "people officers" might want to rethink their approach. A bit of churn could do the company good — from the top of the company on down.

So concerned that he monitors articles on child sexuality on Wikipedia personally. So concerned that he has started Wikiyouth, an organization unaffiliated with Wikipedia which attempts to "protect" children from "fearful adults." So concerned that he has, in the past, posted naked pictures of children in sexual poses to his website, The Humanist.

Before becoming the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director, Möller was elected to the nonprofit's board of directors by Wikipedia's users. What this points to: The problem goes much deeper than Möller. Wikipedia's inner circles have been taken over by an extreme cadre of advocates of "free culture" whose beliefs boil down to not having a problem with children seeing porn.

They're entitled to their point of view, of course. But they can hardly pretend that, compared to mainstream thought on the subject that it is, in Wikipedia parlance, a "neutral" one. And Wikimedia Foundation can hardly expect to continue raising millions of dollars from mainstream organizations like the Sloan Foundation if it tolerates the likes of Möller in its top ranks.

In every jest, there's a grain of truth. Later in the movie, Filo appears in a disorganized office, while Ash Patel, the executive ostensibly in charge of Yahoo's platforms and infrastructure, cleans up around him. Not a bad metaphor, except that insiders say they're surprised if Patel even does the clean-up work.

While Google's engineers are awash in a sea of computing power, and are challenged to come up with ideas to use it all, Yahoo's developers cope with an IT infrastructure that is at once too centralized and too disorganized. New CTO Ari Balogh has talked about fixing Yahoo's spaghetti code with new layers of APIs, or ways for independent developers to access Yahoo's websites and data. But making Yahoo more open to outside programmers won't fix the underlying problems with the company's code and infrastructure. Former Yahoo engineers talk about servers that its datacenter operators are afraid to unplug, because no one knows what they do.

It's no wonder, really, that Microsoft executives had talked about discarding Yahoo's technology and introducing their own if they bought the company. Microsoft may be no great shakes when it comes to Web technology, but having started later, there's less accumulated cruft to scrape off. Until Filo is pried away from his iron grip on Yahoo's servers, and do-nothing layabouts like Patel are fired, it's hard to imagine things improving at Yahoo.

They like right angles and clean surfaces at Austin-based interactive agency Tocquigny's offices. We do too. Photos by pierpont.communications

With high ceilings, lots of brick and a bicycle garage, Six Apart's offices never remind engineers that they're contributing to global warming by helping General Motors sell cars. (Photos by Stephen)

Pixar's Emeryville headquarters look like a set from one of their movies, except the humans look real. Photos by Moriarty at Ain't it Cool News

There's a movie theater at Netflix HQ. That and movie quotes from Dr. Strangelove will put you n this list every time. Photos by HackingNetflix

Most of the Googleplex is ugly — gray and corporate. But then there's the gym, swimming pools and vollyball courts. Photos by jyri, spanaut, FrameSniper and kikidonk

Google's Zürich offices also have a fireman's pole.

Nick Denton's new steampunk sweat shop on Elizabeth Street is the nicest in Nolita. (Full disclosure: I get to work there, and you don't.) Photos by Nick McGlynn

Etsy founder Rob Kalin's BFF Martha Stewart would never approve of this workplace. It's much too unkempt. But we do, for its handmade feel and the huge window onto Brooklyn. Photos by Amit Gupta and mmmfiber

Digg's headquarters are in an unremarkable corner of San Francisco — but dugg for the office signs that look like Digg badges. And the beer.

Frank Gehry designed IAC's New York offices for Barry Diller. He went for the classic so-ugly-it-looks-like-you-did-it-on-purpose look. And we think it works.

Microsoft remains obsessed with Google's dominance in search. Its brightest minds are confounded by its inability to catch up; they saw acquiring Yahoo as a way to instantly bulk up, and apply their algorithms to a larger database of searches.

But that presumes that all we do, all day long, is search the Web. The truth is search is just one of many online activities. When Google got to it, early pioneers like Yahoo had neglected it, leaving much room to exploit and improve Web search.

Yahoo and Microsoft both might do well to take as a given that Google will dominate search for the foreseeable future. Consumer inertia will dictate that, if nothing else; trying to make search ever fancier is a sure way to keep Google as the search engine of choice. Feature-obsessed Microsoft engineers will likely lard up Windows Live Search with more virtual gewgaws; Yahoo would do well to simply ape Google's simplicity.

The mooted plan to have Google serve some of the ads on Yahoo's search results, but only if they make more money for Yahoo is wise, and not just because it may pass antitrust scrutiny. Yahoo should not abandon the business of contextual advertising, as the art of matching ads to search keywords is known.

Yahoo, in theory, should know more about its users than Google; if it is ever able to apply that data to advertisements, it may well be able to make some searches more profitable than Google can. And Google, with its larger corpus of search queries, may squeeze more dollars out of some searches than Yahoo ever can. Cooperating cleverly doesn't mean giving in; it means maximizing one's profits. Suggestions that Yahoo fire the 2,000 or so employees of its search marketing business and throw all of its text-advertising sales to Google seem to go too far; but perhaps Yahoo should abandon all its algorithmic research and concentrate instead on analyzing its users' online behavior.

Downplaying search, too, seems wise. Jerry Yang says he wants to make Yahoo a set of "starting points" for Web users; but of all the possible ones, an empty search box seems like the least interesting place to start. What can Yahoo add to that blank space? Since Yang and Filo first started picking websites for Yahoo's online directory 15 years ago, they've created experiences for users — "programmed" in the media sense, not the software sense. Even user-generated sites like Flickr have relied on community managers to set the tone and show users what's possible. That has always struck me as Yahoo's strength, and they should build on it.

The biggest criticism of Yang is that he hasn't seemed to found Yahoo's purpose on the Web today. If he just stops searching, perhaps he'll find it.

Brooks is employed by Seesmic, a videomail startup, so some of the "two dozen videos" she made could arguably be seen as all in a day's work. But the rest? The mainstream readers of the Times must wonder what people like Brooks do all day. One supposes they could sign up on FriendFeed to find out, but they, unlike the people of the Valley, have real jobs. Brooks, for her part, makes no apologies for her online chattiness: Her website sums up her career from a first-grade report card: "Cathy likes to participate in any project, so long as she gets to talk." In that, she has found a community of like minds.

"The question from our standpoint is, how you find signal in the noise?" asks Peter Fenton, a VC backer of FriendFeed at Benchmark Capital. That assumes that there is any signal. Such is the complaint of Michael Arrington, who bemoans his 954 unread Facebook messages, and demands that Facebook make changes to accommodate him. Has it ever occurred to Arrington that he is, in the argot of product managers, an "edge case"? Entrepreneurs desperate for coverage, and aware that he never reads email, are trying a new way to reach him — and Arrington, in his compulsive neophilia, actually tries out the new medium, for a while. He then quickly tires of it, and throws a tantrum. Catering to such a person's whims is no way to run a company.

Is information overload really anything more than a self-inflicted disease of the Valley? I doubt it. But to the extent it is, Facebook is far better poised to solve the problem than a startup like FriendFeed. The Times mistakenly reports that Facebook is playing catch-up in gathering up its users' online activities from across the Web. Balderdash. It's just done a lousy job of marketing its ability to do so.

The technology behind Beacon — the Facebook feature which ruined Christmas for some Facebook users, by revealing their online purchases, and has gotten Facebook sued for allegedly violating a Blockbuster video-renter's privacy — is now being used to report posts to Twitter, Digg, Yelp, and Flickr. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg botched Beacon by presenting it as an advertising technology last fall. His recent spin that it was a technology meant for programmers, not Madison Avenue types, hasn't taken hold. It's likely Facebook will have to drop the Beacon name altogether before it successfully revives the technology.

But Facebook's News Feed is the most logical place to gather together the sum of its users' online activity. The users, after all, are already there. FriendFeed might make a logical acquisition for the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, or most likely of all, Google (its founders are all ex-Googlers). But a radical paradigm for the future of communication? Sorry, Zuckerberg got there first.

(Photo by Brian Solis)

As it stands, a producer can contract with a liquor distributor to produce a commercial at a profit, and then distribute the commercial on YouTube without paying a dime — even reaching underage audiences. Or he can get paid to place brands in the hands of sketch-comedy players. Again, he makes the money, not YouTube. I'm not sure that "innovation" is required so much as doing what television has been doing for generations, which is charging advertisers to distribute their commercial content.

YouTube's incredible rate of user adoption and massive market share has been largely due to the fact that it's reached a critical mass of content, which is better than any advertising the site could have bought. There is no video search anymore, really, just YouTube. What the company needs to do now isn't brainstorm new and interesting ways to sell ads against free content, but leverage what other distribution platforms are already doing — including Google search.

Because even if the site doesn't want to charge Smirnoff to distribute the company's commercials, YouTube could at least charge to have Smirnoff ads appear on searches for specific keywords. And if the online video site policed for copyrighted material, not only would it help make nice with content providers, it would also mean YouTube could then charge them for the distribution of show clips as well — which, ultimately, serve as advertisements for the shows, both on television and online.

As NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes pointed out, "It's all smoke and mirrors until the products launch." I have a bad feeling that YouTube is thinking that "plinking" — embedding product links within videos — and other failed interactive ad schemes of the past will save them. If Google simply put the screws to the people who can pay to play their content, in the time-honored tradition of entertainment distribution racketeers throughout history, the site would have been profitable a long time ago.

1. Current Facebook profiles allow users to move application boxes around their profile wherever they like. Zuckerberg's new profiles won't allow as much customization. "The question is whether users will like the return to a uniform "profile" that looks the same for everyone. I would bet that users actually prefer to customize the look & feel of their profiles," an exec at one of the major widgetmakers tells us.
   
2. Zuckerberg wants to integrate the News Feed with the Wall. One developer tells us: "Mixing in 'X wrote on Y's funwall" along with more personal messages from friends may deteriorate the quality of the new wall/feed feature as a whole."
   
3. Facebook widgetmakers hate the tabs on Zuckerberg's new profile. One complains that most apps will suffer due to them: "By default a few apps will get their own tab and most will be relegated to the 'more' tab." Another source tells us this is one area where Zuckerberg has definitely caved to developer pressure.

   Facebook has some improvements in the latest version which should mitigate some of this effect on developers. Nevertheless, a substantial fraction of traffic to developers' apps will likely be lost as navigation to new tabs is unlikely to equal current profile traffic.

   
   
4. This search bar better not disappear like it does in the other profile preview. If it does, one developer asks:

   How will users easily find their applications and search for new ones as well as do a quick search of their friends? Getting users to adopt to such a massive change without any major problems is going to be a huge x-factor.

I'd long thought that Battelle's flip-the-bird photo, used here, was a reflection of his charmingly combative personality. As a founding editor of Wired, which set the tech world on fire in the '90s and helped inflate the bubble, Battelle failed to stack up the tall dollars. He founded The Industry Standard, which sold more pages of advertising than any other magazine in American in 2000 and then went bankrupt in 2001. Battelle, in short, has been adept at chronicling booms, but not profiting from them. Until now.

Battelle is just the latest entrepreneur to cash out before his company goes public, a practice once frowned upon in Silicon Valley. But Federated Media turned profitable last fall, we're told. Being cash-flow positive means never having to say you're sorry. And it also gives entrepreneurs leverage with investors that they never had in the '90s, when building Web companies was much more expensive.

So at last he's earned what they call in the Valley "fuck-you money" — enough money to simply walk away, should a job turn unpleasant. In fact, we hear that's what Battelle is planning to do, albeit temporarily. He's told investors in Federated that he plans to take a leave from the business to work on his next book, The Conversation.

Where Battelle's profane wealth may get him in trouble is with the bloggers he represents. Unlike him, most of them have yet to cash out, or even turn a profit. Federated Media's take of their advertising — typically 40 percent — strikes many as too high, though most have yet to try their hands at hiring and managing their own salespeople.

But they shouldn't worry. Having enriched himself, Battelle is now thinking of them. After hearing rumors that one of Federated's blogs was in merger talks, he approached the blogger and encouraged him to come talk to Federated first before taking an offer.

In other words, Battelle is now contemplating a blog rollup. Rather than see his customers picked off one by one, with their ad inventory walking out the door, Battelle may use some of the money he's raised to buy blogs himself. It only makes sense. He knows his customers' businesses well, since he organizes conferences, orchestrates redesigns, and performs other services besides for them, in addition to the mundanities of selling advertising.

Battelle likes to think of himself as more than just a business partner to his bloggers. He's their buddy. He's their pal! This bubble has everyone frothy, and the valuations may be making some of the bloggers under his care unduly giddy. While Battelle may enjoy a tipple now and then, friends don't let friends sell drunk.

Not that Wikia is likely to get much more of Wales's time. He told the company's board that he would spend 10 percent of his time on Wikipedia, and 90 percent on Wikia, a promise he swiftly broke. There's no reason to expect that a change in scenery would change Wales's ways.

His domestic life is in no better a state. His wife, Christine, whom he is divorcing, has banned him from staying at their St. Petersburg, Fla. house on his infrequent visits to see his young daughter, we hear. A wise move on her part, since Wales conducted some of his obscene sex chats with Marsden from the guest bedroom.

"Everything with Jimbo is the creating of an illusion," says a source who knows Wales. "The illusion of being a good husband, the illusion of working everyday, the illusion of having ideas."

Which makes New York the perfect venue for Wales. From the theatricality of Broadway to the fanciful financial vehicles of Wall Street, New York is a manufactory of make-believe. The island of Manhattan increasingly resembles one large stage set — an artifice of a city. This is a man who's made his career on pretense, on cajoling others to labor for him. Jimmy Wales has come home. San Francisco will not miss him.

(Photo by Mary S. Butler, on a previous Wales visit to New York)

The incident largely ocurred within the confines of a forum specifically set up by Uloop to enable employees scattered across American college campuses to communicate with other. When on payday a number of employees found their checks were short, a thread was started to discuss the matter with each other — since management hadn't formally or informally alerted anyone to the pay cut, according to Garrido and Doolittle.

Garrido says management fired the pair within twenty minutes after bringing up the prospect of unionizing. He also reported that management began to call every employee who had left a message in the thread — shortly before deleting it entirely. Which sounds a lot like typical offline actions long deemed illegal by the NLRB: Intimidating employees in order to deter them from organizing, and removing employee-posted, pro-union materials from designated areas of the workplace.

When I asked Garrido and Doolittle if they had contacted, or been contacted by, any existing unions or support, they pointed out that they no longer had access to fellow Uloop employees, having been fired and banned from the message board. And while an ad-hoc group could possibly be assembled on Facebook, it offers no safe-harbor — management can moderate "networks," including deleting messages, and can monitor employee-created groups simply by joining.

In other words, until the NLRB has ruled one way or the other, if you're going to try to organize employees online, which in the case of Uloop's disparate workforce is really the only way, it's best to copy what contact information you can from employee directories and set up as secret and private a system as you can manage on your own. As poet and activist Audre Lord once pointed out, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

It wasn't the interview with now-former CIO Douglas Merrill, which served to convince me that the Canadian-nice Merrill will get eaten alive by the music industry. It wasn't the moment when Jim Killeen of Cobe, Ireland, a Catholic priest, argues the Pope's position on human sexuality with Jim Killeen of Denver, Colorado, the swinger and self-described "tranny chaser."

It was a few minutes into the film when noted Scientologist and Earthlink founder Sky Dayton makes an incongruous appearance to muse on the business of moving bits. Later on, the filmmaker Killeen intereviews his schizophrenic brother and sister about their experiences with psychiatrists and the medications they're currently taking, proclaiming that he feels they'd be better off without psychiatric care. Finally he declares on camera that he's a Scientologist, confirming my suspicions based on Dayton's appearance and the anti-psychiatry agitprop.

But that's just a side note in a watchable and somewhat entertaining but otherwise forgettable documentary. The best moments are the man-on-the-street interviews where people from around the world describe their own experiences running a vanity search for their name on Google. But it doesn't succeed on the same, earnest level that 24 Hours on Craigslist did, probably because what it has in geographic scope it lacks in range of characters as subjects.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Barack Obama and other candidates have demonstrated that the Internet is useful enough for raising money and, more importantly according to bloggers, impressing bloggers. Campaigns Wikia has done neither. After an initial spate of press, the site now goes entirely unremarked in a heated political season. Why? For a simple reason. There is actually no shortage of information about politics, much of it delivered by seasoned professionals. It may not be perfect, but it does not leave a void that needs filling by an empty-headed Internet philosopher. Politics may require transformation, and Anderson may be right that it's not happening. But to think that a Web page anyone can edit, but no one cares about, will change this state of affairs? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

(Photoillustration by CEOsmack)

A recent Fast Company article on Andreessen's current venture, Ning, went no better. You can practically hear the writer propping his eyelids open as Andreessen goes on, and on, and on, about "viral expansion loops."

What happened to the Andreessen who once ridiculed Windows as "a set of poorly debugged device drivers"? Why, he's gone online. Andreessen's blog is relentlessly entertaining. His verbal fisticuffs with the New York Times are must-reads; the vitriol oozes out of every line. And he posts just infrequently enough to keep us hanging on every word.

The only surprise, really, is that Andreessen took so long to start blogging. This world was not made for him. In the Web, he created one to suit.

(Photo by mathoov)

I don't buy the theory promulgated by self-interested rivals that blogs are nibbling away at CNET; it has always had rivals, and its sites' traffic has continued to grow as the general interest in gadgetry rises.

But if you look at CNET's income statement, the story is simple: revenues are nearly flat, while costs have soared. For that, the most likely culprit is CNET's diversion into content areas like food and babies, in which it has no expertise and its advertisers have no interest. Trying to expand horizontally has been a fruitless distraction. Rolling up smaller blogs to expand the inventory its salespeople can sell — that would actually make sense. CNET's deal with Yahoo to license its tech content and cooperate on ad sales is a positive sign of management focus, but it smacks of being too little, too late. Selling everything outside CNET's core expertise and spending the proceeds on a rollup strategy would be the right move, but I'm not sure CNET CEO Neil Ashe is brash enough to do that.

So why the emphasis on Yahoo's earnings? Financial reports are numbers, not guesses. They boil down a company's prospects into easily digested figures. But their preciseness is their weakness; they look back, not forward. What investors — and acquirers — pay for is future results, not past performance.

What Yahoo is worth isn't about how fast Panama can ramp up search-advertising revenues, or whether dropping it for Google will produce more money. It's about what Yahoo could do if you ripped out existing management and replaced it with executives who have the respect of their employees and can command, and obtain, results. If Yahoo's engineers could push out a product like Panama in months, not years, the way Google's seem to do.

The hidden message in Microsoft's seemingly firm price is this: Ballmer thinks Microsoft's Web properties are doomed on their own, and his crew of screamers can run Yahoo a bit better than the muddle-headed consensus-mongers in Sunnyvale. But not that much better. If he really believed in his own people's abilities, wouldn't Ballmer just up his bid and seal the deal?

• Web surfing: You might beat the company porn filters for a couple of days using Google Translate as a defacto proxy, but eventually that avenue for NSFW browsing will get shut down, and your IP and cubicle address logged in the process. I say flip 'em the bird and browse Fleshbot anyway — at least it's funny and classy.
• Private public records: Have a credit card? A mortgage? Vote early and often? Then you've generated reams of consumer data that companies can access for a nominal fee to see if you were the type to blow through Discover card cash advances on hookers and blow.
• Geolocation: Why do you think Sprint, which at the turn of the century focused on enterprise instead of consumer business, was one of the first American carriers to offer phones with GPS? Think tracking your delivery van as you take a lunch detour to an in-call professional. And those RFID keycards are quite handy at logging exactly where every carefree, anonymous blogger of an employee is on campus at all times.
• Personal email and IM: While I'd hate to scare our invaluable tipsters away, you might want to think twice before logging into Meebo or Gmail to send us tips, especially if you're communiques are routed through a proxy. The VPN plus SSL layer is a thin veil at best, and a port 80, XSS-comprimised gold mine of intercepted gossip-mongering at worst.
• Built-in videocams: If you're at a company that prides itself on security, then you might want to put a band-aid over your iSight lens. Because Mac OS X isn't immune to severe pwnage, and a leet hacker with a grudge or just a perverse interest can watch and record everything you do in front of your MacBook, from hookers to blow.

Sargent's interview with Ask a Ninja cocreator Kent Nichols went well until the Ninja himself joined the show via a video feed that didn't really work. "I can't even understand what he's saying," Nichols told the crowd after an inaudible Ninja monologue went flat. Another technical difficulty: cutting between the Ninja and the stage on screen, the audience got a nice look at the other open windows running on the computer running the show's A/V board.

Sargent's whole schtick is running his show as an amateur hour; he pretended to be fired from his last show, Infected. But how could Ad:tech's audience, hardly Sargent's Web-savvy, insidery target, know this? When Revision3 cofounder Kevin Rose took the stage as a guest, the lines between schtick and snafu continued to blur. Rose used to host a cable show on a now-defunct channel called TechTV. Sargent asked him if he'd ever want to go back to traditional media. Rose said no, of course, and explained that he preferred Internet TV to cable because its less structured and pre-planned.

Advertisers, though, kind of like a bit of structure. Never was it more clear why TV producers so carefully manage air time than when guest Tiki Bar TV creator Jeff MacPherson came on stage and told a five-minute story about not meeting Steve Jobs. Not meeting Steve Jobs? Could have been told in 30 seconds.

As the live taping wound down, Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk came on. And he almost saved Web television for the whole bunch, drawing cheers from the assembled ad buyers and sellers with a typical I-did-it-you-can-do-it-too rant. Sargent, ignoring the live audience, cut Vaynerchuk off and suddenly it seemed like Vaynerchuk didn't belong on stage. True. Vaynerchuk's video intro featured clips from guest appearances on shows hosted by people known by their first names — Conan and Ellen. Unlike online video, Vaynerchuk has made it to prime time.

Readers voted that I should attend the hearings as a Comcast representative. In true Comcast spirit, I stayed home, just like the telcos, and watched it online at VON TV. (Besides, I don't have an appropriately ugly suit to play the role.) Only one actual network provider showed up — Lariat.net CEO Brett Glass from Laramie, Wyoming — but the anti-regulation argument was still well-represented on the panels, if not in the audience.

The main arguments against government regulation basically amounted to the typical accusation that regulation will restrain free market competition; if network operators aren't allowed to manage traffic and content, that will prevent them from policing the Internet for child pornography and copyright infringement; and that ten percent of users are using 75 percent of available bandwidth — presumably to trade child pornography and infringe on copyrights using file sharing protocols.

The man of the hour, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, gave one of his typical speeches accompanied by slides. He turned the free market arguments against the telcos, paraphrasing Adam Smith in observing that producers rarely meet but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public. But the most interesting perspective in favor of network neutrality came from the Christian Coalition's Michele Combs. She argued that the cable companies would be happy to let the porn industry pay for access to consumers, whereas "grassroots" organizations like her own would be silenced.

Of the public commenters, none came to the defense of ISPs. Most brought up free speech issues. An impassioned "Tiny" Lisa Gray Garcia from Poor Magazine brought up the issue of the digital divide and how a tilted Web playing field could potentially restrict access to Internet adoption among communities, such as immigrants, who are just starting to get online and access media. No wonder Comcast didn't show up — public opinion was stacked against them. Thankfully, they don't have to worry about the average American truly understanding the issues, and game knee-jerk politics to their advantage if necessary.

Primarily through new ventures that not only go around the studios, but around traditional distribution entirely. While the networks and studios all have subsidiaries producing content strictly for online distribution, the talent contracts are still typical pay-as-you-go deals (and meager at that). Agencies have been most enthusiastic about new busines models — probably because they're already realizing efficiencies in terms of talent discovery using the Internet, which allows them to get around scouts and managers and reach new faces easily and cheaply.

A number of agencies have begun embracing new models. 60frames, an online video startup, took $3.5 million in venture funding and was incubated by the United Talent Agency. Creative Artists Agency is assembling a $200 million venture fund with partner Draper Fisher Jurvetson. International Creative Management is reportedly talking to Qualcomm about raising their own cash. And William Morris has helped back a $500 million SPAC to fund M&A deals, with Ashton Kutcher serving on the board. The draw for the agencies is the ability to own a piece of the company that distributes work from their own talent stables.

The only problem is, that gives them a conflict of interest when negotiating with the studios. Why pitch deals to the studio for the standard 10 percent cut when in-house deals would result in agency fees and back-end profits? And no one knows how this will shake out for talent. As LivePlanet producer Sean Bailey pointed out to reporter Laura M. Holson, "People in Silicon Valley too want their pound of flesh."

(Photo by Getty/Sharon Dominick)

• Fans versus friends: Be careful who you call a friend, especially in public. Because they may very well publicly deny said friendship. Awkward! Instead, say you're a fan — you show your respect without requiring their reciprocation. On the other hand, be nice to your own fans, since they're the ones who rabidly defend you in the comments and show up to your parties.
• Pre-empt gossip: Get caught snogging someone of the wrong age, class or gender? See a flash pop as you lean into that pile of drugs for a whiff? Spin it in public yourself before the gossip hounds and rumor mill can spin it for (and against) you.
• Think before you publish: Every appearance made and project undertaken by a star is considered from multiple career angles before it's agreed to. You might call your Twitter updates about bowel movements "radical personal transparency." Others call it "bad business decision."
• Personal grooming: You might be able to show up on the Google campus in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. That doesn't mean you should show up at the Webbys in the same outfit. If you make a pile of VC cash or flip your company, you might want to consider spending some of it at Barneys and getting a decent haircut.
• Don't swim without a buddy: Going out on the town, or just to South by Southwest? Bring a friend who knows these rules as well or better than you do. You never know when you'll need someone to push you into a cab or knock that tell-tale, post-rehab martini out of your hand just before getting run over by on-rushing Flickr users.
• Hire professional help: To some, this all comes quite naturally. They're called lawyers, stylists, managers, publicists, agents and the like. They make it their business to know these things, and can offer an invaluable objective perspective when your own vision is blinded by the glare of stardom. And they'll often volunteer when you're young and illiquid if they can trust you to be loyal when you cash in.
• Don't slag your competition — much: Fame, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, is a fickle food. There's a fine line between friendly competitive posturing and creating lifelong enemies. You really don't want to piss off someone you might eventually find yourself begging, on hands and knees, to hire or acquire you.
• Have a sense of humor, and humility: This is, by far, the most important, both for your public image and for your own self esteem. The Internet is not, in the grand scheme of things, serious business. We all get planted in the ground eventually. Have some fun and keep it all in perspective.

A lot like it used to — everyone's still working to pay their agent, their lawyer and their accountant. No one producing video for online distribution is even thinking about hiring a maid, gardener or driver yet — not even Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. And if you think Google AdSense will cover those costs, you'll probably end up begging for change on the boulevard of broken dreams. Or maybe the off-brand Spider-Man will have a heart attack and you can take his place amusing tourists. Licensing deals, merchandise and sponsors are still the only ticket to Tinseltown riches. And old showbiz types will milk young upstarts for every penny on that end. (Photo by Steve Zaslavsky)

Depressing, because Yahoo was supposed to be a bridge between the Valley, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue — not a battlefield. And once Yahoo is swallowed up, as it surely will be, those power centers will resume warring, to the benefit of their egos but at the expense of their customers.

Each suitor views Yahoo as something different. Microsoft wants to gain relevance in advertising and search. News Corp. wants to flip MySpace for a profit before its star fades further. Time Warner simply wants to rid itself of AOL, and all the bad memories of a failed merger. Google simply wants more pages to feed into its monetization machine.

No one wants Yahoo for Yahoo, save for embattled founder Jerry Yang. And he has not so much a vote in the matter as the threat that he'll have a nervous breakdown if the board sells his baby out from under him.

It is likely too late to save Yahoo. Indeed, it's not even clear if its suitors understand why they're pursuing it. News Corp. and Time Warner see it as a dumping ground for their online properties — but both would be shackled by a large stake in the enlarged business. Microsoft wants to apply its technology expertise to Yahoo's websites, but it surely underestimates the ruinous culture clash that would entail. Google doesn't really want to help Yahoo; it just doesn't want anyone else to run off with it. The result of any deal would be the status quo.

It's hard to see how Yahoo can escape the snare, and if it did, how it might once again pursue its ambitions of bridging the old world of media and the new. Cozying up to Madison Avenue's agencies meant that Yahoo missed the power of Google's automated ad-selling machine. Playing at being Hollywood studio made Yahoo's embrace of user-generated content too slow and to tentative. Someone will have to step into Yahoo's role. But its cautionary experience will scare away peacemakers. What once was middle ground is now scorched earth.

The Pulitzer Prize is a curious award to seek. It rewards obtuse articles on public policy, favoring newspapers with expansive Washington bureaus and reporters with D.C. connections. That's not a game that pageview-seeking online reporters particularly care to play. But if they did? They wouldn't likely win. Consider a list of online stories some sources suggested as Pulitzer-worthy:

• Matt Drudge's breaking of the Newsweek spike of Isikoff's Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story


• Charles Johnson of Little Green Football's debunking of the George Bush Air National Guard memos


• The Smoking Gun's debunking of author James Frey's memoir


• Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo's reporting on the U.S. attorney-firing scandal

Marshall's post comes closest; it won him a Polk award. But online reporters would do well to ignore the Pulitzers, rather than froth about their exclusion. They can reach an audience far larger than a parochial newspaper. And if they do manage to influence policy with their reporting? That in itself should be the prize.

• Focus on numbers. StyleDiary "might have not had MySpace level traffic," Handschiegel says, but because StyleDiary kept focus on its topic, a "60 percent return rate and average session time of something like 30 minutes" was plenty attractive for potential buyers. As is talking stats, not style.
• Promote yourself and the company carefully. Potential buyers wouldn't know about StyleDiary if Handschiegel hadn't made them aware. But self-promotion is tricky, especially for women. "Whoring yourself out and bouncing around the parties" isn't the way to do it, Handschiegel says. Neither is "Twittering 100 times a day." Actually, this advice applies equally to men.
• Accumulate real advisors, not Facebook "friends." "I was sort of mentored by two really successful serial entrepreneurs. I spent six or seven years working with them, watching what they did, how they conducted themselves."
• In conversations, add information, not just your voice. The best way to counter people's assumptions about female entrepreneurs — namely, that since you're a girl, you won't know anything — is by contributing to discussions online and off with actual knowledge. For a specific example, Handschiegel started talking about IP packets. I didn't follow, but she sounded way smarter than most of the wantrepreneurs I hang out with in Manhattan.
• Don't spend. StyleDiary was easier to sell, Handschiegel says, because it was "self-funded, debt free and cash flow positive." Any tricks to keeping it so lean? Things to avoid spending on: "Office, office supplies: things that make you feel like you're doing something." Also: "A lot of girl entrepreneurs go bananas thinking they'll make money. I would never spend the $3k it'd take me to be at SXSW just to party there."
• Sometimes you have to let your girl's-girl image go. "Nothing takes precedence over the business. That's why you see me at events and I usually got ready in the car, if at all."

It's called radio, and more recently, music videos. In both cases, record labels basically paid to promote album sales — either through payola, in the case of radio, or through seven-figure film budgets, in the case of music videos. The content itself was given away for free. Thankfully, digital tools make recording and mastering that much cheaper as well. The only change in thinking (and artist contracts) required is to see the recordings themselves as a loss leader for stuff you actually can sell, like tickets and T-shirts, fan club memberships and licensing rights.

The new MySpace Music, like industry-backed efforts with MusicNet, PressPlay and Bertelsmann's Napster, is doomed to failure because the labels persist in seeing recorded music as a profit center, not as a promotional platform for leveraging artists' brands. Of the four majors, only EMI hasn't signed on with that effort yet, and if former Googler Douglas Merrill has any sense, he'll tell the company not to bother. (Photo by AP/Peter Kramer)

Investment portfolios of universities, pension funds and charities expanded in value as Americans put their savings into stocks. As a result, stock prices rose. Richer, these institutions put money into venture capital funds. The funds spent like drunken sailors. As long as the stock market stayed up, they could reap the rewards of their investments. Venture capitalists, like mortgage companies, relied on investment bankers to lay off some risk by selling their wares to someone else — in this case, IPO stock to the public.

If all this reminds you of the U.S. mortgage crisis, a time where anyone could get a loan because it was assumed that the price of real estate would go up, up, up, you are not alone. During the stock bubble, the SEC made no bones about its inability to keep up with the number of filings it had to process, review and approve. Something similar happened at the mortgage banks. As long as everyone signed a piece of paper saying they knew risk was involved, the loans got written. Can you imagine a Netscape public offering — the company's main product was given away — sponsored by a financial institution supervised by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.? Me neither.

(Photo by Bub.blicio.us)

Gawker writers are each assigned a "Monthly Base" pay. No matter how much traffic their posts generate in a month, writers will receive at least their base. On top of that, productive writers can receive a "Pageview Bonus," which varies depending on which site they write for. All Gawker sites are assigned a "pageview rate". Any amount of traffic a writer generates over their minimum is paid as "bonus." By comparing their monthly base to the pageview rate of their site, a writer can determine how many pageviews they need to generate per month or, if they exceed their minimum, how much they're getting paid in total. A leaked memo explains the whole process in great detail.

For example, my monthly minimum pay rate works out to 256,000 page views a month. If I deliver under that, I'm (theoretically) reprimanded and encouraged to write more popular posts. To determine my pay for a particular day or month, I multiply my total page view count by Valleywag's pay rate. Our contract is pretty standard fare for performance-based pay, offering a "monthly base" and a "page view bonus." However, Valleywag's writers have soundly beaten their minimum post counts all three months we've had this program in effect. Our page view rate is our de facto pay rate.

Since this plan was announced in late December, we've known that the pay rate is to be changed on the first day of every quarter. I expected to be informed of the pay rate before the month started, but that hasn't happened, even after repeated requests to my superiors. We're working in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop, effectively being paid based on how many views we can drum up — and now the goalposts are being moved mid-kick. This is unnerving and a slap in the face to the "creative underclass" that writes for Gawker's blogs.

If a potential advertiser asked Gawker to start running its ads and promised to negotiate terms later, they'd be laughed out of the room — but that is exactly what the company is asking of its writers. If I were a salesperson, I'd expect to know my quarterly sales goals well in advance.

Gawker Media is, let's not forget, a for-profit business. The company might need time to make proper pricing decisions. But that goes both ways: Writers are for-profit as well and we should not be expected to work blind.

And, no, this is not an April Fools' joke.

(Photo by Hey Paul)

• The piggy post: Pranksters — either Googlers or mischief-makers posing as them — bought a Facebook ad targeted at DoubleClick employees with the copy "Please stop gorging on all our food. Maybe we won't fire you. Thanks!" DoubleClickers reportedly clicked through at astounding rates. Why? Because they felt insecure about how Googlers view them. Don't ignore your intuition, DoubleClickers. Your insecurities are real. Google employees — the armies of Harvard and Stanford grads who believe they are as smart Larry Page and Sergey Brin — will never cease to remind you that you went to Rutgers. How can we be sure of this? See our next reason.
• They made you reapply for your jobs: After Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned DoubleClickers that their jobs were not safe postmerger, Google managers echoed the threat by requiring DoubleClickers to submit their resumes for approval by committee. Then HR held job interviews. We can imagine how that went: "How do we know you aren't just some Rutgers graduate with a 2.75 GPA who will ruin our really useful company with your utter banality?"
• Underlings at Google aren't happy at Google, and they went to Yale: Even customer-service rep Googlers will look down on DoubleClickers. Why? To make their miserable lives seem fuller. As one tipster recently told us:

  The management within Google, especially AdWords and AdSense (the money making machines of the entire company ... engineering gets the glory but advertising brings in the big bucks) are completely disorganized and chaotic.

  Guess who's going to run DoubleClick.
• Not an advertising underling? There's equity to be had elsewhere: We just heard that ex-Yahoos are asking for $200,000 to $250,000 to join ad-supported startups in New York and the Valley. And if the startups are too cash-poor for that, they're getting big chunks of equity. At Google, you'll get, well, Google stock.

No, this is about the twisted dynamics of the music industry. Selling unprotected MP3s is all the rage now, even though label executives have insisted for years on copy-protected formats, like the kind Apple sells through iTunes. Forget Jobs's propaganda about Apple wanting to "free" music from copy protection. He doesn't care one bit about the digital-rights management software, or DRM, that record labels insist on. And he knows that most consumers don't care about the issue. He just wants to sell iPods, and his customers just want to buy them.

What Jobs does care about is other music stores having something Apple doesn't. The labels have been favoring competitors like Amazon.com with licenses for MP3 files — because they now fear Apple more than they fear piracy. And Jobs knows that DRM doesn't work to stop piracy, anyway. But what it does do is lock music to devices, because hardware manufacturers can't risk breaking the DMCA's circumvention provisions.

So Apple needs a new hook to win the labels back. Selling subscription music would allow Apple to lock down its music once more. According to reports of the proposals Apple and the labels are considering, iPod buyers would pay anywhere from $20 to $100 to get all the music they can download. Ah, but they'd have to download it from iTunes, onto an iPod.

Bundling music would give Apple a huge edge over the competition. Nokia's also proposing an all-you-can-hear music plan. But for all of Nokia's talk about cell phones replacing MP3 players, only 7 percent of cell-phone owners listen to music on their handsets. Amazon.com could try a subscription plan, but it's hard to see how it would make money, since it doesn't have the iPod's hefty profit margins.

Jobs comes out on top, again. Apple sells more iPods by giving the record labels what they want — copy protection and revenue — without having to share the iPod's profits. The compliant tech press corps will hail his plan as genius, forgetting he ever said anything about consumers wanting to own their music. The losers here are the musicians. Apple and the labels will divvy up subscription revenues, and the artists' cut will likely be smaller than what they'd make off of by-the-song sales. But since when has anyone asked their opinion about how to run the music business?

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Slide won't be running an IPO any time soon. The only way founder Max Levchin and Fidelity and T. Rowe Price cash out is by being acquired, perhaps for a hefty chunk of Facebook stock. Mark Zuckerberg's company already has a huge amount of eyeballs, but picking up Slide would give them even more — and most importantly, massive reach across the other social networks that Slide's widgets run on.

Zuckerberg has already said he wants to expand Facebook across the Web, looking ahead to the inevitable day when growth on his site stagnates, the way it already has on rival MySpace. Beacon, his first attempt to extend Facebook, flopped last year amid charges that the privacy-invading feature ruined some users' Christmases.

An ad network for widgets could be Facebook's answer to Google AdSense. Google makes a ton of money from ads placed on Google.com, but reaches thousands more sites by offering them a cut of ads it sells and places. It also helps track users as they move around the Web.

Combining Facebook's existing ad ventures with Slide's huge audience of drunken-party-pic posters would give Zuck a hedge against fickle users abandoning his site for the next new thing. As Google showed us, the advertising business is where the money is made. It would be smart for Zuckerberg to solidify his hold on the market while he still can. Of course, he'd have to buy Slide for inflated stock, not cash — but Web entrepreneurs like Levchin love to deflect reporters' questions about their wealth by saying it's all on paper.

If Zuckerberg is really going to model himself on Steve Jobs, he can't be accessible. His post-interview appearance at a Facebook developers' event was doubly foolish. It contradicted the message he was trying to put out: That he's letting go of managing Facebook as a product so he can run it as a company. Zuckerberg was trying to make amends for letting Lacy conduct a Wall Street-style CEO interview about money, power, and personality by address developers directly. But he made several flubs, and his underlings had to step in and correct him about which features Facebook was making available to outside programmers.

In other words, Zuckerberg's not yet a CEO, even as he's losing sight of the details of his website. He hasn't learned how to win over people with manufactured charm. And his just-a-programmer schtick is threadbare. One very fair criticism of both Zuckerberg and Lacy: Neither had anything to talk about at the interview. Jobs, Zuckerberg's role model, knows that he can only go on stage when he has something to announce — and he drives his engineers to tears making sure they deliver it for him. Zuck, admit that it's going to be a while until you master that part. And until then, do yourself a favor. Shut up.