Richtel's short posts are riddled with typos in an attempt at authenticity. But he hasn't given any of his characters an engaging voice — I can't tell them apart. There's clearly a puzzle to be solved, but a puzzle is not a novel. Unlike, say, the diary entries in Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence, these posts don't add up to reveal the complex mind of a dynamic character created by the author. Instead, they mimic the what-the-huh intractability of most Twitter streams.

Even Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin was perplexed by Richtel, wondering if he wasn't indulging in an ARG, or alternate-reality game.

The exercise seems much more fun for Richtel than for readers. He can zazz up his stuffy NYT image by boasting, "I'm writing a novel on Twitter." But had someone else announced a similar experiment first, would Richtel, who covers both digital culture and Internet prostitution for the Times, actually consider it newsworthy?

Rather, Sorkin's publicist, Joy Fehily, tells us, on his behalf. Or whoever answers her email. With all the layers of secretaries and managers and representatives in Hollywood, you can never tell. Yesterday, Sorkin's agent's assistant issued a nondenial, before politely informing us, "I have to hang up on you now."

Likewise, the skeptics will have to hang up on any remaining doubts that Sorkin is behind this movie. Really, could anyone else do the movie? Sorkin is the master of the office drama, picking up on the details that make an inside-baseball story at once believable to insiders and entertaining to outsiders. If it had been anyone but Sorkin, we would have scoffed, too.

The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale.

Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters.

Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:

Disclaimer: I don't work at Google. I probably never will. I'm not smart enough. As far as I can tell, almost nobody is. So it goes.

From a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, comes the following strange story ...

It seems that once upon a time, there was a guy - we'll call him Dick.

'Dick' was director of food services for a really big dot-com.

'Dick' had a wife. She was a highly placed executive at Bon Appetit....

It's not clear exactly HOW Bon Appetit came to acquire the Go^H^H big dot-com's contract. Right there, some thorny questions can be asked ... like, whether inside information influenced Bon Appetit's bid? ...

It seems that 'Dick' negotiated, it is alleged, two deals - the second deal translated into a end-of-the-year 'rebate' check being cut by B. A. and delivered to, yes, you guessed it, 'Dick'.

To make matters worse B. A., it has been said, did not deliver what they contracted to deliver, to big dot-com's cafeteria(s). Apparently there was a little watering down of quality, a little substitution here and there going on.

Big dot-com, it is said, did an audit. What sort of audit? It seems likely that there were private investigators involved ... I'd surmise a few bugs, here and there ... and maybe some chemical and DNA profiling of fruits and vegetables.

(If 'Dick' was like every other 'dick' I've ever known, he lined up every week to have his car detailed by the inhouse auto detailing service - so installing a bug in his car, as well as retrieving the audio, would have been child's play. Note to would-be 'dicks' ... don't be a dick.)

'Dick' was invited to a meeting of the BoD, I hear, and given two choices - resign, or be terminated. He's outta there, now....

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be known nationally as the patron saint of gay marriage, but back home, Newsom has built his career on things like buying fleets of hybrid vehicles and installing windmills near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Small problem — as Curbed SF points out, Newsom has never built a windmill or anything else energy-related anywhere near the Golden Gate Bridge. Not that such considerations would quell admiration from right-coast hacks looking to promote handsome, young politicians for the benefit of the party machine.

If you live in New York, you might think San Francisco's Gavin "Gavvy-gav" Newsom is some sort of John Lindsay-handsome but Michael Bloomberg-effective miraculous wonder. He married the gays! And instituted universal healthcare! And tans his hot bod with solar panels! It's okay, we understand — you guys have never had as firm a grasp on left-coast reality as you thought you did. In truth, Newsom's administration has failed on such basic points as violent crime, public transportation, and affordable housing.

While local New Yorker correspondent Tad Friend chewed on Newsom's presentation hook, line and sinker, even he can't be entirely blamed. The regional press corps has been filled with unapologetic boosters since the gold rush days. With Nancy Pelosi, our local political machine's grand inquisitor, running the House of Representatives, it's only natural that we press a lanky golden-boy type upon you poor suckers statewide. For my sake and yours, however, don't believe the hype.

Gavvy-gav was, and is, a ditzy jock who just happened to be related to somone endeared to the Getty oil fortune. As a perennial ringer for upwardly mobile softball teams otherwise stacked with the obliged noblesse, he rose quickly from above the muddied ranks of local activists and condo association street fighters. Picking topics which cost him little political capital locally while presenting them as daring moves nationally, Newsom has cemented the perception of his position firmly between the socially center-left and economically center-right.

Which, honestly, is about the perfect balance for the pot-smoking, free-market and gay-loving populace which forms his constituency. Still, it's no frame to hang an Obama-level cult of personality on. Newsom's feather-light shoulders and uncannily cheery countenance really can't take the weight of serious responsibility. Take pity, east coasters, and please don't bother to burden him with it.

(Photo by Franco Folini)

Undocumented workers chop vegetables and wash dishes throughout the food industry; why would Google's cafes be any different? The hypocrisy of America's immigration rules isn't the issue, though; it's the foolishness of Google's management.

Even if everybody does it, Google executives claim that it runs its business differently — and better. Claiming the moral high ground may prove harder now. Google's chief people officer, Laszlo Bock, has lobbied Congress vigorously to expand the number of H-1B visas the company gets. Getting caught with an undocumented nanny has torpedoed many political careers. The next time he appears in Washington, D.C., don't you think Bock will get pointed questions from self-righteously huffy Congressmen why he doesn't think American citizens are fit to serve his employees' meals?

Google, which has been feuding with Bon Appétit over the running of its kitchens for months, may be addressing the problem. "There are rampant rumors in all the kitchens that Guggenheim [sic] will be taking over the account come December," Deep Fried tells us — actually referring to Guckenheimer, a less highfalutin' food-service competitor to Bon Appétit. "Everyone is paranoid that when [Guckenheimer] comes in all the undocumented workers will get the can."

If that happens, who will serve Googlers the free meals they've become accustomed to? We suggest Larry, Sergey, and Eric don hairnets and gloves.

(Photo by midom)

The trouble started when Google hired John Dickman as its director of food operations. Dickman is married to Lisa McEuen, an executive at Bon Appétit. At the time, Bon Appétit and Google were two of the largest buyers of organic and sustainable food in the region; by picking up Google as a client, Bon Appétit gained considerable purchasing power. A source in Google's kitchens says that Dickman was "the reason Bon Appétit got the Google contract."

But in exchange, Bon Appétit, a division of Compass Group, got a very testy client. A former Google chef who had his own ideas about how to run the cafes profitably said he tried to get founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt interested, but they didn't listen "because I didn't have a Stanford degree."

Google's ethics cops have never looked askance at, say, Schmidt hiring his girlfriend for a high-profile PR gig, or Brin getting Google to invest in his wife's startup. But Dickman's marriage to a Bon Appétit executive raised eyebrows, and he left the company in January.

Two top chefs followed him out the door. Josef Desimone went to Facebook, in March. Dickman himself went to Apple, and Nate Keller, a protégé of Google's first chef, Charlie Ayers, followed him there. Both Desimone and Keller took several members of the kitchen staff with them. "All management staff has quit within the last three months," says a source at Google. That may be an exaggeration, but if so, not by much.

One issue that's been underplayed: The behavior of rank-and-file Googlers. "Pride is all cooks and dishwashers have," says a former Google chef. But Googlers, whose sense of self-aggrandized entitlement is already legendary in the Valley, have been taking out their frustrations on the people who dish out their food. Kitchen staffers are "invisible" to them, says a Google food worker — except when they somehow displease Googlers who expect free meals and servile deference, too.

Google's cafes have always been at the heart of its PR strategy, helping to portray the company as generous to employees, dedicated to doing things differently, and caring about Mother Earth. Google PR director David Krane took on the replacement of original chef Charlie Ayers as the task he worked on in the 20-percent time Google gives employees to work on side projects. I can't remember the number of times Krane cajoled me to enjoy a free meal, courtesy of Google.

He wouldn't want me there now. A Bon Appétit executive said in May that the company was planning to drop Google as a client. Arrogant, tightfisted, and argumentative, the Googlers were more trouble than the food-service contract was worth. Even so, Bon Appétit has been scrambling to patch things up.

"The two founders of Bon Appétit come on site at least once a week," says a Googler. "Other representatives from Bon Appétit headquarters are on site every day — as visitors. It's a very sticky situation. The kitchen staff isn't being told anything. When dinner is cut how many jobs will be cut, too? The thing that really gets me is that the Googlers have no clue and will be asking us questions when dinner and other programs stop. They won't know the truth either."

The company seems uninterested in letting Googlers know the truth. It's telling that Google PR won't go on the record to deny the cuts, though they're happy to persuade reporters on background that the cuts are limited. A spokeswoman, conveniently unnamed, told CNBC's Jim Goldman that the company had no idea where the rumor came from.

Here's an idea for Google PR: Go down to a kitchen, and talk to the people who actually make the food you love to eat while chatting up reporters. They seem to be better informed than you are.

(Photo by Jeromy Henry/Fortune)

Last year, when we aired the mildest speculation about Google cutting back on free food, commenters were outraged. Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company's resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they'd add perks, rather than cut them.

In 2004, they wrote:

We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge ... We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

What went wrong? For one, Google handed its restaurants over to an outside management company, Bon Appétit, which runs many Valley corporate cafeterias. The change did not go well, with Google and Bon Appétit constantly clashing — even over minor things, like whether kitchen workers could use Google's foosball tables. Star executive chefs like Nate Keller and Josef Desimone left. Desimone, who was recruited by Facebook, took many chefs with him.

The departures left Google's kitchens understaffed even as it undertook an expansion of its cafes to Alza Plaza, an office complex close to the Googleplex it acquired last year. Bon Appétit simply didn't have the staff to keep offering dinner, and Google didn't want to foot the bill to hire more.

Could this all stem from a change of heart by Google's formerly perk-crazy founders? Sergey Brin is said to have complained about employees' overweening sense of entitlement to "bottled water and M&Ms," a comment company flacks denied he made. Regardless of what Brin precisely said, it makes sense that he'd rethink his generosity. Brin has made his billions already. Spending to keep his employees motivated at startup levels won't pay off. Tightening the belt to keep profit margins high? That, and not free dinners, will preserve Brin's outlandish wealth.

The savings from cutting dinner, as well as some snacks, should be substantial. By one estimate, Google spends $7,500 a year on food per employee. But the phrase "per employee" is used loosely here. Employees often took their spouses and children out to dinner at the cafes, or wrapped up food to take home for the family — on shareholders' dime.

Fine, some Googlers abused the perk. Even then, consider the message Google is sending to employees: Go home and have dinner with your families. What will Thunder Parley, Google's self-appointed in-house food critic, say? This is a slashing of benefits Google executives can't sugarcoat.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))

Earlier today, users of the microblogging service were convinced Obama had picked Bloomberg. The Twitter users who got word of the real pick heard it through, yes, a Twitter account reposting CNN's story. Why didn't the campaign just direct people to sign up for CNN's breaking-news alerts? Those seem faster.

I am a med student with an additional major in Clinical Psychology. Ina's self-proclaimed gender is debatable (and any debatable factoids should be left out of an encyclopedic entry).

This particular Wikipedia editor must not have gotten to the chapter on gender identity disorder in doctorin' reference texts like the DSM or ICD. For everyone's sake, I hope this Wikipedia editor goes into podiatry.

As Fried rightly points out, for reference materials, it's a matter of style. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, for which Fried serves as a vice president, has a handy stylebook supplement that might help.

But Fried now has a bigger problem with Wikipedia: Her entry has been deemed insufficiently "notable" for the online encyclopedia.

In 1983, Knight Ridder and AT&T joined to launch videotext service Viewtron. Anybody with a dedicated terminal, phone line, and $12 a month could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. Norman Morrison, one of the subsidiary's VPs, said: "We're at the beginning of home information technology. We are dancing naked on the stage of history." Knight Ridder recorded a loss of $16 million on the project in 1984. Viewtron claimed as many as 3,100 subscribers before Knight Ridder folded the service in 1986. An impressive number considering all that equipment cost between $600 and $900. Bet it would've been more popular if it'd had porn.

In 1995, Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst, Washington Post, and the New York Times each contributed $1 million to create New Century Networks in 1995. None of them actually wanted any part of it. The opening paragraphs of BusinessWeek's 1998 article on the fiasco best captures the mood.

It was created with a name most of its owners disliked, with a logo one partner ''hated,'' in a city everybody rejected, with a mission nobody understood. So it was fitting that when New Century Network was kicked off last April by nine media giants teaming up to conquer electronic competition, even the launch party bombed. In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ''New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America's Newspapers'' awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating.

The papers sunk $25 million more into New Century Networks before it folded in 1998, laying off 40. Perhaps it was for the best, says a disgruntled vet: "Even had New Century worked, it still would have been something like Google News and that's not exactly the best business ever." Which is funny because Google claims Google News indirectly generates $100 million a year for the company and doesn't crow about it much. These guys? It would've been more naked dancing on stages and things.

After participating in New Century Networks, the now defunct newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder launched Real Cities in September 1999, intending it to be a network of local portals featuring "news, email, search services, e-commerce, and site-building tools," according to PC World. In an article titled "Knight Ridder and New Media: If You Can't Beat 'Em...," Richard Siklos, then at BusinessWeek, wrote

Analysts applaud Knight Ridder's strategy, but some wonder if its network of local sites will ever gel, and they figure Real Cities will someday have to be merged into a bigger entity.

Knight Ridder ignored the pessimists and committed to investing $25 million in its new online business. "I live in terror that some big thing's going to happen that I don't see coming," Knight Ridder New Media President Bob Ingle told BusinessWeek. What Ingle didn't envision: nothing happening. Users didn't flock to Knight Ridder's localized portals. They start their Internets on AOL or Yahoo in Des Moines and by clicking into the Google search box everywhere else. Knight Ridder was eventually sold to McClatchy for $4.5 billion in 2006. Last week, McClatchy sold Real Cities to Centro, a local-media buying agency, for an undisclosed — read: embarrassingly low — amount. Maybe just enough to cover this year's wages?

Before there was Yahoo Answers, where users post questions for other users, there was a similar service from the New York Times called Abuzz, which the Gray Lady acquired in 1999 for a modest-by-bubble-standards $30 million. In January 2001, the Times shuttered the service and laid off 70 staffers, citing an "unexpected slackening of advertising revenue." That was the service's only failure, says a person familiar with the project:

They shut it down after the bubble burst, even though they could have kept growing it, for just the cost of the servers. The Times was always nervous about quality. It was user-generated content, not high-quality editorial and this was before they got down in the dirt with About.com. If they had just left it alone, it would have been ENORMOUS by now

Even when you can't sell adds on ENORMOUS, it's still good. Google News doesn't serve ads. Maybe Abuzz could have referred traffic to NYTimes.com like Google News does to Google. Google calls that trick $100 million. You know what the newspaper's call revenue gimmicks like that? They can't remember.

Founded in 1997 and still operating today, Classified Ventures operates Cars.com, Homescape, Apartments.com, RentalHomesPlus, and HomeGain. It's owned by McClatchy, Belo, Gannett, Tribune and the Washington Post, and is probably the newspaper industry's most successful online venture. That's not saying much. On December 30, 2007, part-owner McClatchy told the SEC its 25.6 percent stake in Classified Ventures was worth $99.3 million. In a filing last week, McClatchy said its stake was now worth $86.5 million — a 13 percent drop in half a year. Craigslist, eBay's Kijiji, and even Facebook allow their users to list cars, apartments, and other goods for sale for free, threatening the paid-classifieds business online and in print.

Oh, and Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium? Don't get us started. Or do.

(Photo by DRB62)

Jason Kottke, a popular blogger, wrote about the Yearbook Yourself site on Sunday. Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter, soon adopted an Eisenhower-era look on his site, even as he complained about the trendiness of FaceYourManga. His colleague at Twitter, Biz Stone, was an early adopter of the manga look last week. A Twitter user, Vishy Venugopalan, notes that it's too late to go manga, and has followed Williams on the Yearbook trend.

This is fashion, of course, nothing more and nothing less. Countless startups have sprung up around the idea of blinging your "avatar," the fancy word entrepreneurs like to use for one's online depiction of self. But no one seems to be making money off this trend. Yearbook Yourself, improbably, was offered up by a chain of shopping centers, which advertises some of the apparel chains in its malls on the site. FaceYourManga only says that it is "property of Pixelheads," which appears to be some kind of Web design operation.

The profile-pic generator is nothing new. A Simpsons avatar generator was popular last year. Nintendo's Wii uses "Mii" avatars, whose manga-lite stylings became popular even off the videogame console. But the two new sites show that demand is spreading. There may not be a market in this, but there is a mania.

What we lose is any sense of who we're dealing with online. Unreal avatars serve to further the breakdown of online manners, and personal boundaries. It's easier to flirt with, or insult, a manga character or a black-and-white Photoshop job than a real person. Of course, our online friends never really were our friends, were they? Look at them: They're just funny pictures, acquaintances as trading cards. Collect them all.

(Profile pics by ev, biz, caroline, and midtownninja)

You won't find Tumblr in your sysadmin's RSS feeds. Tumblr bloggers follow one another on the site's internal Dashboard system. By design, the site limits bloggers to a few formats, gracefully styling their most self-aggrandizing prose into tasty niblets. It's like the beauty of a three-chord postpunk love song packaged as a middle-school love note: "Do you want to / Follow me? / Yes/No"

New York's chattering classes — the new old media kids, the new new media kids, and the even newer kids who want to be the new new kids — have gleefully hopped aboard Tumblr. Karp's ladylove, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, is there. So are a raft of current and former Gawker editors and their hangers-on, drunklinking one another late into the night, thanks to Tumblr's one-click reblogging tool.

"In one particular social circle," Karp explained recently, "we've collected a lot of New York users. It's a clique like any other where you'll see a lot of negativity." True, and what cuddly, darling negativity it is.

(Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 4:19 AM, Peter Rojas wrote:
If you could just delete the street number and street name that would
be great. Your post is the only place on the public web that has that
info, and I'm hoping that raising that small hurdle to finding it will
help.

I've been blogging for seven years and I've never felt the need to
publish someone's home address like that.

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 8:40 PM, Peter Rojas wrote:

If it's all the same to you guys, could you please remove my address from
this post?

http://www.cityfile.com/dailyfile/853

I get that this stuff is a matter of public record, but I've had a problem
recently with someone sending harassing materials to me through the mail
and
since I've just moved I'm hoping that they won't figure out what my new
address is. Right now you guys have the only mention of it on the web, so
I'd really appreciate it if you just removed the address from the post.

Thanks!

Peter

—
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

_____________________________________________________
Get RCRD LBL's free MP3 of the Day newsletter: http://rcrdlbl.com/newsletter/

(Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Penn repeated the same advice to Clinton, telling her not to worry about being perceived as "warm" or "nice." Gates's image didn't shift until he actually changed from being a hard-driving capitalist to saving the world.

We think Penn's next client should be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Hiring the likes of Penn is perhaps the only job Facebook's new flack, the D.C.-connected but tech-clueless Elliot Schrage is qualified for — so get cracking, Elliot!) After Zuckerberg's disastrous interview with Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas this March, I was told Lacy's manner — which struck some audience members as overly familiar — was an attempt to make Zuckerberg, who's robotically stiff on stage, seem more human. In person, Zuckerberg's quite engaging; he needs stage training, not an extra dose of "humanity." Penn seems brash enough to tell him as much. Mark, meet Mark — I think you two need each other right now.

"Follow spam" is what happens when a Twitter user sets up an automated script to subscribe to thousands of individual users' feeds, found by crawling Twitter's pages. Follow-spammers aren't interested in reading all those people's updates. They're actually hoping their new pretend-friends will follow them back in exchange, creating an opt-in list for their messages. These may be marketing, or just personal drama.

It seems like a victimless crime, but there are two problems caused by comment spam:

• 1. Each user gets a notice whenever a comment spammer starts following them. If you're getting Twitter on your cellphone, it means frequent interruption by annoying "TotalStranger is now following you on Twitter" text messages. If you don't have an unlimited messaging plan, the messages cost you as much as 15 cents each.
• 2. Williams's servers are already overloaded. "In extreme cases," he writes, "these automated accounts have followed so many people they've threatened the performance of the entire system."

That's it. I know, hardly a crisis. White people need something to be uptight about, and Ev Williams has delivered. I give it another three months before there's a service mag called Twitterer at my local Borders.

Joi Ito, an early Twitter user and an investor who helped launch the service's Japanese version, said in April that the wireless theory doesn't apply. Early on, Japanese users were 30 percent of the service's base, a percentage that has fallen as it has grown in the U.S. and elsewhere. But they used the site despite its flaws. Though Japan has long been text-message crazy, Twitter didn't have a Japanese SMS service at first. Even entering a message in Japanese characters required a workaround.

Ito thinks that Twitter's simplicity struck an emotional chord in the famously minimalist country:

It got crazy early adoption in Japan from the beginning. One of my theories is that a lot of services in Japan to be either closed or over-featured portals and simple services with good open APIs are not as common as in the US and it attracts developers and users who are sort of sick of a lot of the bloaty Japanese services.

Here's another theory on why Twitter spread: Ito himself. Though he's too modest to say it, the globetrotting venture capitalist is a key bridge between San Francisco and Tokyo. Could it be that Twitter spread in Japan in part because Ito, Web 2.0's trans-Pacific import-export specialist, took note of it, and others followed the trendspotter? We are talking about a social network, after all. People may stay because of their features, but they join because of their friends.

As late as last year, Ito was hedging his bets, favoring Twitter rival Jaiku in April 2007: "I've been helping the Jaiku guys out a bit as an advisor and I'm also a friend of Ev's." (That's Ev Williams, Twitter's founder.) Less than a year later, Jaiku had been sold to Google, and Ito announced he was investing in Twitter. It's not an explanation that coders will like, but Twitter's spread in Japan suggests success really does come down to who you know.

(Chart by Pingdom)

The Times's San Francisco-based technology editor, Damon Darlin, is recruiting for two positions to write stories on technology, some of which will only appear online. In print, the appetite for tech stories among the Times's stable of luxury advertisers is limited. Online, tech brands are begging for more Times-quality pageviews to advertise against. Two questions: First, how will that change the meaning of "All the news that's fit to print?" Second, will the Times be able to convince reporters that "online exclusive" reporting is no longer a second-tier career?

Wales's deep thought, which ends the piece:

I like to think about how there are about a billion people online now, and in the next five to 10 years there is going to be the next billion coming online. Interesting things are going to happen.

Those who have attended Wales's speeches know this is par for the course; Wales says things that seem like they ought to be interesting, but are, on inspection, not. Only the ranks of cultishly fervid listeners hanging on his every word manage to create the illusion of importance.

Indeed, the illusion of importance is what unites Wales and Wikipedia. W managed to find Wales's first wife, Pam, who recounts how Wales in his 20s dreamed of owning a castle and being a millionaire before he was 40.

Instead, he ended up as an options trader. He often couches his biographies to suggest that the money he made trading options let him fund Bomis, the porn portal from which Wikipedia sprang. The truth, people close to Wales say: He was an utter failure as a trader, and the money behind Bomis came from somewhere else. Wikipedia, as a nonprofit, has not paid off for Wales; nor has, to date, Wikia, his for-profit wiki startup, which he has mostly neglected.

Wales has been a failure at love, too. After Pam came his second wife, Christine, from whom he is separated. His entanglement with Canadian political pundit Rachel Marsden was brief, torrid, and ill-fated. He has estranged some of his oldest friends, substituting celebrities like Bono and Desmond Tutu for them.

With neither money nor love, what's left? Fame, but of an empty sort; the kind of fame that leads to strangers Twittering about him in airports. Not a fame that profits Wales, except for the speaking fees; and not a fame that makes his life better. His quest for money has veered strangely off course. Middle-aged, muddle-brained, and middle-income, Wales has realized none of his original ambitions. And the worst part? Everyone knows it.

(Photo by Anthony Blasko/W Magazine)

He's a leading Dallas attorney who even sued the firm he cofounded, Baron & Budd, and is a regular on blog Overlawyered. More interesting is that Amanda Congdon intervened in order to protect her claim on part of the company. Meanwhile, the younger Baron complains all this legal wrangling tied his dealmaking hands, and that the company nearly went broke twice this year.

The Rocketboom episode neatly explains why the world of online video so resembles film school, a parent-funded enterprise of self-indulgent auteurs with macroambitions viewed by microaudiences (including yours truly). Sony's deal doesn't affirm the potential of online video as a means of creative expression; it simply tells us that the rich, despite themselves, can't help getting richer. (Photos by Eric Skiff and Alex de Carvalho)

Can we just say it? Julia has the buzz and attention these second-tier bloggers and video makers have dreamt of for years, and they can't stand it. Maybe you guys need to wipe off that mirror on your laps and take a good hard look. Over here, we're nothing but grateful for her success — Wired's Allison story, sure to be read by hundreds of thousands of our kind of people, namechecks Valleywag five times. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Not all attempts to make wordcraft measurable are sensible. Under Sam Zell, Tribune newspapers are counting words, coming up with the laughable result that Hartford Courant reporters are worth more than their counterparts at the Los Angeles Times. The last thing publishers should be doing is setting up systems that reward the mindless gushing of words. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, pays writers a set monthly fee, with a bonus that varies with the number of pageviews their items generate.)

The Bloomberg way — "first word, future word, factual word, fastest word, final word" — emphasizes speed and accuracy in evaluating its reporters. (Some aspects of the news operation's culture may be shifting under new editorial leader Norm Pearlstine, but it's hard to see those basics changing.) News has value when it is actually new, and helps Bloomberg's customers make money.

And for all that, Bloomberg News is a relatively small part of Bloomberg's value proposition. Far more important are the prices that Bloomberg's terminals flash across traders' screens. News stories, in this scenario, are just one more commodity.

Not all journalism lends itself to such coldhearted analysis. Political reportage is a vital public service and, in the absence of local newspapers, it is hard to imagine how it will get funded. (Ironic that Michael Bloomberg, the company's founder, is now New York's mayor.) But it's hard to understand why business reporters, of all people, complain when their chosen career is treated like, well, a business. Merrill Lynch's pending sale of its stake in Bloomberg points to a future when the news is worth more, and those who write it, only as much as their last story. Depressing? Only to journalism careerists.

Brin has a personal foundation, funded with some of his Google fortune. One of the largest recipients of his largesse is the Michael J. Fox Foundation, an organization founded by the Canadian actor and dedicated to researching Parkinson's disease, from which Fox suffers.

In May, 23andMe announced that it was signing up Parkinson's patients for its genetic-testing services. The tests would be paid for by a $600,000 grant from the Fox foundation.

Wojcicki described the approach in a Huffington Post op-ed as "Research 2.0." To our ears, this sounds more like a good old-fashioned back-scratching arrangement.

Here are the questions people ought to be asking: Was Brin's donation really a donation, since some of it ended up going into his wife's pockets? And should the Fox grant count as revenues for 23andMe, since the money can be traced back to Brin, the cofounder of Google, an important investor in the startup? If IRS and SEC officials don't start looking into the deals, then they're not doing their jobs.

How can Brin make this right, if he really believes in his company's code of conduct and the "don't be evil" culture he helped foster at Google? Google should immediately sell its shares in 23andMe, at cost. 23andMe should return the Fox grant. And the Michael J. Fox foundation should return Brin's donation.

Brin, whose net worth was recently estimated at $18.5 billion, can easily afford to invest personally in his wife's startup. And there's no conflict in doing so; he'd merely be seen as a supportive, if indulgent, spouse. The problem comes when he starts using other people's money to fund Wojcicki's ventures. Google shareholders shouldn't be funding her experiments; neither should the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Nor should U.S. taxpayers be footing the bill. Especially considering that 23andMe's tests may not even be legal, according to the state of California.

Google's success has persuaded Brin that he doesn't need to listen to other people's advice, or follow their petty little rules; his gut instincts have made him fabulously wealthy, so why should he? He may not have crossed any legal lines in this latest episode of self-dealing — but it shows that he's on a path to do so. Sergey, stop now, before you really embarrass yourself.

That Facebook would throw this all in Schrage's lap is telling — about both Facebook and Schrage. Schrage, having shrunk his role considerably by following Sandberg from Google to Facebook, is likely desperate for some scrap of increased authority. And Facebook's geeks, getting assailed in the press for their decisions, are eager for someone slicker than they are to take the abuse.

Still, it needs to be said: Facebook's platform is technically immature, and needs a technical manager. Chamath Palihapitiya, whom Schrage is replacing as its head, may be inept at public relations — look at last year's debacle with Facebook's privacy-invading Beacon feature. But that doesn't mean he's bad at running a computing platform.

Schrage may not be a geek, but he'll now need to play the part. This should be fun to watch. And he can take comfort in one precedent: This isn't the first time the owner of an important computing platform has, in desperation, put a gladhanding slickster in charge. Microsoft's Kevin Johnson, who now oversees Windows, previously ran its sales operations. He also negotiated Microsoft's Facebook investment. He would surely approve.

In a word, yes. I instant-messaged Denton — that's the only way he communicates, really — asking him to elaborate, and he replied: "Oh, just because he's got such a nauseatingly successful track record."

A British-born Financial Times beat reporter sent to cover Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom, Denton reinvented himself as a technology entrepreneur. He sold a dotcom events business, First Tuesday, in a luckily timed deal as the bubble was bursting. He briefly entangled himself in an online newsfeeds venture called iSyndicate before starting a direct competitor, Moreover (that's "more OH ver," you Yanks.) But he quit as CEO years before VeriSign bought the company. He's the first to admit that his success is more from good timing than hard work.

Denton's clearly wealthy. He owns a fancy loft in New York's SoHo neighborhood. He funded Gawker Media, as best I can tell, out of his own pocket. At the same time, he invested in other blog ventures like Treehugger and Curbed. But he's far, far short of Thiel's $500 million a year. In 2004, when he first courted me as a blogger, I asked him where he made his fortune. He gave me a vague answer about currency trading and investing in London real estate. Denton is familiar with the business of manipulating markets. He cowrote All That Glitters, a book on on the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank caused by one young trader.

Having observed Denton for years, I have to say this: He's never seemed happer than when working as an editor. I was almost sorry to replace him as Valleywag's editor a year ago, because he so clearly enjoyed the role. When he appointed himself editor of Gawker in January, it seemed more a homecoming than a temp gig.

That's why I found Denton's note so mysterious. Could he be unhappy as the blogosphere's success story? Does he wish he'd instead joined the lucrative hedge-fund world?

I'll admit I barely know the man. In an age of oversharing, Denton makes an art of revealing no personal details. That's what makes those four words stand out: "Thiel makes me sick!" I almost wish I hadn't asked him to explain himself.

(Photo of Thiel by David Orban; Denton by Matt Haughey)

Jobs's scary-skinny appearance at an Apple event earlier this summer had everyone talking, including Lyons. While there turned out to be a reasonable explanation for Jobs's frail frame — aftereffects of surgery for pancreatic cancer — and people with Jobs's specific ailment have a high survival rate, Lyons concluded that posing as a guy recovering from cancer just couldn't be humorous for much longer.

Hence his attempts to write as Fake Jerry Yang and a Google insider. None of the alternate personae really took. Just as well. Some thought that after the New York Times unmasked him last year, Lyons's blog wouldn't be as good. Instead, he just got better. As Lyons proved on his book tour for Options, his first Fake Steve novella, he is riotously funny as himself. Goodbye, Fake Steve Jobs; hello, Real Dan Lyons. Where have you been hiding?

Foolish disregard for his severance agreement aside, one has to ask this about Lodwick: What kind of entrepreneur or investor puts his deal terms online, in napkin or any other form? That's an easy one: the same kind of entrepreneur or investor who would relentlessly blog his sad relationship with noted New York nobody Julia Allison, quit the Internet over its injustices, rejoin the Internet in an effort to spread Ayn Rand's message, and then, in a huff for the ages, quit the Internet once more.

Update: Ouellette has taken the memo down, saying he posted it to the Web by accident.

• In "Fears Over Facebook Beach Party," SkyNews reported today that

  As thousands of Facebook party-goers prepare to descend on a seaside town for a "Night Of Mayhem", local police are determined to stop it going ahead.

• In "Woman branded prostitute in Facebook scam," Britain's Telegraph reported in February that
  

  A woman claimed her life has been destroyed by strangers who stole her identity and set up a Facebook profile describing her as a prostitute.

• In "Facebook Tube party that ended in drunken riot was organised by City banker," the UK's MailOnline reports:
  

  One of the organisers of the London Underground protest that descended into drunken chaos at the weekend is a City banker who fears losing his job as a result, it emerged yesterday.

• In "Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt," the Washington Post reports:
  

  Since late March, 74,000 people had registered on a Facebook page created and run by Maher and a few other young Egyptians, most of them newcomers to activism. Maher would end up among what rights groups said were 500 Egyptians arrested during two months of political activism in Egypt — and find himself stripped and beaten in a Cairo police station, he said.

• In "Facebook 'dipping' craze irks pool owners" the UK's Telegraph reports:
  

  Teenagers are using internet satellite images to spot outdoor swimming pools before meeting for late-night dips.Once a venue is found, the youngsters use social networking sites including Facebook and Bebo to meet for impromptu swims and pool parties.

• In "Tycoon's son wanted over Facebook murder," Australia's News.com.au reports:
  

  An Arab billionaire's son listed as a Facebook friend of a murdered socialite has been named by police as a prime suspect in the blonde's death.

• In "Husband 'murdered wife before killing himself' after she confessed on Facebook she was leaving him," the UK's MailOnline reports:
  

  A husband is believed to have murdered his wife before killing himself after she told friends on Facebook they were splitting up, it emerged yesterday. Less than a fortnight ago Mrs Grinhaff, 42, updated her profile on the social networking site, Facebook, telling friends she was "currently splitting" from her husband.

• In "Facebook mob trashes £4.4m Spanish villa," the Register reports:
  

  A Brit-owned £4.4m Spanish villa has been laid waste by 400 rampaging teenagers after the owners' 16-year-old daughter posted invites to the mother of all wrecking parties on Bebo and Facebook.

• In "Internet' party turns into riot," This Is Cheshire reports:
  

  A girl's 18th birthday party turned into a major "riot" after an invitation was posted on social internet networking site Facebook. Gangs of teenagers tried to gatecrash the fancy dress bash after a friend of the unnamed youngster put a message about it on the internet.

  
  
  
  
  (Photo of the Facebook Tube Party by Annie Mole)

As new media gets big, it remains small at heart — and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" — though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle — Boing Boing's "band manager" — a multi