Another dent in its once-sterling reputation is the last thing Sony needed, after having to recall 9.6 million laptop batteries because of fire hazards.

Which colors a later statement from the same article:

Sony [was] late to the exploding markets for portable music players and flat-panel televisions.

U.S. Investigates Sony for Antitrust Violations [NY Times]
Earlier: Sony battery explodes at Yahoo's Mission College campus [Valleywag; photo by Kevin Collins]

The conference this year is completely sold out...press will be asked to cover the event from the Pop!Tech Screening Room...The room is right around the corner from the main conference room and is specially furnished with Steelcase furniture and HP Plasma Screens. Best of all, you can snack in the Screening Room.

"Around the corner" means out the door, down the sidewalk and around the corner - exiled press doesn't get to go in the same door with the $2500-ticket attendees. Then they watch a high-def version of a live stream available to anyone on the Net.

But oh boy, snacks!

So which bloggers ponied up the cash and which took press-pass second class? PC Magazine's Gearlog is in the screening room, writing, "It took me most of a day to get up here from New York, but you can watch it from the comfort of your cubicle." Cheeky blogger Robert Scoble says, "I'm so jealous I'm not at PopTech." Meanwhile, blogger Jason Kottke says he's in the audience.

So why did PopTech bother inviting journalists at all? No editor wants to send his reporters to Maine just to watch a conference on TV, and isn't it cooler just to let the attendees blog it?

Not that there's anything wrong with that — boring guys built this industry. Just that the profile of Karim is the second-most painfully dull New York Times article I've ever read (after the Weddings section). An excerpt:

On Wednesday, during a walk across campus and a visit to his dorm room and the computer sciences building where he takes classes, Mr. Karim described himself as a nerd who gets excited about learning. Nothing in his understated demeanor suggests he is anything other than an ordinary graduate student, and he attracted little attention on campus in jeans, a blue polo shirt, a tan jacket and black Puma sneakers.

Last time a newspaper described someone this dull, the next paragraph read "No one suspected he'd murder an entire family."

With YouTube, Grad Student Hits Jackpot Again [NY Times]

H.P. Could Be a Finger-Pointing Case [NY Times]

But the curve is just an illustration of the tired "80/20 rule," found in Middle Management for Dummies and economics textbooks.

The rule that 80 percent of x comes from 20 percent of y is a fundamental guide — but shouldn't those testing the world's most popular desktop operating system already know this stuff? How about a more meaningful graph — like one illustrating the record six years it's taking to get an edition of Windows out the door?

A Challenge for Exterminators [NY Times]

REALTY BITES FOR YAHOO! [NY Post]

In another sign of Google Inc.'s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company's top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.

Google products released this week

• Google Code Search
• SearchMash (check the privacy policy)
• Google-Litcam Literacy Project

Google products promised by CEO, who is clearly doing acid on the job

• Google Truth Predictor

Eric:"Toward the beginning of the year, we recognized that we needed to get good at partnerships."
Translation: "Torward the beginning of the year, I was getting bored."

Eric: "We tried to pick partners that represented different initiatives that we wanted to work with for a long time."
Translation: "We threw darts at the infamous Google Master Plan."

Eric: "[Our partners] have a way of reaching customers that we do not on our own."
Translation: "Damn it, why did we promise we wouldn't make a Google PC?"

Eric: "You do partnerships for a reason."
Translation: "Like our VP of products says, we just toss stuff against the wall and see what sticks."

Eric: "Everybody's moving to MySpace, basically."
Translation: "I'm reading 2004's trade journals, basically."

Eric: "Microsoft continues to claim to enter the market, but we really haven't seen them yet, they're just getting started. I'm sure eventually Microsoft will be a competitor."
Translation: "Oh snap!"

Eric: "We have a lot of cash. What should we do with the cash?"
Translation: "No seriously, what do we do with all this damn money?"

Google's Chief Looks Ahead [TIME]
Earlier: Chaos theory: How to tell if a Google deal means anything [Valleywag]

It isn't, naturally — it's more likely just that the paper naively picked up a revenge story from businessman Murry Gunty. See, Pincus blogged about his classmate Gunty this January, recounting some old college ethical scandal and citing Gunty as an example of an unpunished bad businessman. Gunty wasn't happy, so he called Six Apart — the people who host Pincus's blog — to tell Pincus to take down his article or remove Gunty's name.

Pincus, liberal First-Amendment-Rights-believing hippie that he is, said no. Six Apart's execs checked out the situation, decided Pincus was right, and stopped bothering him. A few weeks later, the Washington Post turned it into a story of how bloggers can wreak havoc on someone's reputation.

The Post says Gunty declined to be interviewed for its new story, but Pincus accuses Gunty of hiring a PR firm to get this story published. Geez, if Gunty did that, he really got screwed, since the Post calls him out for censorship and raises the whole unsavory issue to the public again.

So Pincus is acting like a paranoiac, and even his blog commenters are arguing that the Post piece was really pro-Pincus. Looks like you can't rile up a mob like you used to.

This is a stupid move for Pincus. First off, he could have passed this off as a positive article just by picking different excerpts. Chalk that one up to his lack of slick PR ability. Second, this is especially bad timing since he's recently re-entered the public eye by returning as Tribe's CEO just a few weeks ago. He's exposing the tired "old vs. new" trick, which bloggers don't buy any more, and that can't help his popularity among the insular crowd at Tribe (where many members know and love Mark).

In any case, Mark shows the responsiveness that makes Tribe users love him, posting a comment on his own post acknowledging other commenters' points. Chances are this is just a hiccup for a happy hippie.

(Update: Edited for clarity)
Hard-Learned Lesson: Don't Try to Censor A Blogger [Washington Post]
I got skewered today in the washington post! [Mark Pincus]

Perverted Justice, a sting group that poses as kids in chat rooms to entice would-be pedophiles into incriminating sex chats, came under fire a while back for their aggressive tactics, which range from acceptable watch-dogging to entrapment. Now the group works with NBC Dateline to make the show "To Catch a Predator," a could-your-kids-be-next ratings-grabber that's buying PJ plenty of publicity. How will PJ capitalize on that?

By boycotting Google.

At the moment, PJ lists Google as the top of its "Corporate Sex Offender Registry," for not removing from its search database every pedophile website that PJ reported. Fair? No. Embarrassing publicity? Yes. If PJ incites a boycott with Dateline's backing, Google won't cave — that's not their way — so the little tiff could blow up in the next few weeks if PJ decides to go all out.

In the end, PJ will lose its battle as the publicity dies out (give it a month tops), so this will just be one fun fight to watch.

The Perversions of "Perverted-Justice" [10 Zen Monkeys]

That detail is missing from the AP report about Google's purchase of the Wojcicki's home:

The busloads of people that show up to take pictures of the house and garage have become such an annoyance that Google asked The Associated Press not to publish the property's address, although it can easily be found on the Internet using the company's search engine.

Ah, that wily press, helping desperate technotourists find the hidden hotspots.

Wojcicki says she needed help paying her mortgage at the time — and who better than Google, which had just received a million dollars in funding.

Google buys garage that launched Internet's top search engine [Associated Press]

Blodget recently resurfaced on a blog called "Internet Outsider." His latest post begins: "The most surprising thing about RBC analyst Jordan Rohan's comment that MySpace could be worth $10-$20 billion in a few years is that he deemed this assessment 'audacious'—and the press seemed to agree. Why is this audacious?"

Ahem. It's audacious because the company, bought for $518 million, is so precariously perched on an aging model of social networking that it could lose its sweet advertising deals as soon as the market implodes.

Given all of this, it's distressing to see Blodget quoted — without irony — in the New York Times. These days, Blodget is practically a voice of reason. A scary thought, unless you're into the "blind seer" archetype.

Could Microsoft Bid for eBay? [NYT DealBook]
Internet Outsider [Blodget's blog]
Henry Blodget [Wikipedia]

• "Game of Clue"
• "CSI: Corporate America"
• "a Dan Brown thriller"
• "Da Vinci Code"
• "a proposal for a made-for-TV movie"
• "a whodunit"
• "Encyclopedia Brown"

To the Times's credit, the case really is this silly. The report produced by HP's investigators is filled with after-the-fact circumstantial evidence, its writers identifying George Keyworth as the boardroom leaker using his word choice quoted in CNET (The word "pooped," says the report, "is also an unusual term." The word "lectures" made the investigators guess the leaker had an academic history). To compare it to any real detective case would be an insult to the profession.

Hewlett's Hunt for Leak Became a Game of Clue [NY Times]

Tech Firm Shows Off Glitch-Free Software [Washington Post]

Breaking News! During a deep investigation, we found Google's most media-saturating executive hiding in plain sight on the cover of Newsweek that's been out for days. Marissa Mayer's anti-biometric face-morphing technique ensured that millions of web programmers would stream right past her in the checkout line. God she's advanced.

It's hard to make out the details, but if you examine the demarcated area, and squint real hard, you'll realize OH MY GOD IT'S HER.

Newsweek cover [Wausau Daily Herald]

The fact remains, however, that for technology firms, venture investing is a delicate balancing act. "The types of deals that might be strategic to the corporation might not be the most financially attractive," Ms. Munce of I.B.M said.

The opposite can be true, too. While not strictly a venture play, Yahoo reported a gain of $563 million last year from a $10 million investment it had made years earlier as part of a technology agreement with a promising start-up. That start-up was Google.

Venture Investing as a Strategy, Not to Make Money [New York Times]

"People go by the cockroach theory: When there is one roach, there's going to be more."

HP bought the slogan and is already building an ad campaign around it.

Focus is on Hurd as HP stock price reacts to troubles [SF Chronicle]

One popular use of social-networking site Facebook.com is to flirt with other members. As it happens, Facebook Inc., the start-up company behind the Web site, has been doing some serious flirting of its own.

People familiar with the matter say the company has held separate acquisition talks with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Viacom Inc. over the past year. Now, say some of these people, the start-up is in serious discussions — again — to sell itself to Yahoo for an amount that could approach $1 billion.

Ugh, a flirting metaphor. Am I the only one who feels like an Arrested Development character seeing young George Michael's plain, quasi-Mennonite girlfriend and blurting, "...her?"

Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts With a Big-Money Deal [Wall Street Journal]

Disruptor 1: Netvibes (Custom web portal)
Hero (pictured here not knowing he'll be Photoshopped to look silly): Founder Tariq Krim
B2 says: "Netvibes currently doesn't accept typical Web ads — the kind Krim denounces as 'Advertising 1.0, in your face.'" Instead he gets "sponsors."
B2 means: "Netvibes took $15 million in funding. It doesn't have income, just pointless deals that get media attention until a conglomerate buys the company."
Netvibes competitors B2 doesn't mention: Goowy, mobileGlu, Pageflakes, Protopage, Start, and over 30 others

Disruptor 2: Salesforce.com (Customer resource management/application platform provider)
Hero: CEO Marc Benioff
B2 says: "It's true that Benioff is known throughout the tech business for his bombast, and he's always predicting that Salesforce is about to do something amazing. But he's not all talk."
B2 means: "Benioff is about to launch a product update that will bring his company up to speed with competitors Microsoft and Oracle. Yawn."
Favorite Benioff quote: "We will destroy Oracle and SAP because they won't be able to respond to the innovation we are about to unleash."

Disruptor 3: Clearwire (Wi-Max broadband wireless provider)
Hero: Founder Craig McCaw
Actually, this guy's story checks out as far as I know — real business plan, real success. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

Disruptor 4: Zopa (Person-to-person loans)
Hero: The business model
B2 says: "Zopa is closing that gap by using the Web to allow personal lending on a massive scale. The startup was the first company to introduce peer-to-peer lending in the United Kingdom 18 months ago and is about to launch in America."
B2 means: "In America, Zopa will compete with Prosper, a personal lending site that already has a head start and funding from the same venture capital firm."
Proper term for Bessemer Venture Partners, investor in Zopa and Prosper: Player

The Disruptors [Business 2.0]

Google and Apple 'in video talks' [BBC]

Steve Jobs opened his latest Apple announcement by practically telling the press that he wants to get into their pants, so it's acceptable that a few writers would get lazy and use his words for their headlines. But after so many repetitions, Jobs is starting to sound less like a masterful technologist and more like a high-school makeout artist.

Living room is Apple of Jobs' eye after white headphone hegemony [Scotland on Sunday]
The living room: The Apple of Jobs' eye? [NY Times at Inside Bay Area]
Make Room on the Couch for Steve [Newsweek]

It's a great column, but there's nothing technological about online shopping now that eBay and Amazon are household words and over two thirds of consumers visit an e-commerce site during any given week.

Maybe it's an awkward play at getting more women to read this section ("Women like fashion, right? Add some fashion!"), or maybe the nuances of the sweater/jacket dichotomy really strike the editors as a technological dilemma. But adding some online storefront links to a fashion article does not make it a tech article.

A Jacket's Not a Jacket When It's a Sweater, See? [NY Times Technology Section]

1. Don't follow up e-mail pitches ("I was wondering if you had the chance to read this material," said the SS PR message. Oh, I had the chance. I also had the chance to watch Ron Popeil infomercials). The journalist you pitched probably gets ten to a hundred of pitches a day and deleted yours. This time you're marked as spam.
2. Life is not LinkedIn. Do not try to "make contact" with every nearby human being. There's a reason that "making contact" sounds like something you do with aliens.
3. There is such a thing as bad PR. Don't try to prove it.
4. Tech writers are cranky. (They're surrounded by geeks and suits who make twice their income right out of college but can't put a sentence together.) Ply them with drink.
5. Before you send an irrelevant press release, count to 10. If you still feel like sending it, count to 20.

Still worried you'll come off as a flack? Below, other PR-plagued writers share their horror stories.

Ex-writer Kourosh Karimkhany ("Identify me as 'burnt-out former wire service reporter'") has some anti-flack anger to work out with his therapist:

From my days at Bloomberg/Reuters/Wired, sure. Got plenty.

1. Don't send postal mail. 2. Don't send a fax. 3. If you call make sure you keep the pitch to 10 seconds. If you don't have me in 10 seconds, you're never gonna get me. 4. Spell and pronounce my name right.

5. Embargoes are satan spawn. Please realize that we as journalists know exactly why there are embargoes: to meet the deadlines and timelines of the marketing department. No self-respecting journalist — even sleazy ones like the ones at [gaming blog] Kotaku — would EVER want to go along with your marketing department's plans.

One writer says, "Don't call around deadline time [4-6 PM Eastern]. Actually, don't call, period. E-mail is just fine, unless we already know you."

Valleywag owner Nick Denton wrote about Silicon Valley for the Financial Times. He adds, "Don't ask for information that you can find on the website, e.g., 'Could you tell me the name of the editor?'" Also, "If you're taking an exec round for a demo, keep them wanting more. Nothing worse than being forced to sit through an hour-long demo that should have taken 10 minutes."

Publicist Paula Gould says she gets along with journalists because she doesn't "tackle them at conferences or stalk them. I hate those kinds of publicists. They expend a tremendous amount of energy on very little return."

At the very least, don't be creepy. "One time," says CNET writer Nicole Lee, "at this big trade show, a PR guy tried to set up an appointment with me. And i figured, last day of show, sure. I figured he had a booth or whatever.

"But no. he just had this hotel room. And it was a small company i hardly heard of. And he wanted me to show up in the hotel. And I'm like, 'Ummmmmm.... can we meet at the trade show?' And he's all 'no... it's too much trouble.'"

She didn't go.

Matt Foremski, the 18-year-old son of Tom Foremski, a reporter for the blog Silicon Valley Watcher, was the first to disinter a trove of photographs of the familiar-looking actress, who portrayed the character named Bree in the videos.

Way to go, Foremski boys! We knew Tom (a well-known Valley dude and a former Financial Times reporter) was due for a scoop, but this was a shocker. (And since we assume the discovery involved poring over photos of cute teenage actresses, we're relieved Tom's 18-year-old-son did the legwork.)

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn't [NY Times]
SVW Exclusive: The identity of LonelyGirl15 [Silicon Valley Watcher]

• An unscrupulous LiveJournaler posted a fake Craigslist sex ad and published nearly 200 responses, including that of Microsoft employee Jerry Cummings (Warning: Dongs), pictured here. While this was a real asshat stunt to pull, that won't stop us from tittering at Jerry for sending dick pics using his work address. [Waxy.org]
• The LA Times can't figure out who's behind the amateur-but-not-amateur videos by YouTube star lonelygirl15, and they're too pussy to admit that all the evidence points to a progressive media company represented by the Creative Artists Agency. It's obviously not a real teen running a one-woman show; the cuts are too crisp, the monologues too scripted, the source too untrackable. [L.A. Times and apophenia]
• Hewlett-Packard didn't just spy on its board members. The company sniffed out the personal phone records of journalists including writers at CNET and the Wall Street Journal, and New York Times writer John Markoff. The firm that did this told HP its investigation was legal. How scary is it if they're right? [NY Times]

The high-tech version of Gillette's marketing strategy of giving away the razors and selling the refills could be implemented at Sun Microsystems if CEO Jonathan Schwartz's plans for "Project Mercury" take hold.

No wonder Schwartz bugged General Motors to give its cars away as loss leaders for the OnStar service. "Schwartz, the guy with the give-away-the-Cadillac business model" is much sexier than "Schwartz, the guy with the give-away-the-Venus-Vibrance business model."

Sun May Give Away The Blades [InternetFinancialNews]

Mr. Perkins, who was briefly married to the best-selling author Danielle Steel and recently wrote a racy novel titled "Sex and the Single Zillionaire," did not respond to requests for comment. A representative said Mr. Perkins was in the Mediterranean on his new $100 million 287-foot yacht, the Maltese Falcon, and did not want to be disturbed.

The paragraph isn't anything like the business-minded analysis around it, but who cares, the Times has to put its gossip somewhere.

The story ends with:

The search warrant affidavit [against HP], on file in Marin County in California, where Mr. Perkins lives in an expansive hilltop home with ocean views, also reveals that the attorney general and AT&T are considering civil lawsuits as well.

How are Perkins' ocean views relevant here? Did some hapless editor randomly insert pieces of the Lifestyle section? WE ARE SO CONFUSED.

Leak, Inquiry and Resignation Rock a Boardroom [NY Times]

I can practically hear the Ian-McKellen-esque businessman saying, "Rock this boardroom, baby."

Leak, Inquiry and Resignation Rock a Boardroom [NY Times, no reg]
Earlier: The HP Way: Chairwoman snooped board member's personal calls [Valleywag]

• "This next wave is going to be bigger than anything that came before it, says [BEA cofounder William] Coleman."
• "Coleman is one of dozens of new barbarians plotting the Cheap Revolution."
• "They are embracing simplicity, unlocking prodigious new power and cutting tech costs by up to 90%, threatening the Silicon Valley plutocracy."

Yeah, a guy worth $50 million who was nearly a dot-com billionaire in 2001 is just the barbarian we need to threaten the plutocracy. Is anyone else worried for Forbes's sanity, or is it just accepted that everyone writes like BusinessWeek now?

All right, Valleywag's heading home early. We'll be back Tuesday. Have a great Labor Day Weekend!

The New Barbarians [Forbes]
Image by Paul Kidby, Discworld illustrator [PaulKidby.com]

Google Chief Schmidt Joins Apple As Director [Washington Post]

Forbes [Front page]

We don't want to accuse Wired of anything, we're just worried for it. In the September 2006 issue, "The Rebirth of Music," we found Beck (last album: 2005) on the cover and a dozen recycled stories inside:

• "Frazzing," Jargon watch, pg. 50: seen on ABC News's blog in January
• "Phantom ring," Jargon watch, pg. 50: seen in the New York Times, May
• Nerdcore rap, pg. 62: seen in Wired Magazine, June 2005
• LED graffiti throwies, pg. 66: seen in MAKE Magazine, May
• Japanese paper robots, pg. 70: seen every day on Boing Boing since, like, 2004

• Apple MacBook, pg. 84 (we couldn't believe this one): seen in Macworld, May
• Luxurious Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, pg. 92: seen in the Annals of Improbable Research, 2001-2002
• Splogs, pg. 104: seen in Wired News, October 2005
• Low-texture computer graphics, pp. 133-140: seen in every magazine, CD-ROM, and made-for-reel CGI short around 1999
• Feature: Mix CDs, pg. 172: seen...geez, where...since the beginning of Pitchfork, unless you count mix tapes, in which case seen before High Fidelity came out
• Barenaked Ladies, pg. 178: career last seen in 2000, with an alleged appearance in 2003
• The Pitchfork Effect, pg. 184: seen in the Washington Post, April

Wired Magazine 14.09 [Wired.com]

My god, is there anything this woman thinks she can't do?

On the upside, Lucky did up Marissa to look like a star. Marissa, if you're reading this, please keep your hair like that and buy only vintage 50s wear. (And pearls. Lots of pearls.)

Lucky Magazine [Official site, these pages not available]

That's why Valleywag presents its first Spider Jerusalem Award for Best Blurb in Technology Journalism to the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry. He sums up the frustration of so many former tech news fans when he introduces a story about private space travel by lamenting the fall of the brave space-scientist archetype:

C'mon, kid: Your square-jawed rocket engineers of future histories past are now tattooed, pierced software engineers coding social-networking sites.

Second Thoughts on Outer Space [WSJ]

We drew up a chart of past valuations, aiming to appropriately display the precision of these guesses.

Sources: GigaOM, Gizmodo, New York Post, Techdirt, TechCrunch, CNET at New York Times

We think this more accurately represents Business 2.0's attitude. I mean, holy shit, $60,000 a month! That's as much as a respectable small business! Who can fathom this kind of wealth besides every damn millionaire in the Valley?

Mega-size version [Valleywag]
Earlier: A word about the photo in Business 2.0's Michael Arrington profile [Valleywag]
And: A picture of Michael Arrington lighting his cigar with a hundred-dollar bill [Valleywag]

• eWeek lists ten effects of AOL's search records leak. Effect #11: Journalists everywhere goad each other to stalk AOL users. [eWeek]
• Gawker Media's Lifehacker asks how readers would fix AOL, perfectly mimicking the usual AOL decision-making process. [Lifehacker]
• User 317966 will soon give birth to a child with a pig's tail. [AOL Stalker]
• ITToolbox reminds us, yet again, of the many ways your privacy can be violated without AOL's help. Wow, the modern market really does make AOL obsolete. [ITToolbox]

The TechCrunch founder is in the perfect middle-management power suit, yes.

He's smoking a big ol' stogie, yes.

And there's money floating around him. Very 80s. Classy. Feels like BusinessWeek.

So why is he not lighting his cigar with a flaming Ben Franklin?

Blogging for big bucks [Business 2.0]