The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

For years, newspapers and other media companies have complained about Google reaping profits by indexing media content for free. Google has responded that media companies are free to remove themselves from Google's search engines if they wish. But media companies never actually did it, because the hit to their traffic would be too big. They'd prefer to just get paid by the search engines. Which is what Rupert Murdoch may now do.

Business Insider estimates that the Wall Street Journal, News Corp's most prized media property, would lose about $15 million by pulling out of Google—meaning that Bing could theoretically secure exclusive search engine rights for that price. The money is almost too small to matter. But this could be a trigger for much bigger things. Namely, the Great Search Engine Wars for media content.

Brian Lam argues that this move would hurt consumers. Instead of being able to go to Google to find everything, consumers would have to know which specific media outlets had exclusive deals with which search engines in order to track down their content.

And that's absolutely true! This trend, if it becomes widespread—every big media company hunting for the richest deal it can get from a search engine—would make life more inconvenient for media consumers like you and me. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. The fact is that the current situation cannot stand. Have you read our #layoffs tag lately? Rupert Murdoch—and other media owners—are tired of Google making money off their content, for free. The original idea was that the traffic driven to media sites by Google would provide enough revenue, through ads, to make everyone happy. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Online ad revenue is not doing the trick.

So media companies will need new revenue streams to survive. A big one will be paid content; i.e., if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee. But search engine deals like this—in which media companies make search engines pay for exclusive rights to access their content—are another online revenue stream that could become significant. News Corp's deal isn't big money, yet. But presumably if Google and its competitors realize they will have to engage in bidding wars to lock in rights to good media content, the value of those deals would increase considerably.

The bigger picture is this: Yes, the "journalism" industry will shrink. That's part of the future. Fine. But even with the wondrous world of blogs and nonprofit journalism foundations and every other new permutation of creating content, the fact remains that if people want to enjoy a fundamental baseline of serious news media in this country, they will have to pay for it, somehow. Yes, it's more inconvenient to have search engines with exclusive content deals. It's also inconvenient to have to pay to read online news. But these and other new revenue streams will have to come into place if we don't want to keep griping forever about journalists being laid off and news quality getting shittier. Everything cannot always be free and delivered directly to us on a platter when it costs money to make, okay! So try not to fear the portentous coming of the Search Engine Bidding Wars. We're just going through the bumpy phase of things now. You'll get used to it. And the annoying kid you sent to J-school might actually be able to land a job one day, too.

[My colleagues do not necessarily agree with me!]

So, like, you might assume that interviewer Hank Plante would ask about this mysterious absense from all his official events, and his unannounced, Mark Sanford-style trip to Hawaii. But Newsom just wants to grin and laugh the soulless laugh of a cornered Scientologist, and talk about the budget deficit. It is a terrible, terrible interview, with the rictus smile and the mirthless laughter. And it ends with Newsom removing his mic and bitching, off the record, about how mean it is of journalists to ask what the hell is up with him.

And then the Wall Street Journal reported that Newsom was going to quit politics and go back to his winery. Newsom called the reporter to deny it, but there's no way in hell this guy's remaining in office until 2012.

The most annoying thing about TweetBookz isn't that it's spelled with a Z (which is pretty annoying and should be reserved for Liza), but that it has lowered the bar for the already suspect phenomenon of giving people an analog medium for their digital brilliance. But at least the publishing world does us the favor of finding the best of the bunch to give annoying Twitter-based books. Just like companies that will self-publish anyone's crumby novel for a service fee, now any 14-year-old girl (or the parents of any 14 year-old who think their kid is the Confucius of microblogging) with a keyboard and/or a smart phone can enter the realm of publishing. This is going to be the first thing I write about on @StuffIHate.

TweetBookz only charges $30 for a hardcover and $20 and it is comprised of as few as 40 pages with one tweet on each page or as many as 200 tweets. That's only 10 cents a tweet, which means that is now official market value for these internet outbursts. Thanks, TweetBookz, for placing an amount on them. Now to get a $10,000 advance for the @StuffIHate Twitter book, we're going to have to write write 100,000 dispatches. That's way too much work!

The WSJ reports that the number of Wikipedia editors (real editors—not you) declined by nearly 50,000 in the first three months of this year alone. The trend is attributed to the fact that whereas in the past you used to be able to just hop in and edit shit, now you have to have your work "approved" by some superlayer of supereditors, many of whom take joy in shooting down the Wikipedia aspirations of the unapproved masses. Horror stories abound. So who are these Gatekeepers to all the internet's knowledge?

A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

As you suspected: nerds.

Today, the Times runs a trend(ing) piece in the business section on how Twitter users are making serious cash Tweeting ads. Like, serious cash. How much?

Meet John Chow, a guy who makes money telling people how to make money online with his blog. Basically, imagine an infomercial about making infomercials. That's this guy, who's described as a "blogger and Internet entrepreneur." Watch, he makes money:

Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M's with customized faces, messages and colors...In October, Mr. Chow's income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. "I get paid for pushing a button," he said.

$200 bucks. For telling people about M&Ms. Since the Times doesn't, let's take a look at what that Tweet looked like:

He's got the designation of it being an ad in two characters, four if you count the parenthesis. He puts the designation of it being an ad after he places the link, so visually, your awareness doesn't come into play until you've been given the chance to get to/click on whatever's being sold. And four characters out of 88 comes to about 4.54% of the message. It looks subversive to me, and I know it's an ad, but then again, I'm not dumb enough to follow this guy in the first place.

Yet advertorial content is a time-honored tradition in all kinds of publishing formats! Including this one, where we place "sponsored ads" everywhere. But these look like out-and-out endorsements, followed by the designation of it being an ad. And if you attach them to hashtags and @feeds, you can more or less just harass and molest the flow of information coming in to Twitter. Just like when you could see HOT XX NEKKD AMATEURS being attached to Twitter messages that were coming out of Iran after their elections a few months back, by automatic spam bots. Brilliant.

So: what's the defense for completely subverting and messing with the user experience on Twitter? Enjoy this:

"We don't want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network," said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. "All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us."

Kind of sounds like the way vampires work, right? Once you're done with getting your blood sucked, you become one of them because you need more blood. The reason people left MySpace en masse (besides the fact that Facebook offered a cleaner interface and unanimously better user experience) was because of the gross, nonstop barrage of advertising, which Facebook has thankfully kept to a tolerable minimum. What's to stop your Twitter feed from becoming just one, long, advertisement if the people and trending topics you follow are being turned into ad-vampires left and right? And do people even really care that much?

One problem is that many Internet users eschew the idea of these ads, saying they commercialize authentic dialogue and undermine people's credibility. "It interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience," said Robert Scoble, a technology blogger with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, who says he "unfollows" people on Twitter who send him ads.

Exactly. So who's to blame for all of this, really? When Twitter goes to shit, and like a bad strain of drugs, everything you touch comes from the same gross source lacing it with their nasty advertorial additives? This assclown, snake oil salesman Mr. Ted "The Murphman" Murphy, he of Pay Per Post, a company basically everyone in Silicon Valley regards as straight-up evil.

They're not wrong. Pay Per Post was having users sell other users on products with no disclosure that they were ads. Whoops! The Times article catches up with Murphy, who's now doing Izea. Which is how Julia Allison ended up shilling for Sea World. But Murphy's reformed! He's better now! He knows he made a mistake!

Ted Murphy, the C.E.O. of Izea, now a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially "made a big mistake" by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea's ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers like "#ad" or "#sponsor."

Right. Except, whoops, not all of them:

The Times piece wraps up like so, as they chat with people running Likes.com, which, I don't even care to know what it is, really. All of these people are gross and lecherous. Here:

"We are trying to limit it, to prevent people from losing their following," said Bindu Reddy, a former Google product manager who started the company with her husband, Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google engineer. "We know people are queasy about this."

Right! But probably not as much as Twitter is, or should be. It doesn't appear that they're doing anything to even take a cut of the product being moved under their hood. Amazing that the most money being made on Twitter isn't by Twitter. Their product goes down in value to them because it's becoming an ad network.

But who's even dumb enough to follow Julia Allison and John Chow? Won't they catch on to the con being run on them? Well: the same people who watch bad TV, for one thing. Philo Farnsworth probably thought his invention was going to make the world a way better place, too.

Meanwhile, spambots and assclowns like Ted Murphy's zombie army who're getting small bucks will attach themselves to hashtags and your @feed like leeches. Big brands won't care whether this hurts what people think of their product—however much we want it to, or however marginally it will—because this creates awareness. And to think, it's all because of a guy who likes like Ted Murphy. Look again. Right?

Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy. Unless we can get everyone to do this:

Neel Shah, Page Six gossip and former Gawker and Radar-ite, was glad his phone didn't end up with the likes of his present or past employers. (He should be.)

Tech pundit and Berkeleyite Andrew Keen articulated an ideology of what might be called, if you're avoiding Rush Limbuagh-isms, "femifascism."

British Telecom's Kevin Marks hopes that's an iPhone you're discreetly working in your pocket.

Singer Weird Al Yankovic does this every time he flies.

Wired's Dylan Tweney is bookmarking your comments for future reference, haters.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

The spooks at the NSA are, of course, notorious for their role monitoring internet activity, and for their use of warantless wiretaps to monitor U.S. phones, often illegally. So computer users could easily be worried to hear that the NSA has "partnerships" with Microsoft, which makes their operating systems; Intel, which makes their wireless chipsets; and McAfee, which makes their antivirus software (so-called!).

From NSA Information Assurance Director Richard Shaeffer's testimony to the Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security:

Working in partnership with Microsoft and elements of the Department of Defense, NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to engance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks... All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later during the product's lifecycle.

Shaeffer also talked about his agency's "trusting relationship" with the private sector, including a "partnership" with Intel and McAffee to promote a security protocol — or should we say, "security" protocol? — from the federal government.

These IT companies all want to do business with the government, so it's to their advantage to be seen as cooperative in implementing federal protocols in their products. But should consumers distrust these ties? The general consensus among private-sector security experts canvassed by ComputerWorld was, in the words of one, "I can't imagine NSA and Microsoft would do anything deliberate because the repercussions would be enormous if they got caught."

Right, because if there's anything that clearly motivates these two massive organizations with virtually guaranteed near-term revenue streams, it's fear of public shame. This is why we have not seen either entity doing anything embarrassing, recently.

(Pic: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, by Getty Images.)

Speakeasy reports that the Regretsy mastermind is April Winchell, well-known comedic human. Notably, her new book publishers admit:

"We're not going to use everything from the Web site," said Jill Schwartzman, the purchasing editor at Random House. "The ones we're going to pick are the ones that work for a book-reading audience."

So read everything on Regretsy.com for free, or buy the book and read less, for a fee. Just mail April Winchell a check and continue to read her website!

Twitter engineer Alex Payne is, needless to say, not impressed with Google's new "Chrome" operating system.

Financial writer Heidi Moore is, needless to say, as unimpressed with Best Buy as Alex Payne.

CNET's Rafe Needleman is, needless to say, as unimpressed with sleazy sales tactics as Hedi Moore, as unimpressed with Google Chrome as Alex Payne and, for all his angst, unable to even ask for a refund.

The Onion's Joe Randazzo wants you doing blow by the time he returns to this bathroom an hour from now, or there's going to be hell to pay.

The Huffington Post's Jason Links accused Mediaite of having ZERO Tumblarity. Or maybe negative Tumblarity. Ya, that bad.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Courtenay Semel, for those who are not familiar with her heiress-level fameballing, is not a shy and retiring person. A person does not make out with her attention-craving girlfriend Tila Tequila on red carpets because she mistrusts the media; a person does not scream at a club bouncer to "just fucking Google me, you dumb fuck" because she mistrusts the media; and a person certainly does not "joke" to a magazine reporter that "I'm kind of like the Don Juan of the lesbian world," as Semel did with Curve, because she mistrusts the media.

So it's odd that Semel would tell Curve that the "media kind of ruined that relationship" she had with Lindsay Lohan by saying the pair were dating. Semel added: "I can't even have a best friend because I guess I'm going to be linked with them next." But maybe she also can't have friends because she gives underminey quotes about them, like this one, from the new interview:

I think, you know, everyone scrutinizes, Lindsay for everything she went through, but they should thank her, because it shows you exactly what not to do.

That's a fairly cutting quote considering that Lohan has yet to enter rehab per Semel's urging. Of course, when Semel only went to rehab herself after her dad cut off access to the trust fund, something she left out of her little zinger. Semel, it would seem, grasps the advantages of strategic oversharing as well as the rest of her internet-bred generation; if only daddy Terry had been so savvy, Yahoo might be in a better place today.

[via People]

(Semel with heiress Casey Johnson this past May, top, via INF; Semel-Tequila pic, lower, via x17online.com)

In short, Twitter's new slogan reflects the microblogging service's evolution from a venue for self expression into a forum for conversation, according to Welsh linguist David Crystal. Crystal seemed an ideal expert to consult on Twitter's new phrasing: he has written or contributed to more than 100 books on language, including on internet linguistics, and examined the text-messaging culture from which Twitter was born in his most recent work, the appropriately-titled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.

Here is what Crystal emailed us about the significance of Twitter's change in phrasing:

I'm not surprised. Twitter has become steadily more discursive, with people maintaining threads and introducing a great deal more interaction, rather than posting isolated tweets. As a result the focus has shifted from the individual to the group, and a more open question is required to capture this emphasis. What-doing looks inward. What-happening looks outward. It's a natural development, it seems to me.

So Twitter's users have, at the very least, moved beyond mere navel gazing and into arguing. Way to go, narcissists!

(Pic: Crystal, via DavidCrystal.com)

The suit was probably inevitable. As we first reported, the Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has been looking for victims of scammy ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. Less than a week later, the firm's suit has hit federal district court in Northern California.

You can read the initial complaint in full here.

Neither gaming startup Zynga nor social network Facebook actually originates the advertisements in question; instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make reportedly large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz." TechCrunch has run an aggressive series of articles, cataloged at the bottom of this post.

Zynga reportedly takes in close to one-third of its revenue from "commercial offers" like those, and Facebook does well too, as KC&R lawyers point out in their complaint. An excerpt (click to enlarge):

Swift's attorneys also point to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus' damning video confession that "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues" in their complaint, indicating it will be a significant piece of courtroom evidence, just as we predicted.

The prospect of being on the hook for massive damages has to make both Zynga and Facebook's investors sweat. Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley, with VCs having valued it in the billions of dollars, while Zynga counts the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its major investors. Yet both companies have come to rely on greasy advertisers for much of their revenue; in addition to the game-ad scammers, Facebook is also sells ad to marketers who resort to tactics like using stolen pictures of apparent underaged girls to promote their products. If the company's are found to be liable of helping con customers by working with these sorts of slimeballs, it's hard to say where the payouts might end.

Below, an excerpt of the scams allegedly perpetrated on the lead plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift.

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Raphaël Labbé)

[Full court filing]

Click any image to enlarge.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (pictured) said in a memo to staff (below) that the company is looking to lose 2,500 workers, or a third of its total staff. He'll be forgoing his own 2009 bonus, and is offering executives up to nine months pay if they volunteer for buyouts, according to Business Insider. Interestingly, rank and filers are being offered a weaker deal than their recent colleagues over at Time Inc.; AOL will pay them three months severance, whereas Time Inc.-ers get that plus two weeks for every year of service. Apparently unions are nice things to have in situations like this.

As it prepares to offer shares to the public next month, AOL has been on a diet plan in other ways, too:

• After steady increases, ad revenue from a deal with Google started falling this year, according to Peter Kafka at All Things D. The deal provided $700 million in ad revenue last year, about one third of the total, but was off $42 million in the most recent quarter.
• AOL surrendered bustling celebrity-news site and cable network TMZ to Time Warner; Tim Armstrong said as recently as July that he hoped to "actively" discuss whether to retain TMZ with Time Warner and that "‘If the value of TMZ increases, it's a really good thing for us."
• AOL may sell MapQuest, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D.

Pic above by Yaniv Golan.

Armstrong's memo to staff:————-

AOLers –

"Employees First" is the way that we have run the company since April and that mantra is something I take very seriously because our company is a collection of people and our brands are the work of our teams. We started by working together to determine AOL's strategy, then the correct structure for the strategy, and, as we have discussed, we are now faced with making sure we have the correct cost structure for the strategy. You have seen daily and weekly updates on Project Everest and many of you have been involved in trying to align our resources to maximize AOL's opportunity.

AOL's cost structure is something we have worked on for the past four months, and we have spent hundreds of hours reviewing ways to fix the cost structure as well as the revenue growth engine. As we are coming to the conclusion of this work over the next few weeks, it is clear that we will need to have a significant reduction of costs at the company and across almost all functional areas and geographies. Headcount costs are going to be a majority of the cost reduction recommendations coming out of Project Everest.

As I mentioned in our last Project Everest update, the idea for a voluntary layoff was suggested and we agree that it is an option that gives people more choice and decision-making ability instead of waiting for the final cost recommendations and involuntary layoffs. Starting December 4th in the United States and ending a few days after we spin out from Time Warner, we will allow employees to choose a voluntary exit from AOL. Additionally, tomorrow we anticipate beginning the communication process for voluntary layoff programs in certain international locations. We will be looking for up to 2,500 volunteers. For context on the target volunteer number, over the next several months we will be looking to reduce approximately one-third of our overall workforce at the company. We will need to do an involuntary layoff if we do not reach the target numbers through the voluntary option.

The reduction in costs is aimed at making AOL competitive for the future of the Web and it will allow us to focus the company on growth in the non-access areas of the business. After the cost reductions, we will have a company that is aligned and structured to drive our strategy in a competitive way. The number of potential reductions isn't aimed at getting us through 2010; it is aimed at resetting AOL at the correct baseline for the future.

As a member of our team and the person who takes accountability for the results of the company, I am making the decision to forego my 2009 bonus. That decision is a personal one and is not a sign for the future payout of the overall bonus plan for employees. That plan is based on performance and overall company outcomes and it will be management's recommendation to the compensation committee of the Board to approve our performance-based bonus payouts for 2009. These are challenging times and today's news is difficult. But every day we are making changes and progress and we are on our way to re-engineering AOL for success. – TA

The Apple Tablet has been something of a holy grail for gadget fiends. Now print publishers are enlisting in the cause with just as much fervor. Condé Nast's plan, as described by company execs to Peter Kafka of All Things D: Port Wired to Apple's tablet by mid-2010, followed later by all 17 other titles. By using a special digital format now under development by Adobe — which makes the publishing software that Condé and most other magazine publishers use — Condé also hopes to gain compatibility with tablet and other touch-screen devices made by Hewlett Packard and others.

Jobs should be flattered that such a high-profile publisher is chomping at the bit to get onto his new gizmo. Condé joins New York Times editor Bill Keller in talking up Apple's device; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is another recent print-media convert to the tablet religion.

Condé, clearly eager, should keep its enthusiasm in check. The company has closed six magazines and slashed budgets 25 percent at its remaining titles this year, setting off a wave of layoffs. It's doubtful that even Steve Jobs can come up with a silver bullet to rescue businesses that have spent many years squandering past digital opportunities. Especially if the company rushes too quickly and turns out a slapdash tablet product that burns its readers on the format forever.

(Photo illustration by Photo Giddy on Flickr)

Singer Adam Lambert issued Out a non-dential denial about him purposely keeping lady fans in denial about his not-very-well-hidden-or-surprising homosexuality.

Writer and enthusiastic Michael Chabon sexer Ayelet Waldman cannot get over her ability to procrastinate. All thanks to Twitter.

Would-be lifecasting mogul Julia Allison is not above talking about her period if it means promoting her new TV pilot thing.

...and Mediaite's Rachel Sklar is not above talking about her lack of pants if it means promoting her sense of humor.

Dancer Lacy Mae Schwimmer dropped the phrase "ouivey." We can only assume that's what chic French Jews say when they stub out their clove cigarettes in an angsty but blasé manner. Explain it to us sometime, Lacey.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Maybe Van Veen has been spending too much time with his purported bestie Ben Silverman, the former NBC executive who takes credit for the likes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Weakest Link. Because we can't imagine Van Veen's media sugar daddy Barry Diller envisioned this sort of thing when he funded Van Veen's studio, Notional, four months ago. It's such a retro format for a "multi platform" studio that's supposed to be inventing the future. Here's some of what's slated:

• "READY, SET, DANCE!: In partnership with a major production entity, "Ready, Set, Dance!" is a first-of-its-kind dance competition series that seamlessly combines the web and television."
• "YOU VS. AMERICA: Currently in development, 'You vs. America' is a ground-breaking game show that innovatively combines the immediacy of the internet with the excitement of a network primetime television game show."
• "CHASE THE MONEY: "Chase the Money" is an epic scale reality game show that combines the pratfalls of a classic prank show with the simplicity of a child's game of 'Tag'."
• "LOVE TAXI: The dating show that takes place entirely in a taxicab. "

Actually, now that we think about it, the dancing one was probably Barry "Twinkle Toes" Diller's idea in the first place.

(Pic: Van Veen, by Zach Klein)