What would actor LeVar Burton and model Fabio talk about at the supermarket? If there was a plausible answer to that question, Burton probably would have tweeted a quote from their unlikely conversation rather than a sighting.

After her "best night of sleep ever," ReadWriteWeb's Jolie O'Dell said goodbye to her job.

Whoever is writing Alyssa Milano's Twitter pinkie swears she is writing Alyssa Milano's Twitter.

Jennifer 8. Lee described the charming people she interviewed for Fortune Cookie Chronicles. It was not too much longer after that she left her job interviewing people.

Molly McAleer, the 889-page-Tumblr sensation, went hunting. For revenge.

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

To: New Media Alumni
Subject: [new-media-alumni] cell phone question

Ok. I may be the last person in America who doesn't have a cell phone.

That's about to change.

But there's something I don't understand.

I can buy any make of phone. I can, for instance, buy a Samsung phone.

But the servicer providers tell me that in order to sign up with them — be in Verizon or AT&T or Spring — I have to buy a phone that has their name on it.

So for example, if I want to sign up with AT&T, I have to buy a phone that says AT&T on it.

So here's my question: what servicer provider can you sign up with if you buy a Samsung phone?

thx.

[Pic via]

That's according to an entertaining little blog entry that YouTube owner Google published today, following the release of court documents . The post claims Viacom hired 18 different marketing agencies to upload video and even sent employees to Kinko's so they couldn't be traced. Viacom eventually lost track of its own leaks, said Google: "On countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement." Now Viacom is suing for copyright infringement — in part based on clips it uploaded itself, says Google. Ya, but Sumner Redstone probably fired that guy already, and plus he really needed that sweet, sweet YouTube AdSense cash.

UPDATE: Peter Kafka of All Things D is live-tweeting these court papers as he makes his way through them. Sample quote he found from Viacom employee: ""I am uploading youtube videos under fake grassroots account.YouTube already questioning my identity. Bastards."

[via Daring Fireball]

(Pic: YouTube co-ounder Chad Hurly who, according to newly-released court documents, made $334 million selling his company to Google. Getty Images.)

Yelp has crossed Philip Greenspun, known for his pioneering work publishing long-form Web content and for starting, more than 15 years ago, a large and technically sophisticated community website — the sort of place Yelp could be if the startup spent less time organizing bacchanals and more time refining code.

A former MIT computer science instructor and startup founder, Greenspun now helps train helicopter pilots for the East Coast Aero Club. In an effort to drum up business, the club asked customers to write reviews on Yelp, an experience Greenspun wrote about in an recent book review and then in a blog entry titled "The extortionists at Yelp:"

We asked our customers to register with Yelp and post reviews... About 15 of them did so and the Yelp page was filled with positive reviews. A few days later, however, we looked and 11 of them had been removed. Now it is down to just 2 reviews.

Another friend said "Just wait; they are going to call you up soon and ask you to pay them a monthly fee. Then they will restore the positive reviews. Companies with a lot of negative reviews get the same call; if they pay a fee the negative reviews are removed."

A Yelp employee later contacted Greenspun to "obliquely confirm... my suspicion that the algorithm might suppress reviews from people who register, post one review, and leave." In light of that, Greenspun said the site's policies "might not be unreasonable," but were still pretty "tough" on his business, since his limited pool of customers tend not to use ordinarily use Yelp.

Indeed, Yelp's dependence on a cadre of regular users is a "tough" break for many businesses besides Greenspun's flight club. It places disproportionate influence in the hands of a limited group of people with plenty of money to spend in restaurants, bars and shops; with time on their hands to write reviews; and an inclination to work free at advancing Yelp's bottom line, without getting so much as a full-name byline in return. Restaurants and other merchants feel obliged to wine and dine this group at Yelp-sanctioned "Yelp Elite" events and less formal contexts, leaving ordinary users to guess at which reviews have been influenced by payola and which haven't.

Then there are merchants who, like Greenspun, can't get Yelp reviews from their happy customers to stick, and don't feel like paying Yelp to get a "favorite review" moved to the top of their Yelp listing, a favor Yelp openly acknowledged selling to customers ("clearly marked"). Said merchants have been suing like mad; since February 24, when we posted a veterinarian's class-action lawsuit alleging Yelp extortion, a spa owner filed yet another class action, nine other business filed a class-action and a furniture restorer filed his own suit.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says he has to kill some positive reviews to keep his site unbiased:

If a business could garner a top rating on Yelp simply by soliciting 5-star reviews from friends, family, and favored customers, how useful would such a site be?

It's a good question, but so is this one: If a business could garner a top rating on Yelp simply by paying $300 per month for "Favorite Review" privileges or simply by throwing free parties for the "Yelp Elite Squad," how useful would such a site be?

UPDATE: We solicited Greenspun for comment, and he wrote us back to say he's not "pissed off" at Yelp as our original headline had it, but he is "disappointed:"

I don't think it is accurate to say that Yelp has pissed me off! I was
disappointed that they killed off all of our flying nerds' reviews.
But they do have a tough spam problem. I think that they need to
figure out some way to motivate a business like ECAC to invite its
customers to become users of Yelp so that Yelp is sure that these are
legitimate distinct people (not just two friends of the owner with
multiple identities).

[Photo of Philip Greenspun in an R-44 helicopter courtesy Ellis Vener.]

Jerry joined Apple's Board in 1997 when most doubted the company's future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years. It's been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I'm going to miss him a lot.

Born in Memphis, Tennesse in 1938, York was instrumental in the turnaround of IBM and Chrysler, as well as Steve Jobs' return to the permanent CEO position at Apple. Like Jobs points out, he got into the company just when every rat was abandoning the ship. Back then, everyone thought it was a sinking. Even Michael Dell publicly declared—with a smile—that Jobs should liquidate the company and give the money back to the shareholders (later, Jobs made him eat his words, after Apple's capitalization surpassed Dell in January 2006).

York joined the Apple board, bringing in his good experience at IBM and Chrysler. During that time he had his own sour experience at MicroWarehouse: In 2000 he became CEO of the famous mail order company, after a $725 million takeover. It went bankrupt, and York announced his resignation.

But according to Jobs, inside Apple's board he was a great help in the Cupertino company's rebound at the beginning of this century. Judging by Steve's words, it seems that York is the antithesis of how Jobs might see Google's CEO and former Apple Director Eric Schmidt: A representation of Old school loyalty and honor vs New Valley treachery and trickiness.

Jerome B. York is survived by his wife Eilene York, four children, and six grandchildren. May he rest in peace.

Business Insider's John Carney realized he should either skip the terrifying St. Patrick's Day festivities, or immediately start drinking.

Yahoo's Courtney Reimer is indebted to you, Amex — for the nice compliment.

After all those trips to Guantanamo, the Wall Street Journal's Jess Bravin wasn't afraid to risk angering those retributive media attack-dogs at C-SPAN. We hear they can be vicious!

The Telegraph's Shane Richmond stayed behind at South by Southwest so you didn't have to.

San Francisco Bay Guardian contributor Louis Peitzman couldn't get a word in edgewise.

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

TechCrunch 50, a Silicon Valley conference where hungry startups strut their stuff, is as volatile as it is profitable. The event nearly broke up last year amid a spat between co-organizers Michael Arrington, publisher of the blog iteration of TechCrunch, and Jason Calacanis, the Web entrepreneur. "We fight like rabid dogs," Calacanis told VentureBeat, but would not "throw an amazing event like this out the window."

Or maybe they will: We've heard from multiple sources that a chasm has opened between Arrington and Calacanis again. Though we've had some help from said sources, it's not hard to figure out what sorts of little feuds might derail one of the industry's most lucrative conferences.

We catalog some of them below, if only to provide other media-event organizers with a nice overview of traps to avoid. For their record, neither Arrington nor Calacanis would comment about their dispute for this post.

• Kidding around with puppets: Last year, Calacanis confirmed the conference series was finished in an interview with a puppet controlled by blogger Loren Feldman. He later unconvincingly tried to say he'd only been kidding. Purportedly his public statements about his spat with Arrington remain a point of irritation.
• Participating in rival events: Calacanis' participation in Silicon Alley Insider's Startup conference supposedly rubs Arrington the wrong way, even though it's ostensibly a different sort of event.
• Conflicts of interest: Calacanis' newly-launched Open Angel Forums are designed to help select startups get investment funding. At TechCrunch 50, Calacanis helps award prizes, potentially to some of the very startups he helped raise money for. As for Arrington, one could argue he has an incentive to help reward startups who have been especially helpful to his coverage. That's certainly enough basis for petty bickering (you don't need much!).
• Big pointless online flame war: Calacanis became enmeshed in a big complicated online controversy and Arrington supposedly found his behavior in said fight tacky and classless. Which it kind of was. The gory details, if you care: A teenaged TechCrunch writer asked a startup founder to give the writer a free MacBook Air in exchange for an article on TechCrunch. The writer was publicly busted but the startup founder remained anonymous for a while. The startup founder, Sam Odio, emailed Calacanis out of the blue to ask advice on going public. Calacanis for some reason forwarded his email to Calacanis' venomous blogger friend Loren Feldman, who promptly threatened to expose Odio's not-so-terrible secret — he had originally promised to give that TechCrunch writer his bribe, "but not right now." Odio blogged about Calacanis' behavior and a shitstorm ensued.
• Just plain mean: Supposedly Calacanis has been gratuitously and exceptionally rude to some of the startups at TechCrunch 50. We've heard stories about Arrington being that way at other events. So, hey, maybe everyone just got on each other's nerves, with the rudeness to other people.

So there you have it: Avoid these pitfalls and your conference/event/sausage fest just might possibly avoid descending into vicious infighting. In the meantime we'll see how long it takes before Calacanis and Arrington realize that only by taming their egos in the near-term can they play Silicon Valley kingmakers in the long term, thus allowing their egos to gloriously balloon to their fullest potential.

[Photo via TechCrunch 50 on Flickr]

There are certain things that all geeks have in common: an intense interest in a very specialized field, fervent enthusiasm for a set of hobbies, a group of other people who share their obsessions, and probably a little bit of social awkwardness. Sure, there are people who fit these stereotypes exactly, but there are enough permutations and substrata of each of these categories that there has to be some leeway. And some people combine traits and interests from a number of these worlds into one big ball of übernerd. But deep down inside, you know which way your dilithium crystal crumbles. Embrace it! Enjoy it! Nerds have already taken over Hollywood. One day they'll conquer the globe!

Sci-Fi Geek
Description: The most influential of the bunch when it comes to pop culture, this group has pretty much taken over the entertainment business. They love anything related to comic books, superheros, galaxies far far away, fantasy worlds, alien invasions, or Sigourney Weaver in space. Without them, blockbusters wouldn't have monster opening weekends, Fringe would have no viewers, and Batman would have no fans. Not only do they obsessively collect the books, DVDs, and figurines related to their favorite titles, they often dress up in their costumes in the hopes of becoming the characters themselves.
Substrata: Comic Nerds, Trekkers, LAIR revelers
Gathering Place: San Diego Comic Con
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: The life and many deaths of Jean Grey
Eagerly Anticipating: Iron Man 2

Tech Nerds
Description: These are the power players in the business world because they have the most money. This is the guy who needs the latest gadget, can configure your computer in a snap, and actually bothers to read the instruction manual that comes with a digital camera. He probably has at least a little knowledge of computer programming, optimizes his web browser to do absolutely everything for him but fix his fancy coffee, and could probably take over the whole world with nothing but an iPhone and a maniacal laugh. Whether he's a Mac or a PC, he is all nerd.
Substrata: Computer geeks, Cell phone wizards, Hackers
Gathering Place: Apple Keynote
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: Google Chrome
Eagerly Anticipating: Hello! iPads come out April 3!

Mad Scientists
Description: You can't mess with the original. These are the chemists, engineers, physicists and other general crazies who are more comfortable in the controlled confines of the lab than in the messy, messy real world. However, they are responsible for the food we eat, the cars we drive, and the drugs we take—even sometimes the illegal ones. Without them, we'd still be using stone wheels and struggling to start a campfire with a flint. They are our saviors, but total bores at dinner parties.
Substrata: Mathematicians, Pharmacologists, Bio Researchers
Gathering Place: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: You wouldn't even understand it if we told you. Idiot.
Eagerly Anticipating: When the Large Hadron Collider finally works

Music Snobs
Description: They think they're cooler than you, but they're just as geeky as all the other castes. Rather than just being a hipster into the newest and hottest bands and changing their tastes according to the zeitgeist, this person is also a fiendish collector of a certain genre of music. Whether it's late American bluegrass, German opera, early East Coast hip-hop, or Baltimore booty house, they have a finely tuned and exhaustive collection and scoff at anyone who never heard of whichever undiscovered "genius" they're researching.
Substrata: Pick a genre, from disco to classical guitar, and it has its own snob
Gathering Place: Coachella
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: Where to find original vinyl
Eagerly Anticipating: Sex

The Wonk
Description: This nerd has decided to use his brilliant mind for evil, not good, and gotten into the political game. He has been in more legislative bodies than female ones, and knows all the key players in all of them. There is not one minute detail of parliamentary procedure, voting district, or legislative record that he has overlooked. He lunches with lobbyists, suppers with strategists, and drinks with demagogues. They keep Meet the Press in business and fall asleep with the CNN crawl running through their little heads.
Substrata: All that matters is Republican or Democrat. Got that, Nader?
Gathering Place: K Street
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: The losing vice presidential candidates of the 20th century. Estes Kefauver, anyone?
Eagerly Anticipating: June 8th, of course. It's the midterm primary election in 10 states!

Gamers
Description: These are the people who live and die by video games of course. They play interactive Halo with strangers online, twist and twirl Mario on screen until their retinas bleed, and engage in strange Pokemon battles on our roof. They have a special place in their entertainment console for their Playstation, Wii, XBox, Game Cube, Classic NES, rescued Sega Genesis, and thrift store Atari. When not in front of a TV they play on hand-held devices in the car and on the subway. No, video games aren't just for kids anymore. The kids grew up and became nerds.
Substrata: Based mostly on which genre they like best: sports games, platformers, role playing, and the like
Gathering Place: E3 Expo
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: Cheat codes for Dante's Inferno
Eagerly Anticipating: It's going to be a long wait until Halo Reach this fall.

Gay Geek
Description: This guy can fall into any of the other classifications listed here, but is also gay. He's too nerdy for mainstream gay culture and too gay for mainstream nerd culture, so he is all alone except for the other lost souls he meets over the internet who share an interest in the games, comics, slashfic, and other goodies created just for them. There are some nerdy categories specific to gay culture, but many homosexuals have an affinity for sci-fi.
Substrata: Gaymers, Show Queens, Madonna Maniacs, Grindr Gurus, LGBT Activists
Gathering Place: Manhunt
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: Shirtless scenes on Battlestar Galactica
Eagerly Anticipating: The next Fanboy of the Month

Sports Fanatic
Description: Many might not consider this rabid sort of sports fan a nerd, but he displays all the traditional behavior of one. He has minute statistics memorized, he dresses funny for special events, he probably hasn't scored in a long time, and he doesn't engage in the thing that he loves most in the world. The wins and losses of his favorite team mean more to him than anything and can affect his mood for days. More than just a casual viewer, don't dare ask this guy, "How about them Yankees?" unless you want to hear a rant about how the managerial Kremlinology of the team has adversely affected ERAs, RBIs, and designated hitters in alternating away games.
Substrata: Football fanatics, Statistics junkies, Cheeseheads
Gathering Place: Tailgate parties
Knows Way Too Much Useless Information About: Fantasy sports league drafting
Eagerly Anticipating: Opening day of Major League Baseball

Rework authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have deployed satire before, via the blog at their Chicago software startup 37Signals. Their fake press release mocking news coverage of Twitter was a touch too bitchy, even jealous, to be genuinely hilarious. This Rove thing, though? Spot on, and we can only hope other authors follow suit. Enough genteel politeness in the publishing world: Let a thousand takedowns bloom.

(We're trying a gallery format for Twitterati to avoid the long process of making the header graphic. If you have feedback let us know.)

Boxee's Zach Klein tried to hitch a ride to the airport. Ever the aggregator, TechMeme's Megan McCarthy basically re-published his appeal, and virtually every other tech scenester at South by Southwest soon followed suit. Low airfares: They have a way of making taxi rides seem awfully expensive.

Internet consultant Jeff Jarvis talked a newspaperman down from the wall.

Ever the New York Timesman, Brian Stelter found a way to self-deprecatingly thank someone for her whisky without quite implying he'd actually drink it. His fellow panelist drank to that.

Now that she's no longer at the Times, Jennifer 8. Lee can reveal the truth: She's something of an email snob. Adjust your Knight Foundation grant applications accordingly.

SF Weekly's Alexia Tsotsis recently moved to Silicon Valley from Los Angeles, so she's not yet become numb to the groupthink and petty sniping. Give her time.

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

AOL's Seed division is trying to interview every single one of the 2,000 bands performing at SXSW via its computer-dispatched army of freelancers. At a company where stories are routinely assigned based on internet statistics, that's a refreshingly human assignment — "Almost Famous 2.0" is how Brian Ries summed things up in his Daily Beast article on Seed's coverage of the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin. But humans have a way of gumming up the machine, and Seed editors have issued an "Urgent call for assignments," shown below. "Urgent" indeed: AOL forgot to Bcc its contributors, exposing their emails, and also told people they could skip the pictures and bios. So much for humanizing the borg.

[Photo via Getty Images]

Update: Jason's responded! Apparently he hates Ray with a vengeance:

well @raywert writes for jalopsuck which will never be as good as Autoblog.com so he has to hate on me. dbag!

@joelfeder @raywert is being dbag because jalopsuck is 10% of www.autoblog.com which i named/founded (+ got me the $ for the teslas!)

@realmudmonster i think @raywert is a hater and wishes he wrote for www.autoblog.com! :-p

@raywert you are an idiot or a hater... but since you work for @notened that's a given. #donthate

@raywert 1. you are an idiot. 2. you are a hater. Those are no ad hominem, those are accurate.

To recap: Jason Calacanis was the co-founder of Weblogs, Inc, which he sold to AOL during the "blogging boom" of 2005 for $30 million. Now, he's the CEO of Maholo, an irrelevant-the-next-time-Google-changes-its-search-algorithm human-powered search engine. Finding himself with loaded pockets, but still struggling to impress with the size of his Twitter account, Jason decided to challenge Ashton Kutcher to a Twitter duel, with mastery of the micro-blogging service's coveted number one slot as the prize. It's unclear if Ashton was ever aware of the challenge, but Calacanis tried for maximum publicity by offering a Tesla Model S — a not-yet-built electric sedan — as a prize for one lucky follower if he beat Ashton.

A flurry of promotion on some blogs formerly owned by Calacanis rocketed him into 19,582nd place in a matter of days. What'd he do with that extraordinary momentum? He retweeted a couple of people talking about the giveaway then, on January 3rd, changed the offer to $50,000 in cash money (or the imaginary car):

Also, if anyone would rather just get $50,000 instead of the car we will make that option available-subject to researching local laws! :-)

By January 4, @Auto had reached a staggering 10,000 followers, prompting an excited announcement and a request for those followers to pressure mainstream media outlets for coverage:

We are at 10k followers & I'm excited! We're going to get this done! Anyone know NYT, WSJ or good press? pitch them #freetesla story!

Kutcher's account, @Aplusk, averages over 3,000 new followers a day.

The mainstream media coverage didn't happen, but nevertheless, Jason was so incredibly stoked to have only 4.6 million fewer followers than @Aplusk that he launched an entirely new contest with non-imaginary prizes:

The @auto contest is going so well I've started 2nd contest! tweet: " Follow @jason to win one of ten Nexus One phones today #freenexusone "

That was @auto's last tweet, but it did result in an additional 10,000 followers for Jason's main twitter account, @Jason.

We're assuming Calacanis is smart enough to know he wasn't going to be able to beat Ashton Kutcher's follower count by giving away one electric family sedan that's not yet out of the concept stage. That leads us to believe the whole deal was an underhanded attempt to net himself additional Internet stardom without actually having to give away anything. Thus, a scam.

Calacanis has yet to respond to our tweet asking for more information, but we've now unfollowed him anyway — we have other people we'd rather talk to.

Photo Credit: cfinke / Flickr

The New York Times's Hiroko Tabuchi went for full disclosure, then an editor's note, note then a full Twitte-retraction.

After losing his credit card at South by Southwest, entertainment blogger Mike Sampson was forced into a life of rulebreaking.

The Chicago Tribune's Rob Manker explained why all that advice to "spring forward, fall back" doesn't apply to late-night TV hosts.

At Pulino's in New York, Guest of a Guest's Billy Gray launched a brave new approach to culinary journalism. (We approved.) (Via)

VentureBeat's Anthony Ha found the print ethos at the South by Southwest press room adorable.

South by Southwest is becoming infamous for such rebellions. The Austin internet conference's geeky audience loves to digitally broadcast their every last thought and impulse, and this hyperconnectedness turns an unhappy keynote crowd — a boring commonplace at most conventions — into an actively rebellious mob.

The last major victim was tech journalist Sarah Lacy, heckled during her interview with Facebook's CEO for asking saucy questions.

This year, Haque's was found guilty of the opposite crime, boring questions, directed at Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. People just started walking out of Haque's on-stage interview with Williams in a sort of organic, flashmob audience defection, nerdy passive aggressiveness at its most cold blooded. Here is a photo of abandoned seats at the talk, which was once standing room only, shot by Web entrepreneur Rakesh Agrawal.

Here's a sampling of how things looked on Twitter, where many in the live audience in Austin have been hanging out even while watching the proceedings unfold on the stage:

Internet technology and ubiquitous wifi have empowered audiences to remain physically silent while actively organizing a revolt. With its nerdy and opinionated crowd, South by Southwest has been on the forefront of this trend, making its audience perhaps the most vicious in conference-land.

But expect audience revolts to spread to other events. And while that will surely be a terrifying trend for keynote presenters, in the end an ornery and networked audience may make conferences a better value for the people who shell out thousands of dollars to attend. If only because they'll get to see an occasional rebellion.

[Photo via Steve Bowbrick on Flickr]

"Top money-maker" Joanna Bradford is leaving Yahoo for infamous robo-news factory Demand Media, and Yahoo's top executives don't seem to know about it, All Things D reports. For Bartz, that's yet another blow to her ego on top of a fresh punch to the pocketbook. The tough-as-nails Yahoo CEO may yet instill the discipline needed to turn her dying internet company around. But bitter medicine does not go down easy, especially without the sugar of rising revenues or stock price.

Eric Schmidt's comments at the Abu Dhabi "media summit" certainly sound especially cocky even considering the Google CEO's past haughty pronouncements. Schmidt, Fortune reports, implied Google is more trustworthy than any government on the planet after he was was asked asked about the company's worrisome stash of private data on its users, Schmidt :

"All this information that you have about us... Does that scare everyone in this room?" The questioner asked... "Would you prefer someone else?" Schmidt shot back... "Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?"

Schmidt also said Google has been known to curb its own creepy impulses:

"There are many, many things that Google could do, that we chose not to do... One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."

Fortune wonders if Schmidt's comments are a sign of "a dangerous culture of self-righteousness." They are.

But the CEO's remarks are just the latest in a series of prominent self-righteous statements from Googlers. There have been plenty of similar cases just in the past couple of months alone. It's worth cataloging them, given Google's deep relationship with its millions of users, and given that the Mountain View internet company doesn't seem to be getting any more humble.

Delusion 1: It's not about the money

In Abu Dhabi, speaking to a diverse international audience, Schmidt said Google "sees itself really differently from other companies" because "we see ourselves as a company with a mission about information and not a mission about revenue or profits."

Here's what Schmidt said to a different crowd, of Wall Street analysts, in an October conference call: "We love cash." That's the full sentence he uttered. He had nothing to say on the call about Google's noble information "mission.

Come on, St. Eric: Google did not make $15 billion in profits over the past year on accident. The company exists to make money for its investors and executives. Period. And that's not something you'd have to apologize for if you'd drop the old saw about how Google is too virtuous to chase money and how it really just wants to make us all smarter.

Delusion 2: Google's wealth means Google "gets it"

Above is an extraordinary clip of Matt Cutts, a search engineer and defacto spokesman for Google. Asked on the podcast This Week in Google to address the disturbing privacy lapses in Google Buzz, which exposed one user's location to her abusive ex, and to address Schmidt's ham-fisted response, Cutts says he believes in Schmidt's handling of Buzz and "a lot of stuff" because Google's stock price is no longer "very very low" and thus the CEO "absolutely does get it."

It's a truly bizarre moment, in which Cutts defends some horrendous management decisions based on Wall Street trades. If the last two years have taught this country anything, it's that the connection between stock performance and executive competence is pitifully weak. UPDATE: Cutts has responded on his blog.

Yet Cutts is hardly alone in revering Google's financials. Schmidt looked at Google's unexpectedly strong third-quarter profits and said they made him "very optimistic now about the future," gave him "the confidence to be optimistic about our future" and made him "very, very happy with Q3." After a blowout fourth quarter Schmidt said "we are back in business full blast."

But at Google financial gains have not been correlated with innovation. The company still gleans nearly all its profits from its core, longstanding contextual advertising business; its many many side projects and acquisitions add little to the bottom line. So Google shouldn't get too excited to see its stock is up 77 percent the past year versus 59 percent for the S&P 500, or to be accelerating its hiring while national unemployment is stuck at 10 percent.

Profits do not mean you're connecting with users' most pressing needs. If that were the case then Microsoft, flush with revenue from its old-line Office and Windows businesses to this day, would have clobbered Google in Web search years ago.

Delusion 3: Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow

Google wanted a big debut for Google Buzz, its attempt to copy the likes of Twitter and FriendFeed. So it bypassed an established "beta" testing system and launched Buzz with no external trials. It also built Buzz into GMail to get more users. This ended up screwing users over on privacy; Buzz was automatically sharing their lists of most-emailed friends with the world.

And yet Google's contrition has been limited. The company response boils down to, "well that's unfortunate but it's also the way the world works now."

Original Google Buzz product manager Jyri Engstrom repeated this view in the above This Week in Google clip, in which he states it was "brave" of Google to risk users' trust for the benefit of Buzz, since it needs that trust so badly. See the clip above. He added:

What we're going to have to come to terms with is this stuff happening more. I honestly don't think it's a bad thing for people to be exposed to the issues this way.

So terrible privacy violations like sharing your location and work address with an abusive ex-husband and other unauthorized parties are the necessary costs of progress and not "a bad thing," according to one of the key engineers behind Google Buzz. In fact, they are learning experiences.

Engstrom said this, by the way, on the same podcast where the abusive ex-husband was discussed, so it's not like he didn't grasp the full implications of what had happened.

But he was hardly alone in framing privacy abuse as inevitable and necessary. In a later podcast, Cutts said that while Buzz perhaps needed more testing, rapid deployment allowed Google to get rapid feedback on Buzz and "iterate" quickly and "try out a lot of different things" (see latter half of clip above).

Translation: It's very effective for Google to use the actual relationships of actual humans to test unproven social networking code. And conveniently, Google doesn't have to endure the sometimes painful cost of this testing!

Of course, there's a more ethical alternative: Use consenting beta testers like the "Trusted Testers" Google has already organized to test innovative social products, rather than rushing into something to get big fast.

Delusion 4: Users are hungry for Google synergy

When Google launched Buzz, it thought people would by dying to see the product pop up all over the place: in Google GMail, Google Maps even Google search. Google VP Vic Gundotra openly talked about using those properties to promote Buzz in an interview with Silicon Valley blogger and startup advisor Louis Gray. See the short clip above.

But this sort of integration proved to be Buzz's biggest weakness: The combination of Buzz and Gmail cluttered up people's inboxes and, quite controversially, made it possible for Buzz to compromise users' privacy by combing their email logs. Google should have known such deep integration would be a bad idea because, as we noted the day Buzz launched, the company experienced a very similar controversy when it hooked Google Reader up to GMail two years ago.

It seemed unfair and sleazy, not convenient, when Microsoft started using its operating system to promote its online services, streaming media technologies and Web browser. Google isn't quite as suspect as Microsoft but, in the eyes of the public, it's increasingly getting close. Especially when it comes to search. And the public will be increasingly hostile to Google product bundles that are more about promotion than functionality.

Delusion 5: Google is a worker's utopia

Google brags about finding, and keeping, "the world's best engineers;" it even avoids offering jobs to some top coders to avoid an over-concentration of awesome. It takes pride in its notoriously lengthy and rigorous interview process, and in coddling workers once they clear it. The company certainly gets tons of free press for the free food and massages.

But the system seems increasingly broken.

Management has flip-flopped on the perks for example; Google honchos originally said posh benefits "save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity... Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down." Also, "these things [benefits] cost nothing." But come the next recession, Google was cutting way back and battling what executives described as presumptuous worker entitlement. "The culture was misinterpreted," Sergey Brin told a reporter. "That grew up into everybody's expectation... We decided to... significantly cut down all the snacks."

The hiring system, it turns out, was nearly rejecting Google's best employees and riddled with bizarre or terrible questions. And as for retention, some of Google's most ambitious employees saw their work buried; some complain until they quit.

Delusion 6: The outraged users are confused

Whenever Google's actions spark criticism, the first response of the self-regarding Google priesthood seems to be to insist the critics are simply bewildered at the company's complicated brilliance.

For example, in December Schmidt made a rather chilling statement on CNBC about secrets (which we were the first to highlight): "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The quote set off a firestorm of controversy.

Google rather absurdly argued that Schmidt had been misunderstood and taken out of context; in a statement circulated at the time its flacks claimed Schmidt was "talking about the US Patriot Act." Sure he was — after he gave his little lecture about the villainy behind secrets. There's plenty of context in the video clip we ran, reproduced above.

Schmidt also absurdly claimed to be misunderstood over Google Buzz. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago, Schmidt went so far as to falsely deny any privacy breach occurred with Buzz, saying in effect that users were hysterical:

"People thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true [it was]... It was our fault that we did not communicate that fact very well, but the important thing is that no really bad stuff happens in the sense that nobody's personal information was disclosed [it was]."

Schmidt said this after a civil liberties group had already issued a warning about Buzz's "serious problems" with "private information" and after Google's own Todd Jackson had said Google was "very very sorry" for getting millions of users "rightfully upset."

Schmidt was right that there's a lot of confusion around Google. Unfortunately for him, much of that confusion seems to originate in the company itself. Hopefully the Todd Jacksons of the company will have a chance to educate their peers on the realities of life outside the Googleplex. Eric Schmidt included.

(Matt Cutts picture by Andy Beal; Jyri Engström picture by Esther Dyson; Gina Trapani picture by Jared Goralnick)