The $1.5 billion hedge fund — one-fifth as large as it was a year ago — fell 4.5 percent in August, a tipster whispers to us, virtually the same loss it posted in June; StreetInsider.com hears the same thing. The fund is now down 8.3 percent for the year, the tipster said. That's versus versus 6 percent at the end of June. If Thiel can't turn things around soon, why not consider unwinding the fund altogether? He's still got his early Facebook investment to cling to, and the unshakable confidence that he's surrounded by "frauds" who aren't half as smart as him. Sounds like a once and future startup founder to us.

(Pic: by Robert Scoble)

Business Insider hears Coleman netted $3 million severance for his 10 weeks work for the company. That's about $60,000 per workday, assuming he didn't come in on weekends.

Maybe that sounds like yet another example of outrageous executive compensation. But we don't begrudge Coleman his money: He fell victim to a similar palace coup at Yahoo when yet another of his bosses was replaced. Kudos to Coleman for being smart enough to hedge his bets this time around with a severance deal, which he presumably insisted on up front.

As George W. Bush famously said, "Fool me once... shame on... shame on you... Fool me — You can't get fooled again."

Lavandeira has won a case against PerezRevenge, a gossip site which styles itself as an antidote to Hilton's "meanness." U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess has ordered the blog's owners, Margie Rogers and Elizabeth Silver-Fagan, to stop using the PerezRevenge name, turn over the site to Hilton, and desist from "using the term 'Perez' to designate any platform, medium, and/or website that contains entertainment or celebrity news or gossip."

Which is laughable, when you think about how Hilton got his start. He first blogged on a site called PageSixSixSix, until he got a nastygram from the New York Post, which objected to his free-riding on the name of its famous gossip column. Lavandeira then came up with his play on the name of the famous hotel heiress, and became Perez Hilton. He also routinely doctors celebrity photos, arguing that sprinkling cocaine dots on them is a transformative use, entitling him to publish them. A couple years ago, several photo agencies disagreed and slapped him with lawsuits. Still, it's all fun and fair. It seems like he's just upset that someone else has joined in on the game.

SAI says that Wired.com was "gutted." We've heard the same, although exact numbers are hard to come by (we still hear 20 or so layoffs total). One layoff victim, we hear: Wired.com managing editor Leander Kahney, who was once mistakenly fingered as the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, by Nick Denton.

There seems to be some feeling that Wired editor Chris Anderson protected his print side at the cost of his online team. Choosing sides is guaranteed to make somebody mad. If you know more, email us.

This insane theory, though, goes like this: the true target of the smear isn't Wendi at all, but rather Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, and one of the rising golden boys of the News Corp. empire and therefore a threat to Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Thomson, whose life story is uncannily similar to Rupert's, also has a Chinese wife, Wang Ping, who happens to be friends with Wendi. Thus, the damaging suggestion about Thomson would be that Ping had aided and abetted Wendi in her dalliance. The only person who'd try to pull off such a crazy scheme? Naturally, News Corp.'s resident master of dark arts and head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Which brings us full circle back to Wolff's book, which has supposedly caused a rift between Ailes and Murdoch because it, as the New York Times reported in October, "suggests that Mr. Murdoch is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns, and its chief executive, Roger Ailes, and that he often shares 'the general liberal apoplexy,' as Mr. Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant."

So there you have it. A crazy theory so crazy it could be true (but probably isn't!). I'm going to head off to Wolff's party now and see if I can dig up something actually substantial. If you know anything about who's behind the Wendi rumor, please email me.

Highly profitable About.com contributes nearly half as much operating cash flow to the Times Company as the news operations, so it would be tough to lose. But that profitability, plus decent growth prospects, also makes it an easier sell. Newspapers like the Boston Globe or the Times Company's regional newspaper chain seem unlikely to fetch much given the state of the industry.

Though online advertising has come in for its share of trouble recently, About.com features, along with conventional banner ads, the sort of contextual text advertising expected to fare better in the downturn than banners.

And cash from a sale could be used to take the Times private, which we heard last week was under discussion, to be funded by the sale of assets like About.com.

The Times in January shot down rumors it was looking to offload About.com. But the company now finds itself in a very different environment. And it would be in keeping with the company's character to face new choices by conserving the hard core of its journalism franchise, even at the expense of more profitable units.

The big unknown, assuming sale rumors are true, is whether the company will be able to find a buyer. If not, it may well have to abandon its sunny forecast regarding job reductions.

(Click the video at top to listen to the original audio. The About.com comment comes around the 00:45 remaining mark.)

Though Flickr is popular, Yahoo has long struggled to figure out how to make enough money on it to cover the site's heavy bandwidth expenses. It also struggled to integrate the company after buying it three years ago.

Getty, meanwhile, has a ready monetization model through its existing licensing business. If it owned Flickr outright, it might be able to streamline the current licensing process, which requires Getty reps to contact individual Flickr account holders, obtain permission and vet the pictures.

After seeing its margins squeezed by Flickr-based sites like EveryStockPhoto, Getty Images decided to buy one, iStockPhoto. It then sold itself to San Francisco private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion in February. Executives promptly gushed about "the next phase of Getty Images' evolution.... in a very dynamic digital media environment." A Flickr purchase?

It's hard to image Hellman agreeing to pay the nearly $4 billion some speculate Flickr to now be worth. But there's a lot of room between that number and the $35 million Yahoo paid for Flickr in 2005. If the two sides could agree on a number, and if Hellman could somehow assemble the cash in this chaotic economic climate, a deal might just be possible.

We'll believe it when we see it. But if you've heard anything, we'd love to hear it too. tips@gawker.com

UPDATE: A Getty staffer wrote in. The staffer hadn't heard anything about a merger and noted that money seems tight, with the Christmas and summer parties rumored to be cancelled or reduced in size. Further, no additional staff were hired for the Flickr partnership.

(Photo by adactio on Flickr)

• "Mini-Me Sex Tape Released On Overseas Website" (avn.com)
• Sex WIth Mini Me (SexWithMiniMe.com)

Previously: Verne Troyer Sex Tape Costar Tells All!, Not The Verne Troyer Sex Tape

At one stage, the friend added, both Courtenay and Samantha were separately visiting Lindsay at a rehab unit called Promises.

The pal went on: “By now Lindsay was sending ‘I love you’ notes to Samantha and signing them ‘Lindsay Ronson’ but telling Courtenay she loved her too."

By October, Courtenay appeared to have the upper hand. She and Lindsay moved into a rented house in Beverly Hills. “But still Lindsay brought men back,” the pal added. “Courtenay would throw fits of rage, writing her hundreds of angry e-mails from another room in the house.

“The sexual attraction between them was electric though and they’d still kiss and make up."

Eventually, Semel moved out and Lohan ended up with with Ronson. In this light, Semel's makeout with Tequila could be seen as kind of a sad attempt to get attention from her long-rumored ex.

The truly sad part of the tabloid report, though, is its assertion that Lohan devolved into drug addiction amid her relationship with Semel because she didn't know how to cope with her lesbianism. Her father Michael, from whom she is estranged, is a devout Christian and skittish about homosexuality, which might have left Lohan without a support network. Against this backdrop, Lohan's recent defacto coming out looks both genuine and necessary for her health.

[News Of The World]

On the one hand, a childhood pal — Russell's mom was reportedly best friends with Levy's mom — can do far worse than guiding one to tens of millions of dollars in wealth. And Pilot Group did more than passively watch its investment grow. From what we hear, Pittman's salesmanship was key to growing Daily Candy's advertising base. Such involvement would be in keeping with Pilot Group's focus on taking a "control position" in its investments. After the investment firm acquired Daily Candy, the newsletter's subscriber count grew tenfold to 2.5 million.

But not everyone buys that version of events. Said the tipster, an AOL veteran who followed Daily Candy closely:

For Pittman to brag that subscribers have increased since he made

the investment is just private equity puffery and delusion. That

would be like my grandmother taking credit for the business success of

the stocks she owns.

Perhaps Russell's help was not so selfless. As our source notes, Russell's advice on the deal would have been "highly conflicted," Russell having worked for Pittman for several months before the Daily Candy investment closed in late 2003.

His line to other potential portfolio

companies and strategic partners is that through his friendship with

Dany, HE was responsible for the early success of Daily Candy as a

startup, so he didn't feel compunction about duping the original

shareholders... Whatever the case, Pittman was not a genius to have his

junior guy abuse a family friendship in a predatory deal.

Let this be a lesson to startup founders who are not yet sufficiently cautions about venture capital investment, or who spend too much time worrying about whether their fameball girlfriends really truly love them for the right reasons: If you're not careful, you might have to settle for a paltry $25 mil when the big payday comes. After taxes, you'll barely be able to afford a decent loft!

Businesses are also increasingly concerned about the risks posed by blogging, social networking sites, and instant messaging. Approximately 21 percent of the companies surveyed have investigated leaks that occurred through blogs and message boards, and 12 percent investigated leaks that occurred through social networking sites. Other emerging leak vectors include peer-to-peer file-sharing services and multimedia sharing sites like YouTube.

Corporate leakers: remember that everything you do on your work computer is subject to spying. But none of this should be construed as discouragement from leaking to us. Use your personal email account, or your home computer, or even your phone! There is no "NEUWS" without "U."

[ars technica via Jossip; image via Current]

So, are readers finally tiring of the torrent of shallow news about no-name celebrities, as Salon believes? The reasons for the abrupt decision are more prosaic, and depressing. Pagesix.com experienced its first day with more than 1m pageviews, last week, when the site published a gallery of photographs of Eliot Spitzer's hooker, Ashley Alexandra Dupré. But it was not making sufficiently rapid inroads into a market dominated by Time Warner's TMZ, and gossip blogs such as Perez Hilton. But the decision to shutter the spinoff gossip site likely owes even more to the Australian media mogul's pessimism about the US economy, and advertising spending.

Murdoch, disclosing a slowdown in ad revenue at his Fox television stations and newspapers, has predicted a "temporary downturn for a year or so." Other media companies, such as the New York Times, are also suffering from the advertising downturn, and have cut costs by making piecemeal layoffs.

The News Corporation boss, who has funded a decade of losses at his tabloid, the New York Post, is typically a patient investor. But he can also be decisive. He will be wary of overstretching the company, particularly after stretching to acquire the Wall Street Journal. During the last big advertising downturn, Murdoch nearly lost control of his company.

Anyway, before competitors gloat at News Corporation's reverse, they should remember this: if advertising spending has indeed turned down, the downturn will not spare web sites. The web's boosters hope that newly cost-conscious marketers will simply redirect their budgets from print and television to the web; that was the hope during the last recession, and it was wishful thinking, then and now. Murdoch will be embarrassed for a day; other media groups will be subsidizing loss-making websites for months before they come to the same conclusion.

We at the Consumerist are happy to welcome Vallywag to the fold. The Consumerist will tell you how the Silicon Valley elite are screwing you out of your money—and Valleywag will tell you how they're spending it.

Go check out Valleywag, we're saying.