Johnson, at least, has received a more clear explanation for why his account was summarily deleted with no warning: Heather Champ, Yahoo's VP of customer service, told him he had been "spamming" the White House photostream. (Johnson has said he posted an initial batch of approximately 10 comments, then another 10 or so when those were deleted. Yahoo has declined to address Johnson's case directly with us.)

Champ also told Johnson the image he attached to his second batch of messages was too graphic. The picture, which you can see here, was from the Abu Ghraib prison and was linked over by Johnson from another Flickr account. Johnson, who has attended his share of political protests, was trying to draw attention to Barack Obama's support for a controversial bill that would have suppressed government torture photos.

Champ broke out both the carrot and the stick. She offered Johnson a $25 gift card he could use for a new Flickr Pro account. "She tried to shower me with platitudes like "Oh I know you are passionate about this issue,'" Johnson told us.

But she also told him there was no way to retrieve his old photos; that seems unlikely, as it implies Yahoo has no backups of Flickr's content. Champ also blocked messages from Johnson's new Flickr account on the internal FlickrMail system. Following a phone conversation with Johnson, she had posted a picture indicating her day wasn't going well, and Johnson had commented underneath the picture, "this is like watching a slow train wreck." She then blocked him.

So Johnson turned to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield (above), seeking help in reaching Champ. Butterfield left Yahoo last year, but he said he could tell what was going on from a distance: Johnson must be in the wrong. Their correspondence:

Yahoo's cuddly new head of PR, Eric Brown, might want to start exercising some message discipline over this situation. Does the company regret its actions (gift card) or stand by them? Does it really have no backups of old pictures? What are the guidelines for commenting on the popular White House photostream? People will inevitably criticize Yahoo's answers to those questions, but at least they'll have them.

(Picture by Dan Farber)

The only thing anyone can agree on was Amazon.com PR's complete mishandling of the situation, once people noticed that gay and lesbian books were getting marked as "adult" titles, which Amazon.com omits from its sales rankings and search results. Top flack Patty Smith didn't do much better with her latest excuseplanation:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for checking in. Best regards -
Patty

In other words, it happened and they're fixing it. That's worse than nothing. So here are the rumors that have crossed our inbox:

Blame France! An Amazon.com alumnus tells us this story about "how it went down":

guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up "adult", which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like "erotic" and "sexuality". That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon. The [customer service] rep thought the porn question as a standard porn question about how searches work.

It's the Conficker worm! A source who claimed to work at Amazon.com told me that internal logs revealed a massive wave of automatically created accounts shortly before the incident, apparently using machines infected with the Conficker worm.

We don't have concrete evidence that it was Conficker, but a few days before the incident, there was a mass registration of accounts on Amazon. We're talking MASSIVE. I don't have an exact number, but from the regions the accounts were registered from, it looked like it followed a trend. There were quite a few from India, eastern United States as well. According to my coworkers who have done more research into it, the regions that the registrations were from followed a strong trend with the regions that Conficker has most affected.

The hacker did it. That brings us back to the claim by Weev, a well-documented website prankster, that he's responsible — a claim which Smith, the Amazon spokeswoman categorically denies. ("No," she said, in response to a series of direct questions asking if Weev was involved. Smith is quite possibly the least verbose director of corporate communications in the world.)

In his detailed explanation of how he allegedly pulled off the stunt, Weev says he hired third-world workers to break Amazon's "captcha" security, which displays a random set of numbers and letters in an effort to block hackers who attempt to mass-register accounts using scripts. Might he have hired a third party which then used a Conficker botnet to create accounts which then flagged gay and lesbian books on Amazon as inappropriate? Or is this all part of an elaborate attention-getting stunt to take credit for an Amazon employee's mistake? Either way, it's a masterstroke to tie together the month's two big Internet memes.

Rose has deleted the pictures after someone at Tesla requested that he take them down. But Tesla flack Rachel Konrad seems thrilled with the leak, praising Jalopnik editor Ray Wert for his site's coverage of the leak. Here's Konrad's email to Wert (who took issue with recent coverage of Konrad's blogger-outreach strategy):

So was the leak a violation of Tesla's intellectual-property rights, or a "really, really nice job"? It's about as clear as anything at the electric-car startup these days.

For Tesla, any publicity is good publicity. The Model S unveiling is Tesla's last-ditch hope at a future in the business. Although it does not have financing for the production of the Model S, or even a site for a factory to produce it, Tesla plans to take deposits for the $58,000 vehicle from customers, a move at least one Tesla executive deemed fraudulent, prompting his departure.

We asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk who sent Rose the takedown request and he replied, "I think it was your mom." And then added, "By the way, I have a crow sandwich coming your way soon." Good to know that this standard-bearer of the green revolution isn't working himself to death to launch his new vehicle and still has time to toss playground insults at bloggers.

After Australian communications consultant Lee Hopkins picked up a Valleywag story about Tesla CEO Elon Musk's elaborate efforts to find leakers inside his company using tell-tale emails, Rachel Konrad, a former reporter for CNET, the AP, and the Detroit Free Press, sent Hopkins a message he characterized as a "snottogram." (Brutal honesty: just another reason we love Australians.) Here's Konrad's email:

Hi, Lee. I'm not sure how much you know about the various publications that you link to, but I really do need to take umbrage with your recent blog post about Tesla Motors citing a Silicon Valley gossip blog. If you want to discuss the company's ethnics, communication and transparency, I am happy to do so — and I am also eager to provide you with examples of real customers who trust the company and its products every day so you don't have to rely on speculation and rumors.

In fact, the first Tesla Roadster has just made its way to Australia:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25137276-3102,00.html

And I am happy to put you in touch with the Australian owner if you want to talk to someone who has first-hand experience with Tesla.

You are an influential blogger and I would be happy to establish a relationship with you if you are going to write about Tesla again. Please reach out to me, particularly if you plan to write a hit piece on the company, so I can give you facts and hard data on which to base your (and your readers') opinions of the company.

Thanks.

Rachel Konrad
Senior Communications Manager
Tesla Motors, Inc.

It's not clear why Konrad wanted to discuss the company's "ethnics" with Hopkins. She can't possibly have meant "ethics." After all, Konrad's former boss, Tesla executive Darryl Siry, quit because he feared the company was committing fraud by planning to take deposits for its Model S sedan before it had a factory site or financing for the launch.

Hopkins replied to Konrad's email asking a series of tough questions about Tesla's troubled business. He received no reply. So much for "communication."

And finally, what about Tesla's "transparency"? Konrad, formerly a distinguished journalist, seems to have adapted well to her new profession of PR. Not once in her email to Hopkins did she address Valleywag's reporting of Musk's digital witch hunt, though she seems to imply it is false. Konrad has not yet replied to an email asking if she really meant to deny the story. Right now, that's the only thing transparent about her.

Facebook redesigns have always attracted an almost ludicrous amount of controversy, going back to its roots on protest-happy college campuses. But the outcry this time is different.

Rather than introduce new, unfamiliar features — as Facebook did in 2006 when it first introduced a "News Feed" to the site — in this latest revision, Facebook has removed or hidden functions users had grown used to. Useful features, like a calendar of events, are difficult to find. Many have noted that the new emphasis on status updates makes Facebook look more like Twitter, a service for broadcasting short text messages to friends on the Web and on cell phones. Facebook's redesign, however, managed to copy the worst aspect of Twitter — the unmanageable flood of incomprehensible trivia — without matching the virtue of its simplicity.

Here's the statement the Facebook flack issued to the BBC:

The new Facebook home page is one step in the continued evolution of the site, designed to give people more ways to share and filter all types of content, such as status updates, photos, videos, notes and more.

We are grateful to have 175 million people worldwide using Facebook to connect with the people and things they care about most, and we take their feedback very seriously.

We are listening carefully to what people are saying about the new home page through a variety of channels - including through a popular application, built by outside developers on our platform, that allows users to vote and express their opinion.

Also helpful have been the many comments we're reading on industry blogs, the Facebook company blog, Mark Zuckerberg's public profile, Facebook user groups, and through the link on the Facebook new home page tutorial.

We encourage people to send us constructive, detailed feedback and are committed to using it to inform how we build and improve the site for everyone.

Could it be any more obvious that Facebook is not listening to its customers? It's not a surprise that a flack would lie, but it is a surprise that one would contradict the boss so blatantly.

Last week, Valleywag revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had sent an email to his staff dismissing the negative feedback and praising companies which don't listen to their customers as "smart." Listening to one's customers would lead to Facebook getting "disrupted" — that's Valleyspeak for "rendered irrelevant" — by an upstart like, say, Twitter.

So let's be clear: Zuckerberg is telling his PR people to issue statements that Facebook is attentively listening to user feedback, at the same time that he is instructing his employees to ignore it. Facebook is getting disrupted, alright. But it's getting disrupted by its CEO, whom we hear is ignoring feedback not only from customers but from his own employees as well.

Instead, he's apparently relying on advisors like former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, who left the company last year to join Benchmark Capital, a venture-capital firm which invested in Twitter last month. Or, who knows — perhaps he's following the advice of a guru he met in India last May? Or some fellow CEOs he met at Davos?

Whoever Zuckerberg's listening to, he's doing so at Facebook's peril. Compete.com, a Web-traffic research firm, shows a steady downward trend in time spent on Facebook since the rollout of the redesign a week ago:

It's early yet, and Compete's statistics are far from conclusive. But numbers on actual usage are by far the most important feedback users are giving — the silent majority who are merely clicking away, rather than posting their gripes. It's telling that nowhere in the company's statement are actual figures on how the redesign has boosted Facebook's traffic. If they were anything to brag about, don't you think Facebook would be sharing them?

(Photo by World Economic Forum)

In an epic 7,738-word interview, the CBS newswoman probes Mayer on privacy, womanhood, fashion, and cupcakes. She even cites Valleywag! (We would love to have been a fly on the wall and seen Mayer's expression when Stahl uttered the gossip blog's name.)

Stahl, otherwise a close study of Valleywag's reporting on Mayer, mistakenly promotes Mayer to "queen of cupcakes." Mayer, who gushed to San Francisco about how vanilla frosting gave her "brain euphoria," had previously denied having any business interest whatsoever in cupcakes.

But, in what looks like a desperate attempt to make herself look more serious for Stahl, Mayer appears to make up a crazy-sounding story about how her enthusiasm for cupcakes was really just an exercise in exploring it as a business idea. And then, when Stahl asks her if she's going to quit Google to become a cupcakepreneur, Mayer hastily denies it:

LESLEY: Yes. Good analogy. To me, Marissa, you are a really, really interesting person because I think your interests are diverse and unexpected. Let me say that. A surprise. And I guess what I'm specifically talking about now is cupcakes, Marissa. You're the queen of cupcakes. What is that? Tell me what that is. Every time I read anything about you, the cupcakes come up.

MARISSA: I don't think I'm the queen of cupcakes.

LESLEY: No?
MARISSA: I do have a legendary sweet tooth. But I think that, you know, one of the key things I think about here at Google is consumers – what they're interested in, what's a fad right now, what's a basic need. One observation I made a few years ago, just from a business perspective, is that I think the same way we saw the rise of the Krispy Kreme donut, people see the rise of the cupcakes. For example, Crumbs is now franchising. Someone's going to take cupcakes and they're going to figure out how to bake them in Subway-like ovens and frost them up right in front of you and franchise it. Because I think that, especially now because of the economic downturn, cupcakes are simple, they are comforting, they're inexpensive.

LESLEY: They're fattening.

MARISSA: And they can scale. But they're interesting from a business perspective. It's a prediction that I made around the next fad. I do have a sweet tooth. I do like to bake. I have my various spreadsheets analyzing different recipes and looking at the differences between them.

...

LESLEY: You know, The New York Times [actually, Valleywag -Ed.] recently created somewhat of a mini-storm by suggesting that you were thinking of leaving Google. And your job at Google is to think about what's next for Google. Are you beginning to think about what's next for Marissa?

MARISSA: I'm very challenged at Google. I'm very happy at Google. I don't understand where the rumor came from. It really was baseless. I couldn't be happier with my role here, our progress at Google, or my team.

LESLEY: In other words – let's get it on the record at wowOwow.com: You are not about to open Marissa's Cupcake Company?

MARISSA: No. Absolutely not.

But the best part is when the ladyreporter and the ladyexecutive start talking ladyfashion:

LESLEY: OK, so you're a geek, right? That's what you said.

MARISSA: Yes.

LESLEY: But, you know, geeks don't wear clothes that match, as somebody said.

MARISSA: Who makes that rule?

LESLEY: Well you just have to observe -

MARISSA: To me a geek is one who is really enthusiastic about technology, likes to hack on things and we have a lot of attention to detail. Why shouldn't our clothes match?

We could think of many words to describe Mayer's unique, Skittles-inspired fashion sense. But never would it occur to us to use the word "match" in explicating her nouveau gauche way with clothing. Look for yourselves, and discuss how best to summarize Mayer's matchless taste:

And let's not forget her sporty look.

(Photos via El Pais, Trends der Zukunft, CNET News, Sydney Morning Herald/Brendan Esposito, New York Social Diary, Wall Street Journal, Beet.tv, San Francisco Magazine, Rafael Mizrahi, Keso via Blogoscoped, SFLuxe,

No surprise that an Apple flack lied. Under CEO Steve Jobs, the company has made a fetish of secrecy, misdirection, and fabrication. Dowling may have been following orders, or he may have been misled by a colleague himself. (He has not responded to a voicemail asking for comment.) But on matters as important as Jobs's own health, Apple flacks have consistently deceived reporters, and — worse yet — gotten caught.

What still surprises us, though, is how many people are so eager to trust the word of a flack with a shoddy reputation for honesty.

California law requires warning in advance of layoffs of 50 or more employees. But the salespeople in question were split between Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and Austin, Texas, which means the layoff wasn't subject to the layoff-warning rule.

And they weren't that big a deal, either, in the grand scheme of things. Hewlett-Packard, which has offices right next door to Apple, is in the process of laying off some 15,000 employees. Why not acknowledge the layoffs, and point out how small they were in comparison to others? The only reason I can think of why an Apple spokesman would lie about something as minor as these layoffs: Sheer force of habit.

(Photo via Esquire)

There are layoffs at Apple today. Lots of security around. Looks like Mac hardware and pro applications folks are being impacted. Don't have any idea of numbers....but it seems like a lot.

A recent report of layoffs in Apple's sales force sparked some controversy, because corporations are supposed to file notice of mass layoffs in advance and Apple PR denied the layoffs. I absolutely believe they happened, despite bloggers who bought Apple's PR spin. It only makes sense in a weakening economy, when businesses are slashing purposes, to cut salespeople. And Apple spokespeople, who have made a foolish practice of uttering obvious lies in public about matters as serious as their CEO's health, are about as credible as, oh, say, a CNBC reporter these days. But let's look at the actual law.

For a company of Apple's size, federal labor law only requires notice for layoffs of more than 500 employees at a single site, in most cases, under the WARN Act. If the employees are physically spread out over multiple sites, it may not apply. California, where Apple is headquartered has a stricter law, which covers layoffs of 50 or more employees, but there are similar loopholes. The state only updates layoff filings once a month, at any rate. If Apple really is making cuts, we may not get official confirmation of the layoffs for weeks, if at all.

There's another route the company could take to cut jobs without calling them layoffs: Disemploy workers with poor performance reviews and call them firings, a move called "forced ranking" that's used at companies like Cisco and GE.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling did not return a call for comment, but that's okay, because he never does.

(Photo via londonderrynh.net)

The tip came from a Jason Felts at Edge Productions. Edge is the PR firm of Jonathan Jaxson, the wacky publicist whose stunt with leaked nudie pics got a client, Disney star Adrienne Bailon, booted from Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. In a now-deleted post archived on The Insider, Jaxson crowed about signing Zolciak as a client.

It figures that anyone stupid enough to hire Jaxson as a flack would also be too stupid to operate her own blog. Kim Zolciak Online is hosted on Blogger, Google's free, Web-based blogging service. Either that, or she just really doesn't like blogs — even her own. From an interview with Paper last fall:

How are the blogs treating you these days?
I try to stay away from them. Initially they were great, and they just got worse and worse. I don't think people can see who you are from seven episodes that are one hour each.

The story broke on Sunday in Consumerist (a website recently sold by Gawker Media to the publisher of Consumer Reports): Facebook had changed its terms of service to say it would retain data even after users deleted their accounts! The scandalous implication: Facebook intended to keep all of its information on us, for ever and ever and ever — every last poke and Wall post and comment and photo and video.

From there, it spread to Tumblr and Twitter. By Monday, it was on Techmeme, a headline-aggregation site obsessively monitored by tech bloggers.

By that evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's response — that Facebook users "own and control" their information — was gaining traction. But it still didn't quiet the blogosphere storm. Late last night, Zuckerberg bowed to the bloggers and retracted Facebook's revision to its terms of service, promising a further revision.

What did the storm accomplish? Facebook's terms of service no longer claim rights to a user's data after account deletion — though Facebook in fact continues to retain that information (for example, in a copy of a Facebook message sent by the former user which remains in a current user's inbox).

All that has changed is words, not actions. But the bloggers who so strongly protested Facebook's new terms of service can't very well complain about the old ones, since they lived under those for months or years without complaint.

And in reality, how many people were actually upset? 91,000 people joined a protest group. That's 0.05 percent of Facebook's population.

Amid this PR storm, no one has pointed out the real issue here, which is that the guy masterminding these legal changes is Ted Ullyot, who previously worked in the Bush Administration under then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, surrounded by coworkers who unabashedly defended torture and shredded the Bill of Rights. Amazing, isn't it, that people are talking about a site's legal boilerplate, rather than the guy who Zuckerberg picked to enforce it?

(Photoillustration via Ideagrove)

The Recorder, a San Francisco legal publication, has details of the case, which is now being considered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Eulonda Skyles (left), the first black woman hired in Yahoo's 200-person legal department, says she was mommy-tracked after a maternity leave in 2005, and treated worse than white women who had also taken time off for pregnancy and childcare.

Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan told the Recorder that Skyles's charges were meritless. And yet Yahoo pushed Skyles's supervisor, Reggie Davis, out of the legal department altogether and into a dead-end job hundreds of miles away from headquarters. Callahan claimed that Davis's new job was "a great career opportunity." Another lawyer, Lynn Loeb, left the company after Skyles pointed out that she was overseeing work by an outside law firm where her husband works, a possible ethics violation. Again, Yahoo said that was unrelated.

And now we hear another top Yahoo executive may have lost her job over the Skyles case.

The Recorder article, written by Zusha Elinson, has a detailed, negative account of Skyles' on-the-job performance which comes from a document generated during confidential settlement talks between Skyles and Yahoo in 2006. (Skyles disputes Yahoo's negative claims about her, as do former colleagues who worked with her at Yahoo.)

How did Elinson get his hands on the confidential document? We're told that Callahan, the Yahoo general counsel, provided it to Jill Nash (left), Yahoo's top flack, and from there, it made its way into the reporter's hands. According to an email Skyles sent to Bartz, that leak was a violation of both the confidentiality of the settlement and labor laws restricting what an employer may say publicly about an employee's performance.

Skyles sent the email the morning of February 2 — more than two weeks before Elinson's story would be published — demanding that Bartz take action against the person who leaked the document.

That afternoon, Nash announced her departure from Yahoo. A flack always chooses words carefully; in her goodbye email, Nash did not say she had "quit" or "resigned" — only that she was leaving. She had no new job lined up, nor did she disclose any future plans.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Nash had worked under three different CEOs in the space of two years, and dealt with a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft and a bruising proxy fight with corporate raider Carl Icahn. But, significantly, Bartz has launched a fearsome campaign against leaks inside Yahoo, going as far as to offer a $1,000 reward to any employee who snitches on a leaker. If Nash really left Yahoo because of the Recorder, we think Bartz needs to write Skyles a check.

We doubt it. Facebook board member Marc Andreessen once cited a paper on business magazine covers as contrarian indicators:

Headlines from featured stories in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes were collected for a 20-year period to determine whether positive stories are associated with superior future performance and negative stories are associated with inferior future performance for the featured company. "Superior" and "inferior" were determined in comparison with an index or another company in the same industry and of the same size.

Statistical testing implied that positive stories generally indicate the end of superior performance and negative news generally indicates the end of poor performance.

So what does that mean for Facebook? In this case, "superior performance" means losing money on an estimated $280 million in revenue last year — and facing more problems as the site grows.

We hear the company is even having trouble managing something as simple as a move to its new headquarters, a soulless office park facing a residential neighborhood on the other side of Palo Alto, Calif. from its current downtown digs. Local residents recently received a newsletter informing them that the move, scheduled to happen this quarter, was pushed back to April because of ongoing renovations:

The evidence that the two have ended their feud, which began when they were both students at Harvard and Facebook was just getting off the ground: Saverin is now listed as a company founder on Facebook's website.

There's an excellent reason for Zuckerberg to make nice with Saverin, though: Ben Mezrich, author of Bringing Down the House, is writing an account of the founding of Facebook which relies heavily on Saverin as a source. Aaron Sorkin, the West Wing creator, is already planning to adapt the book, which doesn't have a publication date yet, into a movie.

If Saverin has made up with Zuckerberg, he may not be as willing to cooperate with Mezrich. One hopes the author got his interviews done before Saverin's name went back up on Facebook. A book proposal leaked to Gawker last year has some factual errors — Zuckerberg and Saverin dined on the yacht of then-Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, who says he has never owned a boat. But even if it gets close to the truth of Facebook's origins, it will be embarrassing, since it claims that Zuckerberg and Saverin set up the website to meet girls. The feud between the founders was central to the plot.

It has been almost five years since Zuckerberg has acknowledged Saverin as having anything to do with the company, which Saverin incorporated and managed for Zuckerberg from their college dorm. According to Rolling Stone, Zuckerberg reincorporated the company and squeezed Saverin out after he accused Zuckerberg of spending company money on personal expenses:

In July, Zuckerberg and Saverin had a mysterious falling out. Zuckerberg has filed a lawsuit, claiming Saverin jeopardized the company by freezing Facebook's bank accounts. Saverin countersued, claiming that Zuckerberg never matched his $20,000 in seed money and, further, used that money for personal expenses. That summer, Zuckerberg transferred all intellectual-property rights and membership interests to a new version of the company in Delaware.

Saverin reportedly told Cameron Winklevoss, another student embroiled in a legal dispute with Zuckerberg, that Zuckerberg had "screwed him, too." Zuckerberg moved the company to Palo Alto, Calif., and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, making the company worth a notional $15 billion on paper. Saverin saw none of that.

With hard feelings seemingly over (possibly smoothed over by some cash or stock), Facebook flack Brandee Barker explains Saverin's official co-founder status this way:

We made the change recently to make sure Eduardo gets the credit and visibility he deserves for his contribution to Facebook.

That's quite a change from Facebook's official stance in 2007, when Barker herself denied on the record that Saverin cofounded Facebook, even though he was listed in the company's documents of incorporation.

Since the lawsuit centers around who did what for Facebook when, it seems absurd to think that Zuckerberg would publicly acknowledge Saverin with a lawsuit hanging over his head. Barker repeatedly refused to answer any questions about the status of the lawsuit. Saverin and his lawyers did not return inquiries. Now, with an ending that seems to have zipped Saverin's lips, will Sorkin and Mezrich have any story to tell?

Though Goldman never discloses it on air, one of his Apple sources is Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, who previously worked with Goldman at CNBC'S Silicon Valley bureau. Does he have other sources within Apple?

He claims to, as the New York Times notes. He went on air last month, in the clip above, to declare Jobs "fine." And in a recent blog post, Goldman dug himself deeper as he stuck to his story:

All along, sources (and yes, there are several) inside Apple have reassured me that Jobs was firmly in charge, executing his responsibilities, and performing his role as C.E.O. One source, who I have known for years, told me recently that Jobs was 'fine,' and that everything was under control. All of it was fine. And I stand by every word of that reporting. Even today.

"Several" sources: Does that mean Goldman spoke to Dowling, his former colleague, and Katie Cotton, Jobs's personal PR guru at Apple, who has a track record of lying about her boss?

Take this earlier blog post from Goldman, when worries first emerged that Jobs, who had undergone surgery to treat pancreatic cancer in 2004, was skipping the annual Macworld Expo event where he usually delivers a keynote address, because his health was failing:

I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs' decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should 'rest assured that the board would let me know.'

Sounds like Goldman has a direct line to the Apple board, right? Wrong. That's the same statement Dowling gave every other media outlet:

If Steve or the board decides that Steve is no longer capable of doing his job as CEO of Apple, I am sure they will let you know.

The only conclusion to reach here: Either Goldman is puffing up flacks as sources, or his sources don't exist.

That's what one former colleague of Goldman's thinks:

Here’s the key to revealing Goldman — he doesn’t have any sources. And his bosses back in New Jersey don’t know that. His only Apple "source" is a flack, Steve Dowling, who once worked at CNBC as the Silicon Valley (off-air) bureau chief.

The question you should raise — does CNBC's managing editor know who Goldman’s sources are? He inflates his bogus persona as a Silicon Valley insider by inventing sources. At any legitimate news organization, if you can use an unnamed "source" your boss must know who it is, by name.

Does CNBC follow this practice? (The answer, as I know well, is: no).

I’ve watched Goldman sit at his desk without picking up the phone for hours, then go on the air and say “I just got off the phone with a source inside Google who tells me...”

He flat out makes it up. He IS Jayson Blair. And he's the only person at CNBC who even tries to get away with it.

Fast Company's Adam Penenberg tried Googling "CNBC ethics" and came up short. We called Kevin Goldman, a spokesman for CNBC, to ask what the network's policies on anonymous sources were — how they were to be used, and whether reporters were obligated to reveal their identities to their editors and producers. (Such is the practice at most magazines and newspapers.)

Goldman (no relation to Jim) said, "CNBC has policies and guidelines that are followed by everyone. And we don't disclose those policies to the public." And he would not comment on the identity of CNBC's sources at Apple.

Blogs are not known for impeccable sourcing. (We call them "tipsters" for a reason.) But at least we're upfront about it — indeed, we're the first to question our sources, often in the same blog post that we cite them. That kind of probing uncertainty makes for a better path to the truth. But it doesn't make good television, and it doesn't fluff up the easily deflated ego of a self-declared "insider."

In a letter posted to Apple's website, Jobs writes:

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

The letter is an obvious response to the furor unleashed by a post on the gadget blog Gizmodo, in which a source privy to Apple's product secrets claimed Jobs's health was "rapidly declining." The source was right about the "declining" part, wrong about the "rapidly," it turns out.

It has been an expensive secret to keep. Apple's market value has jumped by $2.3 billion this morning alone, as traders reveled in the relief of a lie undone.

In the fall of 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a fact he kept secret until July 2004, when he underwent surgery to remove the cancer and rewire his digestive system.

This summer, when Jobs's gauntness grew unmistakable, people wondered if Jobs's cancer had returned. But a simple look at a decade worth of photos of Jobs, who is famed for his annual keynote speech at January's Macworld Expo, showed that his weight loss was progressive, not the sign of some sudden illness.

Stupidly, that was the story Apple spokespeople stuck to — that he had a "common bug." The denial of a deeper health problem just fueled more speculation — and led Jobs, in a profane call to a New York Times writer, to explain, off the record, the same mysterious health problem he's now told the world about.

Jobs's terse explanation, though, raises more question than it answers. Now that he's given everyone a tidbit, they'll want more. Which hormones? What's the cure? Why did Jobs take so long to say he had a health problem? Why did Apple PR lie and say everything was fine? And why did gullibly servile reporters like CNBC's Jim Goldman buy it, counting a call to an Apple spokesman as "reporting"?

Which brings me back to the stock market's reaction: Investors are, perversely, happier knowing Jobs is unwell. Which means it's time for him to go. He has done incredible things for Apple in the past decade, rescuing a company that the industry viewed as certainly moribund.

But the lack of clarity about his future has become an albatross for the company. The stock market hates risk. So the possibility that Apple might lose Jobs's services through death and illness gets discounted; as far as investors are concerned, Jobs is already dead to them.

Which is the real reason why we're seeing Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller, Jobs's jokey demo sidekick, give Jobs's keynote speech tomorrow. Jobs may be better by the spring. But it's time for his company to act like he's gone.

Arrington is the founder and editor of TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley tech blog which rose to the faintest level of prominence on the national stage by chronicling "Web 2.0," a phenomenon which more or less disappeared two years ago and which no one now confesses to involvement in without blushing embarrassment.

The man himself is tall, large, and blustery, given to fits of rage and depression, at once emotionally fragile and viciously vituperative. He does have keen insights on the inner workings of the tech industry. Frustratingly for him, the audience for those is small — and he would like to be running a much larger enterprise. But the credit crisis has popped Silicon Valley's microbubble, and with it, Arrington's dreams of buying up his competitors and then cashing out by selling the mess to investors.

Which sets the stage for Arrington, bitter and frustrated, to launch an attack on a convenient, hapless, and utterly deserving target: the public relations business. And somehow he's managing to make the flacks look sympathetic.

Frustrated by the practice of timed "embargoes," which limit the release of obscure news no one cares about to an arbitrary time convenient to nobody, Arrington has declared not that he will stop agreeing to embargoes, but that he will now agree to embargoes and then break his word. He's also unloaded on one particularly bad flack, Lois Whitman-Hess.

Meanwhile, he won't explain his curiously soft coverage of MySpace and curiously close relationship with MySpace's PR chief, Dani Dudeck.

What makes this all hilarious is that Arrington is really angry because he views public relations firms as his competition. He wants to be the gatekeeper and kingmaker for all the Valley's startups, controlling the public rollout of all of their most obscure milestones. The grandiosity of his territorial behavior, over such small turf, is tragicomic — like a dog pissing on every side of a tree, just to make sure we know it's his.

I'd say the technology industry doesn't need Arrington — but we do. Because now more than ever, we could all use a good laugh.

As with Sarah Palin's baby rumors, the scurrilous media forced Jobs's hand. Arik Hesseldahl, a BusinessWeek reporter, noticed a blog post which pointed out Jobs had not yet been confirmed as a speaker for the annual event, which serves as an international showcase for Apple's products, a massive blogosphere buzz builder, and an orgy of media obsession.

As Hesseldahl put it to me, he wasn't thinking of a story as much as whether he should book his flight for the show. He called Apple last Friday, and got no response — typical for Apple's tight-lipped PR operation. But on Monday, he managed to reach Paul Kent, the general manager of Macworld Expo, who told him he had "no reason to believe that plans are not moving ahead," which Hesseldahl took as confirmation that Jobs would show up.

When Hesseldahl published a story on Monday with the headline "Steve Jobs Will Be at Macworld," all hell broke loose. Kent called back, saying he meant that the show would go forward, not that Jobs was a sure thing. Hesseldahl changed "will" to "may" in his headline and updated the story — but Kent's PR firm kept calling to backpedal. The story spread, and the drumbeat of speculation grew ever louder.

Then, late Tuesday, came Apple's announcement that Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at Macworld, a tradition he's maintained since he returned to the company a decade ago. The cover story was plausible enough: Trade shows were an outdated way to sell Macs and iPhones. But Apple investors didn't buy it, sending the stock down in after-hours trading.

What it speaks to is a control freak who's lost control. Are we to believe that Jobs, who's known for minutely orchestrating every aspect of his keynotes, whimsically decided to abandon Macworld three weeks before the event? That defies reason. Apple was apparently stringing Macworld along, delaying and delaying the announcement, and hoping no one would notice.

Put that in the context of Jobs's ghastly gauntness at this summer's launch of the iPhone 3G, and the ongoing speculation about his health. It's generally understood that the surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer rewired his digestive system, giving him difficulty in digesting some foods. (I've heard he can no longer drink his favorite beverage, a nonalcoholic grape juice from California's Navarro vineyards.) And fears persist that his cancer might return. I keep hearing apocryphal rumors that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is among Jobs's closest friends, once broke down in tears and said, "My best friend is dying."

Amidst that kind of worry, why would Jobs take the stage again? He'd have the fit of his jeans and the flushness of his cheeks debated on blogs in the kind of minute detail that used to be reserved for a new Apple laptop. Showing up in the wrong condition might be as bad for Apple as not showing up at all.

That's why I think there must have been a ferocious debate within Apple about whether he should go on with his keynote, which was brought to a head by the BusinessWeek story. It's the opposite of how Jobs likes to operate — smoothly, in secrecy, with no chinks in the armor of Apple's publicity machine. And it's the clearest sign that something is wrong with Jobs. The ultimate control freak is not himself.

Wall Street analysts estimate that Jobs, regarded as a perfectionist product visionary who has resuscitated Apple's business, adds some $20 billion to Apple's market capitalization. Apple's stock price, down 5 percent in after-hours trading, is expressing fears that genteel reporters can't: Could an ever-worsening illness have led Jobs to cancel his annual Macworld keynote?

Jobs underwent major surgery in 2004 to treat pancreatic cancer. Since then, he's believed to have suffered complications which led to his gaunt appearance — an illness Apple's top flack, Katie Cotton, brazenly lied about.

Apple's official story: Trade shows are a boring, outdated form of marketing, and Apple has better ways to reach consumers. But Jobs made Macworld anything but boring through his theatrical unveilings. They caused such a frenzy that bloggers made an art of reporting on his every word in real time.

I don't expect Apple to comment on Jobs's health. He has made it clear he thinks it's nobody's business, calling New York Times columnist Joe Nocera a "slime bucket" for daring to ask. The stock market is giving voice to an impolitic concern: What will Apple look like without Steve Jobs?

The Journal reported today that Google is rethinking the issue, known in wonkish circles as "network neutrality," and approaching telecom companies about paying them for access to their networks. Richard Whitt, a Google lawyer who works on telecom issues, called the article "confused," and conveniently forgot uttering a statement he was quoted as saying. The Journal is standing by its story.

The only confusion here is whether Google thinks reporters need its permission to uncover important stories.

The arrangement is clever enough; it involves placing Google servers deep with the telecom companies' networks, reducing the cost to the telcos for carrying Google content over their wires. In theory, anyone can do it — which is why Google spokesman Richard Whitt is claiming it doesn't violate their stance on network neutrality, a cause célèbre of Silicon Valley which has failed to resonate farther than 50 miles from the campus of Stanford University.

Some say Google's proposal, dubbed OpenEdge, is clearly malicious, a contravention of its corporate slogan, "Don't be evil." But I'd argue that Google's use of network neutrality has always been evil. Google has not advanced network neutrality because it believes in some namby-pamby principle like the openness of the Internet; it is a cudgel with which it has beat the telecom companies over the head, threatening government regulation if they did not cut Google a deal on favorable terms.

Googlers are intelligent sorts, well-trained in the arts of Big-Brother doublethink. (I almost expect them to change the motto to "Don't be ungood.") Whitt argues that Google's caching efforts aren't evil, because anyone can pursue the same arrangements. Anyone who, like Google, has $14 billion in the bank, that is. Google isn't evil. It's just fabulously rich. And Googlers believe in a level playing field — for anyone who has as much cash to throw around as they do.

(Logo by Gevil.org)