Had this happened to Joe Biden's entry, it wouldn't be deemed a story for National Public Radio. Still, I like this All Things Considered writeup, because it pretty much admits in the first sentence that NPR's army of anti-GOP reporters missed the scoop that Palin was McCain's pick. None of them thought to set a watch on her Wikipedia page.

If you happened to check Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry Thursday, you might have had a good tip about Friday's announcement.

Someone — and apparently it was just one person — felt like the existing biography wasn't appropriate for a vice-presidential candidate.On Friday, 15 minutes before the rumor that John McCain had picked Palin as his running mate, a Wikipedia editor discovered 30 mostly favorable changes had been made to the Alaska governor's profile.

She was called "a politician of eye-popping integrity" and sections on her participation in a beauty pageant and her alleged use of influence to get her former brother-in-law fired were diminished.

Wikipedia is now restricting who can alter Palin's page.

(Photo by AP/Al Grillo)

They called it for Kerry in 2004, by refining a guesswork algorithm until it forecast the electoral vote count almost exactly backwards. The site's editor seems to believe that applying the right mathematical formula to inaccurate poll results will get him accurate results. That's the epitome of the old programmer's saying — Garbage in, garbage out.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission [See? I told you Adbusters is fun] Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

• At least 1 million iPhones sold over the first weekend (Apple)
• Cost to Apple: $174.33 parts plus $50 royalties for 8GB model; $16 more for 16GB model (iSuppli)
• Cost to consumers: $199 (8GB), $299 (16GB) (Apple)
• Cost to carriers: conservatively, $499 (8GB), $599 (16GB) (iSuppli)
• Profit per phone: $274.67 (8GB) and $358.67 (16GB)
• Models sold: 33% (8GB), 66% (16GB) (Piper Jaffray survey)

[W]ith help from the Egyptian bloggers who received the message and alerted his university and the U.S. Embassy, Buck walked out of the police station a free man. His translator Mohammad was left behind.

When asked about his involvement with Muxtape, Lodwick first denied it before backtracking. Then, after sources told us Lodwick might have broken his severance agreement in hiring Ouellette away from Connected Ventures to start Muxtape, Ouellette emailed us to say: "I created Muxtape by myself, thank you very much." We emailed back: "Who pays the bills at Muxtape?" No reply, but we've heard the answer is Lodwick.

Ning does have people in the Valley, as Fast Company claims, "buzzing," but not because of the "viral expansion loops" which Andreessen talks up in the piece. Penenberg's thesis: Andreessen has fused viral marketing with social networks, and therefore Ning's current fast expansion rate will continue ad infinitum, or at least ad acquisition.

This is a fashionable delusion fostered by people with something to sell. Supporting Andreessen's argument are Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson and Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha, both of whom make the argument for compound growth. Wilson is an investor in Twitter; Botha backed YouTube. Both profit from the notion that a site's current growth rate will continue unchecked.

The reality? Growth always slows. Facebook used to crow about how its user numbers grew 3 percent a week. By the time Microsoft sank $240 million into the company, that figure had already dropped; it may now be around 1 or 2 percent. Still impressive, and still fast-growing — but any projections based on 3 percent weekly growth are now dead wrong.

With absurdities about compound growth and viral expansion stripped out, Penenberg has little to offer in Ning's defense. According to figures in the piece, Ning is making roughly $1.7 million a year in the $20-a-month subscriptions some social-network creators pay. The rest of the money they make comes from Google's AdSense ads, the familiar fallback of hopeless startups. Bianchini admits as much in a blog post. And yet she and Andreessen commanded a $214 million valuation for their creation.

What Penenberg doesn't explore: The laughable reputation of Ning's software within the Valley. The piece quotes exactly one Ning user. Had Penenberg asked around, he'd have heard from scores of disgusted social-network creators who walked away from the service after trying it out. Pointing that out would get in the way of discussing the appearance of Ning's creators. Really, Adam, I thought that was our job.

(Photo by Fast Company/Art Streiber)

The journalist-math assumption is that 3 percent of search results is 3 percent of revenues. Of course not, Stoppelman points out. Google doesn't even display ads on many of its own pages, knowing it can't make money off them. His assumptions and conclusion:

• Only 30 percent of search-results pages generate money.


• 20 percent of those pages generate 80 percent of search-ad revenue.


• 6 percent of Yahoo's pages, therefore, generate 80 percent of Yahoo's search revenues.


• Google's 3 percent test could affect 40 percent of Yahoo's revenues.

When people come to the site, I think its it's probably 80 percent the use case of Wikipedia and 80 percent the use case of a traditional search engine like Yahoo or Google.