It's not the fact that the married Schmidt sleeps around that bothers Schrage (and most of his underlings in Google PR); it's how Schmidt mixes business and pleasure. His recent mistress, Marcy Simon, was temporarily installed in Google's New York office to head up PR for Google's still-nonexistent Googlephone. Simon's replacement, TV journalist Kate Bohner, has squired Schmidt, very publicly, to at least one political debate cosponsored by Google's YouTube and CNN. If Schrage wanted to deal with bimbo eruptions, he could have stayed in politics.

It's not clear Schrage is the best choice for the Facebook job, objectively speaking. One person who's worked with him says he's a disaster as a manager, and not particularly strong in the PR part of his duties, preferring the more high-falutin' policy work.

But that could make him the perfect yes-man to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for world amelioration. At the South by Southwest conference, Zuckerberg talked, tongue not at all in cheek, about how Facebook could bring peace to the Middle East by preventing Arab teenages from turning into terrorists. He seems to believe sincerely in this stuff. And if it gets him a job at Facebook, Schrage is just slick enough to put on the illustion that he does, too.

A criticism leveled at Lacy: She didn't ask tough questions. That charge is baseless. Zuckerberg just didn't answer the tough questions she posed. "We're not focused on that," said Zuckerberg in what's becoming his now-standard dodge. Zuckerberg couldn't articulate what Facebook was focused on, except for vague talk of "building a platform." (As panel host Heather Gold proved at a later session with Twitter's Evan Williams, if you ask a startup founder what a platform actually is, you'll never get a meaningful answer.)

A second critique: There was no real news. Lacy did herself no favors by trying to argue that getting Zuckerberg to confirm old revelations, like Yahoo's offer to buy Facebook, constituted a scoop. Facebook à la française? Quelle surprise.

What Zuckerberg needs to learn from his hero: The art of saying something. Jobs keeps his magic alive by only appearing on stage when he has something to announce. Zuckerberg is the boss; he could have held news for this event, or pushed to get products launched in time for him to talk about them.

At his keynote yesterday, Zuckerberg talked a good game about learning to be a CEO, giving up direct oversight of the product in exchange for "setting the tone" for Facebook. He's talking a good game — but under pressure, he reverts to geek form. Later today at SXSW, Zuckerberg is crashing a Facebook developer meetup, where he's going to take questions — the Q&A the audience howled for at the end of Lacy's interview.

Doesn't he have an evangelist to whom he can delegate the mundane task of placating needy Web programmers? He does, but he won't. For Zuckerberg, talking shop comes naturally. Running one is hard.

Couldn't Yahoo have found someone besides Garlinghouse frère and soeur to write about? Perhaps not. With all the defections, the company has fewer and fewer stars to draw on. CEO Jerry Yang is press-shy, and President Sue Decker is downright mediaphobic. Flaunt what you've got.

Then just remember Razorfish. What's that? You don't remember Razorfish? Exactly. Jeff Dachis, former CEO of the online ad agency, was crucified on television by a 60 Minutes episode in which he proved unable to define what, exactly, his dotcom did to earn its keep. "We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business," said Dachis. Gotcha. While the 60 Minutes appearance wasn't the only thing that did Razorfish in, Dachis's company, once worth $4 billion, was soon sold for $8.2 million. Let's hope Zuckerberg fares better on camera.

We've learned that Hinnefeld, referred to as the "IU watchdog" for the Herald-Times, left the newspaper for a media relations position at ... Indiana University. Surprise, surprise. It's reassuring to know that Nick Denton isn't alone in hiring his critics. When Owen Thomas tires of me writing about ChaCha, I look forward to a comfy desk job in lovely Bloomington, Indiana.

Why was the event heavy on the storytellers and light on subjects? "All these fucking PR people!" one friend. "It's like walking through a pig trough."

The biggest Yahoo personality was "peanut butter manifesto" author Brad Garlinghouse, who was spotted deep in a long conversation with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher in a corner by the bar. The biggest name on the Facebook side? Spokeswoman Brandee Barker, who was quite a fan of the photo booth (and, apparently, Swisher, whom she pried away from Garlinghouse for some close contact).

No surprise, really. Yahoo and Facebook executives were likely distracted by negotiations over taking a stake in Facebook. And really, OutCast couldn't have planned it better: The Valley's press corps was drinking and eating instead of staking out restaurants and hotels in Palo Alto. Brilliant!

Indeed, the number and cailber of the journalists who appeared says something about the spell they've cast over the tech media. Spotted in the crowd: author and BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, GigaOm's Om Malik, USA Today's Janet Kornblum, Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News, Jessica Guynn of the LA Times, Bloomberg's Ed Robinson and Wall Street Journal reporters Vauhini Vara and Don Clark. On the less-prestigious side, Red Herring editor Joel Dreyfuss was there, and upon meeting me, instantly began haranguing me for our coverage of his publication's death spiral. "Why didn't you cover Business 2.0?" he asked, alluding to that magazine's recent disintegration. Um, I thought we had?

Ubiquitous videoblogger Robert Scoble showed up. I asked after his newborn son and inquired about how online-video startup PodTech, his ostensible employer, was faring. "Much better than last month," he replied. "Wait, what happened last month?" I asked. "John got fired!" he shot back, shocked that I had forgotten such a momentous occasion. Wait, fired? Didn't John Furrier, PodTech's founder and former CEO, "step down"? You learn something new at every one of these parties.

Stengel observes the benefits provided by Internet leaks: Internet chatter builds buzz. And speculation just increases interest:

In a way, it's a much huger smokescreen now.

There's a benefit of something leaking out in small ways before, because I think it increases interest.

Subject: TechCrunch40 Conference: Final Details and Embargoed Information Release Schedule

Dear Members of the Press,

Michael, Jason and I look forward to hosting you at the TechCrunch40 Conference this coming Monday-Tuesday, September 17-18 at the Palace Hotel. We're incredibly proud of our line-up of start-up companies to be unveiled over our two day agenda and look forward to your critical eyes.

As you can imagine, our 40 presenting companies and 100 DemoPit participants are incredibly anxious to reach out to you during the conference. Since the format of our agenda is a bit different from other conferences, we wanted to share additional details about logistics and embargos to help make sure we communicate expectations to all clearly.

IMPORTANT Embargoed Information

9 am PST Monday, September 17

Press may release the names of the 39 companies selected for TechCrunch40 starting at 9 am pst, Monday September 17. We have elected one wildcard presentation slot that will be based on "audience choice voting" from the 100 DemoPit companies pitching in the Gold Ballroom. The 40th company will present during the last demo slot on the agenda, Tuesday afternoon. All 40 companies are eligible to win the TechCrunch40 $50,000 grand prize to be selected by our expert advisors and TechCrunch40 team.

Individual Company Embargoes, Rolling Based on On-Stage Presentations

Press may release coverage about the 39 companies individually starting with their respective on-stage presentations at the conference. Companies will not be launching their sites to the public until they go on stage to present. We reserve the right to pull any presenting company that does not comply with these policies. We will have classroom seating in rows reserved at the front of the Grand Ballroom exclusively for Press, and we will be providing dedicated Internet access to Press vs the general audience to facilitate live blogging at the event, etc.

Press Registration and Press Room

Press will be invited to check-in at the Ralston Room of the Palace Hotel (to the right of the Garden Court) starting at 7 am. The program guide and techcrunch40.com will have complete information about the TechCrunch40 companies.

We have a dedicated Press Room in the Sacramento Room on Mezzanine Level of the Palace Hotel open 7 am - 7 pm each Monday and Tuesday exclusively for your use.

We're really anxious to start the show. See you soon,

—Jason, Michael and Heather

I never ran this myself, but through a friend of a friend I heard that Apple PR teams are not allowed to communicate internally with one another, i.e. the iPod PR people are not allowed to know what iMac PR people are up to. It is totally divide-and-conquer inside the company.

Externally, you're also not supposed to cultivate relationships with journalists. It's the complete opposite of other vendors. In fact, my friend said, if you're an Apple PR person and you are seen in the company of a journalist, at a party or any place other than an Apple event, you better have a good reason why.

As Ad Age points out: "if you Google 'Apple did not return calls,' you'll come up with 2.35 million hits." That claim is more than a bit sloppy. The exact phrase "Apple did not return calls" returns 3,100 hits. But still, Apple makes the rest of the Valley look like pikers when it comes to withering silence. "Google did not return calls" calls up 978 hits, while "Yahoo did not return calls" comes in at a mere 82 results.

Even if you're able to get through, Apple's PR department is notoriously difficult to work with. As one Silicon Valley reporter told me "If they designed the iPod, every time you went to play a song, the thing would call your parents to ask why your taste in music is terrible, and then, a week later, let you listen to 5 seconds of the song."

So, if you need to get a quote for your story, what should you do? If you're a newbie, you're screwed. Save yourself time, and as you leave your fruitless, pro forma voicemail, create a macro to autotype "Apple did not return calls." Been at this beat for a while? Bypass the PR department altogether, and just IM Steve Jobs himself.

Dell is hardly a stealthy assassin. She telegraphs her strikes. We already know that Second Life's user base is highly inflated (8.7 million registered users, but only 600,000 are considered active). We know that Second Life has been hyped to hell and back and hasn't lived up to advertisers' expectations (American Apparel and Starwood Hotels have pulled out entirely). And we know it's facing a slew of legal troubles (FBI crackdown on gambling, the German police are investigating a child pornography ring, and there's continued talk of levying taxes on virtual sales).

But the deadliest mine buried in the Time article is the fact that Linden Lab, itself, is trying to find some way to instill control over its world. "The dilemma for Linden Lab," writes Dell, "is how to rein in its creation without alienating hard-core users." The griefers — people who smeared John Edward's campaign headquarters with feces or launched a flying penis assault on virtual land baron Anshe Chung — are making the environment inhospitable to new users, who provide a valuable audience, and advertisers, who rent space in Second Life to reach them. (Linden Lab makes its money by charging as much as $1,675 a month for a plot of land.) But any effort to thrust laws and regulations upon the populace defeats the entire premise that Second Life is built upon — it's a world where you can be anyone and do anything, or vice versa.

Time's writer ultimately disappoints. Dell ends playing with her prey, like cat with mouse, but she doesn't go in for the kill. We're glad, however, to assist. There's no way for Second Life to meet its promises to both users and advertisers. Linden Lab CEO Rosedale's campaign to win back the press has stalled and failed.

HACK: How are you going to market this out to the customer base to make sure they understand the integration between the apps?
JOBS: That's what you're here for! To write about our products.