Ad Age reports (via) that Silverman might take over CollegeHumor at the behest of Barry Diller, who bankrolls both CollegeHumor and Silverman's new online venture. Van Veen, meanwhile. is transitioning out of CollegeHumor and into his own Diller-funded media startup, Notional, which sounds a lot like Silverman's Electus (both have something to do with online video production).

We're told Silverman and Van Veen have been working very closely together and talking to each other every day. Perhaps a grander merger is in the works that would combine Electus, Notional and CollegeHumor into one venture. Silverman may have been ousted from old media, but he could still be lord of the new media flies. Especially within a venture that actually celebrates a refusal to mature, an inability to grow emotionally and a proclivity for partying to excess. Those are Ben Silverman's specialties, right there.

(Pics: via Getty, Webbyist)

The rigid philosophy of testing every little aspect of a Web page's appearance — Mayer's team once tested 41 different shades of blue to determine which generated the optimal number of clicks — has driven away top design talent tired of the endless testing. But perhaps the problem is that Mayer's restive designers just aren't as smart as she is! Here's her explanation:

Every design starts with an instinct: It should look like this, or it should look like that. You can actually test it with data. The humbling thing about that is sometimes the data proves you wrong. So for every change I propose, you know, three out of four, four out of five the data will support the change.

It doesn't matter if Google's ugly — the data is on Mayer's side, see?

Wait a second: Mayer famously dismissed a Googler's application for a job transfer because they'd gotten a single C. "Good students are good at all things," she said at a meeting witnessed by a reporter. But Mayer has just admitted that she gets a C, a B-minus at best, at Web design. She recently touted a design featuring unpopular insurance giant AIG. By her own rules, shouldn't she be fired in favor of someone less tone-deaf on design?

Here's a segment from her appearance:

NBC's Scott McGrew missed his chance to get the scoop on Google's layoffs.

Ellyn Angelotti of the Poynter Institute did that whole mouse-frightens-woman stereotype thing.

Chicago blogger Blagica Bottigliero announced her contempt for people who use Twitter to broadcast announcements.

Wired writer Jason Tanz dulled the pain.

Natalie Eshaya, a writer for known twink Ryan Seacrest, committed an ursophobic act of hate speech against perfectly harmless bears.

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

Allison, in a drunken moment at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, admitted to Rambin's impending departure from the lifestreaming venture, in which Allison, Rambin, and Silicon Valley heiress Meghan Asha Parikh posted constant blog entries, photos, and videos from their empty lives.

Rambin was the least prolific blogger of the three. And yet she contributed so much to NonSociety in contributing so little. True, her "speach" often lacked "coherance" (two actual recent typos). But there's nothing as entertaining as watching a rich girl who recently spent a month on a yacht opine about what it takes to make money. (Which, apparently, she needs.)

Here's Rambin's ramble about the future of Web video:

Here's my answer: I think the key to web video is creating all different formats that can exist together. Create a show with a relatively high production value with approachable characters or personas. Have these people or actors make their own unedited videos so the audience gets to know and love them. Concurrently, short, edited videos should be shot with experts and celebs to show a different perspective in an entertaining way. Approach major brands with sponsorship packages that supplement their current traditional campaign (so they don't get their panties in a bunch). Pitch brand awareness and your distribution channels (which should be any website that will have you). License the show to a major network to increase your eyeballs and the show's value and revenue.

She seems to be talking about TMIweekly, a Web-video show which recently got picked up by NBC's most obscure TV channel. Rambin, Allison said, is sticking with the show even as she's dropping NonSociety. Can you blame her? It's the only part of Allison's laughable startup which is showing even a glimmer of commercial promise. It almost makes you feel sorry for Rambin, when her best prospect for making money consists of unwatchable video on a channel no one watches.

Appropriate, because New York Nonstop is as close as one can get to the Internet in obscurity, and yet still claim to be on television, making it an appropriate home for the contentless musings of Allison, an inappropriately well-known dating columnist Time Out New York, and her two friends, Silicon Valley heiress Meghan Asha Parikh and vapid handbag designer Mary Rambin. (Or perhaps just Rambin: Rumors are spreading that Parikh may have quit, though Allison denies this.)

Episodes of TMIweekly, a videoblog, have featured the three talking about uninteresting aspects of their lives. (Imagine Twitter, but videotaped.) It's part of a pseudo-business called NonSociety. Allison recently informed me that NonSociety had taken in $60,000 in revenues in all of 2008. Using the advanced business metric known as earnings before expenses, that would give NonSociety's three foundresses a living slightly above minimum wage. Parikh's family fortune must surely throw off more interest than that in a month.

The 24-hour news channel broadcasts in Manhattan, sort of, on digital channel 4.2, and Time Warner Cable carries it on channel 161. So if you avoid triple-digit cable channels and haven't upgraded to a digital converter — since the government has pushed back the deadline for the digital transition, you probably haven't — you can remain blissfully Allison-free. New York NonStop claims a theoretical reach of 5.7 million, though, so it's possible someone, somewhere, in the New York area might accidentally be exposed to her work.

Whatever NBC is paying Allison for this 24x7 filler, it's surely too much. As NBC officials themselves seem to realize! Meredith McGinn, senior manager of special products for NBC4, explained to the New York Daily News:

You'll get your meat — your news, weather and headlines — every 15 minutes. In between those 15 minutes, you may have a two-minute segment, a two-minute pod, a five-minute pod. So the shows we're looking at are in little bits, not your traditional half-hour newscasts.

So the news is the meat, which makes TMIweekly, what, exactly? Shredded lettuce? Mayo? Anything, surely, except relish.

Rather than force you to watch TMIweekly, we will show you Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley's much funnier parody, "NomSociety":

Welcome To NomSociety from Richard Blakeley on Vimeo.

Disturbingly handsome former MSNBC chief turned media-corrupting journalist-peddler Dan Abrams got shamed into using Twitter by Rachel Sklar, then embarrassed her by doing it wrong.

Don't feel bad, Dan! Octo-mom interviewer Ann Curry also failed on her first day using Twitter. Pesky 140-character limit!

Los Angeles social-media enthusiast and KNBC personality Shira Lazar dreamt of immortality.

1600 host David Shuster did it live.

Twitter-addicted NBC cameraman Jim Long got some sweetness with his coffee.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Has a real media job. Lazar has already achieved something beyond the reach of most fameballs: Steady employment with a large, traditional media business. She hosts Open House LA and First Look LA on KNBC, the Los Angeles-based NBC station. (She's also a host on the Reelz channel, whatever that is.)

Has lived in LA since 2004. Lazar is something of a personality in the self-proclaimed L.A. tech/blogging scene. (In this photo, she attempts to interview Perez Hilton.)

Dov Charney's stepsister. Lazar, described as a "hot peppy Jewish girl from Montreal" by one YouTube user, went to the same Canadian school as Charney, now the CEO of American Apparel, but 14 years apart. When she interviewed her scandal-plagued stepbrother last August, she did not mention his history of sexual-harassment lawsuits, or, in fact, any relationship to Charney at all. That's family loyalty for you! Also not disclosed in the video: Her habit of picking up free clothes from American Apparel. (TV stars get tons of free clothing from airtime-hungry designers, but not usually from their stepbrother's firm.)

Went to Emerson College. Bachelor's degree in TV/video.

Participated in the 2005 Ujena Bikini Jam.

Flirted with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Lazar showed up at a TechCrunch party last July. The doughy blogger accosted her and asked her why she was there. That encounter begat a working relationship where she tried making a few video clips for him. The talks never went anywhere, as she's on contract with NBC through February.

Began dating Rose near the end of November. No professional interest here: "Rose just wants to bang hot chicks off his Twitter list," says one informant who has observed their relationship closely. He does have a large online following, thanks to the popularity of Digg, his news-discussion site, and Diggnation, a companion online-video series where he drinks and discusses Digg headlines on camera. Could Lazar be hoping to leverage Rose's crowd?

Drew controversy at the Sundance Festival. Arrington — perhaps miffed that his play for Lazar went nowhere? — complained that Lazar had cheated to win 24 Hours at Sundance, a competition organized by Rose and Kutcher — and also claimed she'd been bragging about dating one of the organizers. Assuming Demi Moore has nothing to worry about, that would be Rose.

Went to Barack Obama's inauguration with Julia Allison. Allison, the Time Out dating columnist who briefly pursued Rose and remained obsessed for months afterward, claims she's over him. Curious, then, that she cozied up to Lazar in Washington, D.C., offering Lazar her spare ticket to the inaugural. Aubrey Sabala, a Digg marketing manager, may have helped make the introduction hobnobbed with the two in D.C. That's especially curious because I've noticed how extraordinarly protective Digg employees have become about their founder's love life lately. Introducing his girlfriend to the famously indiscreet Allison hardly seems like the way to further that goal. Then again, perhaps that's why Sabala dived between them in the last photo below. Update: Allison, in an expletive-laced IM conversation, informed me that Meghan Asha, her Silicon Valley heiress sidekick, met Lazar at Sundance and subsequently introduced the two.

How serious are they? This is Rose we're talking about, who's not known for his long-term relationships. And the two live and work in different cities. Sean Percival, an L.A. tech personality, says it's over already.

(Photos via Twitpic, Nonsociety, TheChimp.net, LAist, and AnchorBabes)

Our source was first approached this week by NBC for what a producer called a "feature" on Jobs, but later admitted was an advance obituary. Then a CBS news producer called and also requested an interview on Jobs that when pressed, they admitted too was also an advance obituary for the ailing Jobs.

Newspapers and wire services prepare obituaries far in advance that can sometimes sit on the shelves for years. Sometimes it can lead to embarrassment, such as when Bloomberg News inadvertently released a canned obituary for Jobs. And while TV news operations are quick to prepare packages of archival footage if they so much as hear a famous person is ailing, actually taping interviews for those packages is more difficult. Even if news producers can find people willing to talk about someone as if he were dead on camera, it's expensive to send out camera crews to gather footage that might go stale.

Jobs, who is on a six-month medical leave, has said he expects to return to work after dealing with a medical problem he first characterized as a "hormonal imbalance," but later admitted was more complex. In 2003, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and underwent surgery to treat it in 2004; most observers believe his present problems stem from aftereffects of the surgery, which likely involved a Whipple procedure, a rewiring of the digestive tract akin to a gastric bypass.

Is Jobs dying? No major TV network has reported that. But those same networks' producers must believe it is likely enough to roll their cameras.

(Photo by Gizmodo)

Six Sigma has been part of America's corporate culture for a couple decades now; some 80 percent of the 100 largest American companies now use it. But General Electric, NBC's parent, is particularly famous for its Six Sigma fetish. GE does not think it's a laughing matter: "It is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliche," GE's website harrumphs.

What does it means in practice? As Universal found out after GE bought the Hollywood studio, it means lots and lots of meetings. "They are very focused on results," Universal Studios president Ron Meyer said of his new owners to the Times in 2004, after the acquisition. "They don't want surprises."

The idea behind Six Sigma is that every process of a business should be executed with as few errors as possible — the target Six Sigma aims for is 3.4 errors in every 1 million attempts. Now, lots of companies follow silly management philosophies. But Six Sigma takes on religious overtones at G.E. because of its followers fervent belief that it is a universal belief, enforced in every facet of the corporate empire. Even, at one point, according to a (maybe apocryphal) well-told anecdote to comedy writing. Former GE chief executive Jack Welch is said to have once ordered the counting of the number of laughs each episode of NBC's sitcoms.

Eliminating deviations is entirely wrongheaded when the audience wants something fundamentally new. Six Sigma's not a bad practice for industrial manufacturing, but it's not easily applied to fields like information technology, entertainment, R&D, or startups — in other words, everything that increasingly drives what's left of our economy.

Then again, maybe Fey, who bought a copy of Six Sigma for Dummies, is learning something. When 30 Rock launched in 2006, Fey sprinkled episodes with Six Sigma jokes. One of her comedic predecessors, David Letterman, delighted in mocking GE after it bought NBC. Here is a process that can be defined, measured, analyzed, improved and controlled: biting the hand that feeds you. It delivers a laugh every time. The black belts would be proud.

ComScore, a Web-traffic measurement firm, reports that visitors to Hulu.com dropped 11 percent from October to November, when it only drew 4.8 million viewers. NBC.com dropped by half, from 14.1 million to 7.2 million. Which only makes sense, says Peter Kafka at MediaMemo, since NBC.com and Hulu were the two places where people could see legal copies of Tina Fey's Palin impressions for Saturday Night Live.

Look, I realize Palin has gone back to Juneau to sort through all the clothing the Republican National Committee bought for her. But new media badly needs some star power. Can't we give her her own YouTube channel or something?

Sugar's CEO may have aimed to put employees on notice, in hopes of motivating them to perform. But leaving a shoe to drop is the worst mistake one can make in cutting employees, the meltdown's self-appointed layoff pundits agree. Sugar Inc.'s real problem may be self-inflicted: It took ad sales in-house from partner and investor NBC this summer, leaving it with a sales force still in development, right as the online-advertising market got a lot tougher.

Easy: Google TV exec and Michael Steib used to work for NBC. Leaning on old colleagues is one of his favorite tactics for getting ahead, Steib told Crain's when the magazine named him to its list of "Forty under 40":

The other thing that for me personally has been a real asset is I have a network of friends and colleagues and former colleagues and current and past bosses and mentors who I can really rely on.

Rely on, that is, for a face-saving deal which doesn't include the real prize: Brokering ads on NBC's fading but still large broadcast network.

Networks have been experimenting with early releases online for some time now as a way to counteract modern viewing habits such as skipping past all the network promos with a TiVo. But just a couple of weeks ago, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was telling us all that by not airing Olympic events live or letting viewers watch them online, the network was creating "excitement" via "word of mouth" by withholding the opening ceremonies. Then again, the opening ceremonies in Beijing were actually interesting. The third-place network is correctly guessing that there's no way anybody is going to be eagerly anticipating the new season of Knight Rider — which is going to need all the help it can get.