Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling must have a $1,000 tiny pig. And not for breakfast, either.

The New York Times' Nick Bilton can't believe some idiots will pay $1,000 for a tiny pig. And not even for breakfast or whatever!

Paul Carr learned to love San Francisco cabbies all over again on his way (apparently) to lunch with fellow TechCrunch contributor Sarah Lacy.

GigaOM's Om Malik is loving his new 'hood. So many friends. So few bloody tourists.

SF Appeal's Eve Batey loves Oakland and environs for their avian kink. We think.

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Stephanie Pratt has had it with self-involved people who add nothing to the world other than fake drama. Pratt is the sister of fellow reality-TV person Spencer Pratt, but apparently was referring in this case to Perez Hilton.

Yes, Mediaite's Rachel Sklar misdirected her DM to all of Twitter. But the earnest Canadian blogger is genuinely curious how you're doing, entire world!

Actress Marlee Matlin would like Kanye West's lips to do some apologizing.

Someone lied to blog mogul Om Malik.

Larry King's southpaw tweet, a trademark non sequitur, could have used a "DEVELOPING..."

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GigaOM's worldly Om Malik forgot we're all tourists somewhere. But they did keep him stuck on the local train system, which is bound to produce rage in any sane human.

Mediaite's Rex Sorgatz came to New York for the oddballs but stayed for the out and out freaks.

Social-media consultant Leah Jones will not be lectured by coffee snobs.

TechCrunch's Milo Yiannopoulos didn't appreciate the Guardian Yank-ing his chain.

Michael Gartenberg is allowed to brag about his gadget-nerd celebrity, assuming he always manages to viciously undercut himself in the same tweet like this.

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John Battelle's Industry Standard hired research analysts near the height of its hubristic expansion c.2000. Former Red Herring editor Jason Pontin recalled that his magazine, the thickest of the dot-com bibles, attempted the same. He writes in an email:

We hired and built an entire research division: some of its material found its way into the print and online products. I do not believe they ever succeeded in selling much in the way of proprietary research...

You need to understand that there are really two kinds of research products. The first, which we tried to do and failed at, I completely supported as the editor at the time: expand our editorial products into higher-priced subscription research on the model of The Economist Intelligence Unit.

The second is truly proprietary research bought by a single client or group of clients: I wasn't sure that was a great idea, because it was an entirely new field for us requiring a new infrastructure and staff, and we failed at that, too.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, GigaOm publisher Om Malik is a Herring veteran, and made his bones on Wall Street, where proprietary research is common. His current effort is relatively inexpensive ($80/year) and targeted at broad groups of readers. It also has some sort of Web 2.0 twist involving outside contributions.

Hopefully for Malik, those differences will be enough to keep history from repeating itself.

(Pic by Jyri Engestrom on Flickr)

Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney experienced retrotech.

Lazy gadfly Guardian columnist Paul Carr continued to dine his way through the ladybloggers of San Francisco, following Kara Swisher up with Sarah Lacy.

Alt-weekly veteran Mark Athitakis saw the future of journalism.

Blogger-entrepreneur-venture capitalist Om Malik felt the recession funk.

New York Times eclecticist Jennifer 8. Lee crowdsourced penury.

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It's why blogs are supposedly killing sluggish print media. It's why Twitter is thought to threaten Google — and why Facebook has turned itself inside out to copy the message-broadcasting upstart.

Twitter, the message-broadcasting website, is the ultimate realization of this trend, and it's what has venture capitalists buzzing Twitter's value up past $250 million before it's earned any revenues.

The experience of Twitter is a stream of updates from people you follow on the service, most recent first. Headline aggregators like Google News, Techmeme, and Digg works the same way, with algorithms that privilege the latest news — often the publisher who repackaged a story the most cleverly and most recently, rather than the one who broke it.

This relentless neophilia is based on the notion that information only has value if it's fresh. That the only news is breaking news. That the only thing you want to know about your friends is what they're doing right now.

What if it's all wrong?

GigaOm's Om Malik, the blogger turned venture capitalist, wonders just that while writing about Facebook's redesign:

Facebook, by its very nature, is mostly about our past, sometimes about our present, but very rarely about our future. Being symmetric, it's important that we have some sort of a prior relationship with a person in order to friend them on Facebook. Your classmates, neighbors and the folks you met at a party - these are all relationships from your past. Facebook doesn't really allow you to discover new people - and that has been the part of its charm (and utility).

That's why the redesign is so hated: It has grafted the worst parts of Twitter — its noise and its lack of relevancy — over the best part of Facebook, its carefully filtered news feed, which Malik compares to a "constantly updated newspaper about us."

That's the failing of Facebook's redesign: It is constantly updated, but no longer with the best stuff, just the newest. So let's all hope Google doesn't buy Twitter, as the Valley's pundits (and Twitter's investors) seem to be praying it will. That acquisition, done at a high enough price, will spark a boom in realtime investing — an armada of websites all meant to help us find out what's happening right now around the world, with our friends, in our neighborhood.

To the extent that any of them succeed, our lives will be lessened for it. Self-help gurus like to talk about living in the moment. But if we are constantly documenting the moment in which we live, we stop being able to live in it. Sometimes the most important things happened hours ago, years ago, a century ago — but we are just beginning to understand how they mattered. Realtime? So 10 minutes ago.

(Photo of Life clock via Make)

The reality: Battelle's dream of conversational marketing has turned into something more like the schlocky endorsements radio hosts get paid to do. By falling so short of his rhetoric, Federated's experiments have mostly ended in embarrassment, both for him and the bloggers he represents. Last year, he roped Malik and other writers into a scheme to have them recite a Microsoft slogan. And though Battelle apologized for that advertising campaign, he's conducting a similar campaign for Intel — though he has wisely picked so-called "social media marketers" with less journalistic credibility to lose; most already willingly shill for products on Twitter, Digg, and the like.

That's the insult. But Battelle's company has also delivered an injury, in the form of an abrupt slashing of advertising rates. GigaOm, TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, and a host of other tech blogs represented by Federated have had their official rates cut 35 percent; deals negotiated with large advertisers are presumably being struck at even steeper discounts.

So Malik has taken his business elsewhere, to IDG, the publisher of PC World and several other large technology trades. As with Federated, IDG will sell ads, keep a large portion, and share the rest with Malik's company; 30 to 40 percent is a typical commission in the business. IDG has a vast army of salespeople to serve its print publications; as the print business vanishes, it makes sense to busy them with selling online advertising. Federated, meanwhile, has had to assemble its sales team from scratch.

Federated's slogan is that it is "author-driven." What does it say that an author has been driven from its ranks? Malik and Battelle are both savvy businessmen who know each other well. (I have known both for a long time, too, and edited their columns at the late Business 2.0 magazine.) IDG simply cut Malik a better deal, I believe — and no amount of rhetoric about "serving authors" from Federated could make up for the financial shortfall. In every negotiation, the time arrives to wrap up the conversation and strike a deal.

(Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

We sure do love to watch New Yorkers catfight on Twitter. But if you literally "let everyone get time on stage" you won't have a punk-rock utopia, you'll have a boring parade of bad ideas and worse PowerPoint. Think TechCrunch50 expanded to TechCrunch52,157 and you get the idea. Still, we sense it coming: Look for CenterNetworks' own startup event in early 2009. (Photo by Brian Solis)

I like Om. He is everything Arrington wants to be when he grows up.

Arrington headlined his own post about the news "GigaOm ignores my advice," linking to a long, telling post from earlier this year in which he attempted to explain why blogs should remain financially independent. What he really means is: GigaOm shouldn't take VC because TechCrunch is the only blog that's supposed to get VC, so Arrington can buy his competitors.

Arrington has said publicly that he wants to be the one to consolidate the blogging sector into one big Voltron-like online publishing empire. When he wrote this morning that "we are one of the last large blog networks to remain independent," he probably wasn't intentionally lying. But his Web-2.0-centric worldview ignores bigger non-tech networks such as the local Sugar Publishing and the British Shiny Media.

By taking on five million dollars in further investments, Malik hasn't just picked up capital to expand his staff and marketing. Like a pufferfish circled by sharks, he's made GigaOm a much bigger ball for Arrington or anyone else to try to swallow. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Malik and Cashmore, perhaps taking a cue, didn't do any real reporting on the event, leaving that to Threat Level and Laughing Squid. The two simply blogged their Al-and-me pictures as news stories on GigaOm and Mashable, bringing themselves one step closer to the old media stereotype of the vain reporter who can't stop inserting himself into the story — or in this case, into the non-story.

What hasn’t been discussed is that the company isn’t really facing up to the fact that its layers of management have resulted in a state of masterful inactivity, masked perhaps as a culture of consensus. This starts at the top - from the company’s board and senior management down to VP level where people are prone to organizing and attending twenty meetings before deciding the fate of a project.

Granted, he may be a little petulant that Yahoo wasn't well-represented at the Structure 08 conference he threw this week — even after he gave the company's open source cloud computing software Hadoop center stage at an earlier after-work presentation GigaOm hosted. He has, however, been covering Yahoo for longer than many other publications working the story have existed, and breaking his relative silence to predict doom for the company will hopefully shake up some of the executives down in Sunnyvale. (Photo by Pete Jelliffe)

Simple food, simple clothes, a simple home and simple, clear writing. Hopefully I can stick to that plan. I have incorporated physical exercise into my daily life, given up smoking, gone almost completely vegetarian and taken to wearing jeans.

Say it ain't so, Om! You were always one of the best dressed men on the scene! While I can also report that said jeans are very stylish, still, I can't imagine any doctor demanding that you dumb down your wardrobe for the sake of your health.

• Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
• Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
• Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
• Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
• Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
• Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
• Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
• Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
• Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
• Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
• Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
• Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
• Cedric Maloux
• Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
• Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
• Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
• Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
• Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
• Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
• Esteban Sosnik
• Esther Dyson (EDventure)
• Felix Petersen (Plazes)
• Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
• Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
• Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
• Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
• James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
• Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
• John Markoff (The New York Times)
• Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
• Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
• Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
• Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
• José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
• Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
• Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
• Lars Hinrichs (XING)
• Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
• Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
• Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
• Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
• Megan Smith (Google)
• Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
• Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
• Nikesh Arora (Google)
• Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
• Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
• R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
• Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
• Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
• Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
• Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
• Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
• Thomas Crampton (Next Media)