Then again, even a poodle will bite once in a while.

Take the TechCrunch dust-up. The tech business blog sheepishly negotiated with Twitter Inc. the release of internal company documents it received, unsolicited, via email. It was tech bloggers who lead the craven charge, excoriating TechCrunch for daring to run anything at all. On Twitter, several of Arrington's tech elite colleagues said he deserved to be literally spit upon. John Gruber of Daring Fireball called Arrington "a very sad excuse for a man" in a post that garnered strong agreement from longtime newspaperwoman Kara Swisher at All Things D, who added, "there should be no difference between Web 'journalism' and the old-fashioned journalism." Except of course, Swisher was only demonstrating just how different the two are.

This episode's Woodstein was as distraught as anyone to see their dear friends at Twitter burned. TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington wrote: "I wish this had never happened."

But of course, as at least two media lawyers have pointed out, old-fashioned journalists have been utilizing information obtained in violation of both laws and legally-binding civil agreements for years without this sort of ethical outcry. As far as the law goes, it is legal to use such information to journalistic ends, within some fairly wide parameters.

Yet blogs, especially tech blogs, lash themselves oh-so-closely to their sources. TechCrunch is hardly the only example. The diverse and vibrant collection of blogs that track Mac rumors routinely cave to cease and desist letters from Apple, because who wants to end up like the teenaged publisher of ThinkSecret, bullied into submission by Apple for reporting legitimate news about Apple products, news that was proven accurate and was gathered no more nefariously than the stuff that turns up regularly in the Wall Street Journal?

Who wants to be trashed by a spoonfed CNBC reporter , or have your (eventually proven accurate) sources called "illiterate"-sounding by a blogger, for contradicting Apple's company line on the health of its CEO?

This is how journalism dies. Not with a bang, but with a series of favors and quiet surrenders.

(Top pic: Alison McNeill of bub.blicio.us and "Gadget Guy" consultant Dave Mathews engage in a typical in-depth interview at a TechCrunch party last year, via Flickr)

The petitioners are echoing media pressure in calling for Craigslist to shut down its Erotic Services section, thereby preventing the likes of Markoff from contacting 25-year-old "masseuses" through the site. Craigslist does charge for erotic listings, but donates the revenues from the category; Casual Encounters is free. The only way the site makes money is from job and apartment listings; Craigslist doesn't make a dime when you unload your old couch on the site. Frankly, Craig Newmark would make more money and have fewer headaches if everyone not looking for a job or a place to live went elsewhere.

And of course, if Craigslist banned Erotic Services, that's exactly what its clientele would do — buy and sell the same services elsewhere online. That's a far easier route to take, and would save Craigslist a lot of headaches complying with vice-squad subpoenas — which is why most websites ban the sex trade altogether.

"Craigslist is the largest source of prostitution in America," Cook County sheriff Tom Dart told ABC News. Nonsense. Horny, desperate men are the largest source of prostitution in America. And Dart should be happy that they're visiting a website which rolls over so easily when the police call.

What no one is saying: Laws banning prostitution, which makes women engaged in trading sex for money vulnerable to predators, are the real problem. Western Europe's boring brothels suggest that legalizing prostitution is a danger to sexual excitement but not public mores. Sure, boycott Craigslist! It's an easy move to stop spending money with a site that costs nothing — one that changes exactly nothing about the dynamic that got Julissa Brisman killed. Meanwhile, Newmark, the lazy millionaire, will keep doing his humble-nerd act all the way to the bank.

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)

Intellectually, that is, as opposed to financially. Most people attending South By Southwest Interactive admit that they're there for the chance to hang out in Austin with the same Internet buddies they hang out with in San Francisco and Brooklyn. Without the parties, what's the point? That's always been the case with South By Southwest. It's just that with the economy prostrate and the social-networking bubble thoroughly popped, there's not even money to skim from the froth.

There's still enough money to pay for tickets to Austin, of course. But in good times and bad, SXSW has always suffered from a lack of purpose. The music and film festival which gave birth to it has real songs and real movies to talk about. The attendees of SXSW Interactive have nothing to look at but each other, and nothing to listen to but their own kind. Surely that explains why it ends up being a group grope of self-congratulation over little at all.

Ah yes, the bubbly parties. Facebook threw a party celebrating the launch of a tool for linking Facebook friends to iPhone apps, completing the circle of two recent technological fads. And Dennis Crowley's Foursquare — which may be based on code he sold to Google, his former employer — facilitated so-called "flash parties" at bars for those who couldn't get on the official party invite lists, or didn't care to wait in line. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, launched Wefollow.com, a directory of users for Twitter, to help navigate the mess of messages broadcast on the service.

In other words, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are working on iterations of existing software for the most frivolous of purposes. There's not even a fundamental innovation in this round of tweaks meant to help you waste time more efficiently. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Gawker and Valleywag, threw a party of its own — but at least my colleagues were open about their intentions, which seemed to involve getting a bunch of geeks liquored up.)

It all reminds me of Camp Cyprus — the group of 20 Web cognoscenti, a gaggle of Facebookers and startuppers and wantrepreneurs who flew to a rich kid's dad's vacation home on the Mediterranean last fall and created a video of them cavorting in swimsuits to celebrate their own brilliance to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." It was an incredibly tone-deaf gesture at a time when Wall Street was imploding and people were losing their jobs.

Except the economy hasn't gotten any better. And South By Southwest Interactive has more than 10,000 attendees. So doesn't that make its excesses 500 times worse?

A few people had the sense to avoid this particular trainwreck. Ev Williams, the CEO of Twitter, gave it a pass — even though the tech crowd at SXSW did so much to popularize his status-updating service. That the likes of Rose and Crowley are the stars of this year's South By speaks to how far it has fallen.

I first attended South By Southwest a decade ago, when the dotcom boom had 12 months left to run. Mark Cuban, then the head of Broadcast.com, gave a keynote speech about Internet video; he sold his Web-video startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo a month later for $5.7 billion. Under Yahoo's ownership, Broadcast.com went on to not be YouTube.

The difference between then and now: Thanks to the delusions of public-market investors, there was actually money to be made from what Internet insiders admitted were inanities. Now there's no money and no hope of making it. There's just the frivolity left.

Videographer Richard Blakeley quizzed bloggers on the highlights and lowlights of this year's South By Southwest.

Scenes from South By Southwest: (photos by Scott Kidder and James Del)

Tumblr founder David Karp has a new Tumblrette, Stephanie Wei! Update: Okay, we've gotten this whole who's-David-Karp-dating thing straight. Stephanie Wei was recently spotted with Karp at a birthday party for Briana Swanson. A tipster explains:

Karp is most definitely dating Stephanie Wei though, to the annoyance of many. Her friends were calling and emailing me asking if he was gay or not a couple of weeks ago, and now they complain that she's always with him.

Karp's sex life sure is confusing!
Pop17's Sarah Austin shows off her intellectual property.

Former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas puckers up to Laughing Squid's Scott Beale.

Lifehacker editor Adam Pash demonstrates how to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper.

Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk and "friend," which is caption-writer code for "we don't know who this is" very important person Becca Camp.

Facebook employees pop champagne with sparklers, just in case you missed the point that they were drinking champagne.

CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and Tumblr's David Karp attempt to locate South By Southwest's point.

I mean, yes, okay, technically there are thousands of people employed in the Internet industry whose employers, despite the recession, have paid for plane tickets and hotel rooms and passes to a conference called "South By Southwest Interactive," or "SXSWi," or "South By," if you're painfully hip, which starts this Friday.

And technically all these PHP coders and social media marketers and wantrepreneurs and pretty girls with webcams and Hollywood interactive business-development types will be physically present at the site of said conference. But no one actually goes to the conference.

They do go to the convention center where the conference is held, only because there are so many tweets on Twitter during SXSW that it is impossible to make plans electronically, so they are forced to meet up in person to discuss which parties they plan to attend. Plus, they talk about Twitter. And then they go to the parties and drink and talk about Twitter.

Then they wake up the next day still drunk and go to whichever 10 a.m. panel offers free breakfast tacos, which are exceptionally tasty in Austin and good for curing hangovers and make excellent subject matter for Twitter.

Also, Wired editor Chris Anderson will give a keynote, presumably about his book, Free, which lays out an already outdated theory about how everything will be free, except that it won't because everyone is broke, even Google.

This is why I'm not going this year.

But we have found one redeeming thing about South By Southwest. One!

It is a rap song, "South By Girls," by former Facebook interaction designer Eston Bond, who is something of a perfect parody of a South By Southwest attendee. (Under 25? Check. Web designer? Check. Lives in Palo Alto but kind of wishes he lived in San Francisco? Check. Disturbing love of guns? Check.) There are lyrics — with footnotes, because this is a nerdcore rap.

If you use his rap song to create an especially amusing video, you might win a gift card for an iPhone, a prize we only mention for its pointlessness. Anyone who would listen to this song and be inspired to create a video already owns three iPhones. But Bond managed to rhyme "Zivity" and "productivity," so we forgive him.

Here's the song, with Bond's gold-Treo-bedecked visage and some photos from last year's SXSW as visual backup:

(Video by Ryan Tate)

Ah, but Labash, a senior writer at Rupert Murdoch's ultraconservative magazine of politics, makes it fresh because his bilious contempt for Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard-born social network is so pure. He pretends that his late ire was roused by a piece in Slate by Farhad Manjoo, "Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren't you?" But Labash never quite spells out the real reason why he loathes Facebook. It's because Zuckerberg stole his wife from him:

The hardest to watch fall, however, has been my wife. I'll call her "Alana," since that's her name (but note to Face-tards: Don't try to friend her to heckle me, she will not receive you). A few months back, she became a hardcore Facebook addict, as our late 30s age group has become the fastest-growing Facebook segment (35-54 year-olds have increased 276.4 percent to nearly 7 million users in just the last six months). There are worse things she could become, I suppose: a Meth dealer, a UPS delivery-man groupie, a Twitterer. Still, it's unsettling.

In our house, there have always been clearly defined roles. I procrastinate, shirk responsibilities, and spend much time peppering a fairly wide circle of friends with an incessant barrage of individually tailored emails, many of them lengthy (as opposed to the abbreviated, promiscuously generic, group-blog like messages left on Facebook). I tell myself it keeps me in game-shape, writing-wise, like a baseball player taking cuts in the batting cage. Alana isn't an Internet dawdler by nature, but rather, a doer, a model of graceful efficiency. She is Felix to my Oscar.

But slowly, I noticed things taking a turn. The cosmetic stuff, like her immaculate appearance and hygiene, stayed the same. Nor did I see her do anything too creepy or severe, such as sending pictures of her feet at the request of a new Facebook friend or running out to some hot-sheets motel to get worked like a farm implement by an old high-school flame who'd renewed contact (which happens with some frequency on Facebook). But I did notice a general distractedness, a vacantness, a thousand-yard-stare. She seemed to notice it too. In the old days, she'd check her email maybe once or twice a day. Now, she was hitting her laptop like a rat hits a lever for pellets in a Skinner box.

"I hate myself," she'd say.

"Why?" I'd ask.

"Because I'm becoming you," she said.

Zing! Alana Peruzzi Labash has 226 Facebook friends (four of them from right-wing evangelical hotbed Liberty University)! Her sin, according to her husband: She uses Facebook the way he uses email. But somehow her electronic communication is suspect, while his is okay. Labash, in the end, spends a lot of words proving he's an Internet-enabled Neanderthal who doesn't think that women should use computers. We'd have hoped for a better anti-Facebook screed than that.

A $13.4 billion loan package for General Motors and Chrysler will exhaust the last of the $350 billion Congress granted the Treasury for bailout measures. The measure comes even though polls show most peole don't believe the auto industry deserves saving.

Can you blame us? The relentless rain of billion-dollar headlines, writedowns and recovery plans, toxic assets and bankrupted investors, has worn out our financial sympathies. Already, the sight of Detroit's chiefs flying in their private jets to beg Congress for money stoked popular outrage. How many more bailouts can we take?

And yet we have a month to go before anything can really happen, with Dubya a lame duck and President Change still president-elect. A blog-accelerated news cycle will make that seem like an eternity. By the time Barack Obama takes the oath of office, we may be tired of staging rescues.

That is a real danger for the heirs of Maynard Keynes, who are planning to inject hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the American economy. We desperately need to fix roads and bridges — remember the collapse of I-35W? — and the repair work alone could keep hundreds of thousands of people employed.

But one man's stimulus package is another man's bailout. The more plans dribble out, the more cynical we become that any of them will do any good. We need a bigger fix — and a better metaphor. A bailout, by definition is a temporary measure; water keeps flooding in. At some point, you have to patch the leaks. Or abandon ship.

(Photo via Old Picture of the Day)

During the beta of Mahalo Answers, a service where users pay others to conduct Google searches for them using a faked-up currency, one tester asked, "Is Jason Calacanis cool?" An accurate answer: "Despite the bulldogs and the Brentwood mansion, no, not particularly." But instead, an ex-employee unloaded all the rage she'd stored up since getting laid off from her job at Mahalo this summer. Calacanis has his minions delete the entry, but we've obtained screenshots of the uncensored page. It's a soon-to-be-legendary rant.

Our new org chart shows absolutely no changes at the top. We can’t get our stock price anywhere near what Microsoft (MSFT) offered. The new reorg had one objective: personal power plays or internal politics. We lost a few executives after we announced the end of all discussions with Microsoft — a lack of confidence in our own prospects. We lose market share in search to Google (GOOG) every month and we lose market share in pageviews to social networks. As for the Google deal, nothing indicates a job well done better than outsourcing your own job to the competition. After all, it is not as if we had sold the entire search team to another company for a premium price.

Apple itself is a gigantic technology manufacturing company. Which means they're killing the planet! Computers, computer chips, computer batteries, cell phones—all are made of poison. And all end up in landfills. Apple will recycle your old computer, btw, if you promise to buy a new one, from them. (Our boss doesn't care for this line of criticism against the technology industry, pointing out that they've reduced paper usage, but paper is made from wood pulp, not mercury.) But Al Gore's on the board! And they had some sort of corporate initiative with the word "green" in its name. Just like G.E.!

(Not to mention the DRM-laden iTunes store, the company's habit of suing bloggers to reveal their sources, and all the other Boing Boing-bait shit they engage in.)

Apple products have always been "hip" in the bourgiest sense of that word, but now they're simply straight-up lifestyle accessories —you paid an extra two grand for a laptop without a DVD drive because it said Apple on it. Your mouse has one button, because Apple thinks its users are morons who will become confused by a second mouse button. You're paying extra for the brand, and nothing more. While that's always been true of certain varieties of 'hipness', sometimes there's a corresponding raise in quality. (The $200 Levi's jeans are sturdier and better constructed than the $60 equivalents. We're told!) With Apple products, that extra money goes into making your USB port-less laptop look like a clean bathroom tile.

Look, we'll be fair: the primary benefit of most Apple software, the Mac OS especially, is a pleasant intuitiveness and out-of-the-box usability. They look pretty and usually they work. This is why Apple products are perfect for your grandmother! She'll have a much easier time figuring out a Mac than trying to install Firefox on XP. This is also why old white dudes like Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh or Charlie Rose enjoy their fine Apple computers. Not that you'd know this from Apple marketing, which plays exclusively to the cosmopolitan grup demographic. Designers! People who like the indie rock! Kids who wear sneakers! These products were designed for you, because Apple thinks you're imbeciles!

No, they clearly, seriously do. The damn "I'm a Mac" ads have been proving that for two years now. You're a Mac! You're an unpleasant and unlikable little pseudo-hipster creep! The PC is a lovable wit and a fantastic writer! But he wears a tie, you see, so he's a nerd. And they've been insulting your intelligence since day one! The 1984 Super Bowl ad? How childish do you have to be to think that buying one overpriced personal computer over a competing one is in any way a blow against any sort of authority?

At least they finally dropped "Think Different." Because that slogan made us want to find a way to somehow pry the entire West Coast off the continent and send it to drift into the ocean.

We don't hate Macs, we think iPhones are probably a better trend for assholes than BlackBerrys, we own an iPod, and we'll freely admit that buying a computer pre-loaded with Vista was one of the stupidest things we've ever done. (Works fine after the downgrade to XP tho!) Ok? We're just sick of people thinking that because some marketing firm lackey introduced his boss to Feist, or because Apple hired a designer who's heard of Bauhaus, that that makes them a more creative, liberal, or hip company than, say, Dell. At least Dell doesn't condescend to us.

Our green issue is that Google pretends to do something about the environment by trying to find sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, while its datacenters whir away, chewing up electricity all the while. Oh, and let's talk about the fact that Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley are located off a freeway exit, making public transit a virtual impossibility for most of its employees who work odd hours. All the Wi-Fi-equipped buses in the world won't make up for that.

Oh, and let's talk about Silicon Valley's electric-car business. Sure, they don't spew hydrocarbons while they jaunt down the highway, but where do you think the electricity that charges them comes from? Coal or natural gas, mostly. Here's a tip on the vehicle that's going to save the planet: It's called a bicycle. But you're never going to trade your car for a Trek, so forget I even mentioned it.

And then there are the gadgets themselves. Computers are designed to last three years, tops; if you get anything more out of them, consider yourself lucky. Cell phones? Replaced every 18 months on average. And if that fancy flat-screen LCD TV develops one bad pixel? Into the junk-heap it goes. A corollary to Moore's Law: Every year or so, you'll be able to buy something more powerful than what you already have. But ask yourself this: Would you be so unhappy if you just kept using your stuff a little longer?

Oh, and then there's Burning Man. People keep trying to make that event green. But until people stop driving massive RVs to it, it's still going to be a massive generator of pollution. Most of the carbon emissions from Burning Man result from driving to and fro. A suggestion: Move it back to a beach in San Francisco, and have the hipsters ride the frickin' N-Judah streetcar there.

Carbon offsets? A lovely market for Wall Street to trade on. But do they make any difference? No. They don't actually reduce carbon emissions; they just shuffle them around. Anyone who thinks buying a carbon offset actually solves global warming likely thinks they're going somewhere when they walk on a treadmill in the gym, too.

So there's Valleywag's green issue. Glad you asked?