• Photo sharing site SmugMug uses a paid referral program to encourage word-of-mouth growth. To kill referral links, photo site dpreview.com banned all mentions of SmugMug from its forums, letting SmugMug's CEO know by e-mail. The CEO blogged the e-mail and dpreview owner Phil Askey threw a fit. Now Phil has deleted threads and lied about it, turning a simple issue into a PR nightmare for dpreview. [Mike Lane Studios]
• Oh noes! Where is the industry going? Another techie's exit gets scooped by an outside blogger. Laughing Squid owner Scott Beale says Yahoo project manager David Beach (pictured) is moving to social search startup Wink. Not as major as the exit of Bill Gates from Microsoft (or even of blogger Robert Scoble from same), but hey, this is the guy who founded the first record label on the Internet. [Laughing Squid]
• Rumor says that Yahoo's building curriculum software — gotta get kids into Yahoo while they're impressionable — under an in-development project codenamed "Elmo."
• For startup founders and de facto press reps: this list, "When a Reporter Contacts You..." gives advice like, "Deadline: This drives the interview timing, but it also tells you how much of the story you might appear in. If it is a roundup story, or the reporter is on deadline, your source better be quotable as your window of opportunity just got smaller." [Bad Pitch]

Karen Kramer from TiVo tried to Cease & Desist one of our customers today. We have a feature called PhotoRank that lets anyone (SmugMug customer or not) rank a photo by clicking thumbs up & thumbs down icons.

Apparently, TiVo thinks they own all use of the concept of a thumbs up being positive and a thumbs down being negative. Shaking in my boots (ha!), I went to the USPTO and discovered that they do, indeed, have trademarks on 'Thumbs Up' and 'Thumbs Down'.

But they're very narrow trademarks, specifically for interactive television and remote controls:

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=qo3bti.2.39
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=qo3bti.2.40

How exactly does SmugMug have anything to do with interactive television or remote controls? I wonder if Digg or any of the other bajillion sites using thumbs up / down are getting C&D'd too?

Valleywag will ask the founders of Digg and Consumating tonight, if Valleywag is still sober enough to talk.

Well thank the gods for Tabblo, the "groundbreaking free online photo-sharing site" launching May 15! With no competitors to immediately gank its features, Tabblo is headed straight to the top of Bubble 2.0. After the jump, dig their press release (embargoed 'til May 15! Shhhh).

Hi [redacted] -

We wanted to let you know that on May 15th a groundbreaking free online photo-sharing site called www.tabblo.com will be launched. This new site provides professional quality templates and powerful editing tools to create online albums from photos taken by consumers, their friends and families to share online, turn into print products, or contribute into blogs and websites.

Tabblo surpasses other photo-sharing sites through its emphasis on creative control and collaboration, not just sharing of photos. By providing easy-to-use, browser-based layout and photo editing tools, and secure collaboration on photo-based projects, Tabblo creates more distinctive and elegant online photo albums (tabblos), and print products than anywhere else on the Internet.

With Tabblo people can easily and securely pool pictures with family and friends to make great-looking group tabblos or group memories for all. It offers secure access and the ability to download full-resolution images free for local printing.

Antonio Rodriguez, founder of Tabblo (and former VP of MyPublisher) would like to give you a sneak peak of Tabblo's new product - this news is under embargo until May 15.

Please let me know if you'd be interested in speaking with Antonio and taking an early look at the product. I can be reached at [redacted] or [redacted]. I've also inserted below sample images of print posters, the first print product launching with this new service.

Kerry Metzdorf
Red Javelin Communications, Inc.

But SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill knows just how public his photos are. And that is what scares me. Seriously, do not click this at work.

The one photo gallery even Valleywag is afraid to run: the C-section birth of Don MacAskill's children. [Oh-so-NSFW, on SmugMug]

But maybe I just don't get this 'Web 2.0′ term. Maybe it's that we're a bootstrapped, self-funded, profitable-for-three years company, so we don't qualify for the name. Does it only apply to those companies without business models?

Aw, it's okay. Mike doesn't hate SmugMug for its personality. It's because SmugMug is black.

UPDATE: After the jump, a reader provides the smoking gun screenshot. (Or someone wasted a half hour faking it.)

TechCrunch says we're not 'Web 2.0′ [SmugMug blog]
The Flickr Gunners [TechCrunch]