New York Times Detroit bureau chief Micki Maynard pursued her love of U2 to absurd lengths.

Ultrapretentious startup consultant Chris Sacca got excited about a nude wedding.

Marie Claire features editor Lea Goldman contracted the Blueprint Cleanse flu.

VentureBeat snooper Eric Eldon listened in.

Fast Company writer Ellen McGirt made an obscure Blueprint Cleanse reference, we think.

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CNET video correspondent Natali Del Conte kicked back.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter was an eyewitness to injustice.

Mancunian editrix Louise Bolotin sang her heart out.

VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon found a benefit to his Facebook obsession.

Fox Chicago anchordame Nancy Loo suffered for her art.

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

TechPresident's Micah Sifry leaked Obama Web guru Katie Stanton's complaint about government bureaucracy.

Boing Boing adventuress continued her travels in Africa.

Jake Tapper, ABC's resident hunk of red hot newsmeat, gave an incomprehensible update about President Obama's quest for culinary knowledge.

VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon exemplified the South By Southwest work ethic.

As did Air America radio hostess and frequent alcohol seeker Ana Marie Cox.

VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon, who lives in the hipster San Francisco neighborhood of the Lower Haight and rides a hipster bicycle to other hipster neighborhoods and wears hipster glasses and has a hipster job and is generally in denial about being a hipster, criticized hipsters and their cowboy-boot affectations, just in time for them all to pack up their cowboy boots and fly to Austin for SXSW.

Facebook platform manager Dave Morin, who lives in the San Francisco hipster neighborhood of North Beach and is in such denial about being a hipster he doesn't even realize he should be in denial about being a hipster, packed up his cowboy boots and flew to Austin for SXSW.

Cutie-pie CBS Internet correspondent Natali Del Conte got stalked in Texas by Luke Wilson and Paul Rudd.

Chris Lehmann, better known as Mr. Wonkette Emerita, grokked a fundamental truth about Del Conte and Morin's destination. (Psst, Chris: SXSW has hotels, a complete lack of boot-ruining playa dust, and better food. But other than that, you're on to something there.)

Hipster-mongering Details editor Daniel Peres doesn't read Gawker unless told to, Columbia J-school student James Sims, who we suspect is himself a hipster, wrily noted.

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Kind of boring. If you like amusement-park rides, you'll love the Tesla Roadster. If, like me, you sit there calculating the infinetesimal odds that the operator's insurers will allow a rollercoaster to actually pose any real danger to you, you'll hate it. I spent the ride up to Coit Tower and back thinking about how much coal was burned to generate the electricity now being thrummed away by the Roadster's motors.

Back at the bar, Musk was affable enough, considering I've hinted he's taking out his midlife crisis on his employees and may be scheming to take over Tesla Motors completely by running it into bankruptcy. He laughed at the last idea, and then thanked me for the suggestion, saying he hadn't thought of that particular financial maneuver.

Musk still blames cofounder Martin Eberhard for Tesla's current straits. When Tesla raised its fourth round of funding in 2007, Musk says, Eberhard, then CEO, told investors that the Roadster's cost was $65,000, giving it a $25,000 gross margin. "It's right there on the slide, with Martin's name on it!" Musk told me. The company, he adds, was already in the middle of a search for a CEO to replace Eberhard.

A private-equity firm which had invested in Tesla sent some consultants to help Tesla sort out supply-chain issues, and they found that the Roadster's parts actually cost the company $140,000. "We might as well have sent customers $50,000 and saved the bother of making the car," said Musk. Former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, a Tesla investor, confirmed their findings — and that's when Musk decided to fire Eberhard and replace him temporarily with Marks. Just as now, the company's cash position was running low, and Tesla tapped existing investors for new funding, despite having just raised a round. He revealed none of this at the time, he says, because it would have jeopardized the company's ongoing CEO search. (Not that that worked out particularly well; Musk installed Ze'ev Drori, then replaced him last month.)

That's Musk's version, anyway. I'm skeptical, if only from experience with Musk; when he was running PayPal, I remember him making statements that company insiders told me didn't match the facts. But as he was leaving to drive back to the Valley, Musk mentioned that his divorce from his sci-fi novelist wife Justine was a mutual matter; he got the paperwork in first, but she was getting ready to file papers, too. That, at least, checks out. I'm still not sure if I should trust Musk's account of what led Tesla to these perilous straits. But I do believe now that he's brave enough to drive a Roadster up to San Francisco and deliver it in person.

The ten:

1. Act now. Act with speed to get your business in order.
2. Protect the vital core of the business. Use a scalpel instead of an axe, when cutting positions.
3. Get 18 months (or more) of cash. Defer any expansions of facilities, and be frugal with expenditures. For example use Google Docs (online free software) instead of buying something like Microsoft Office for your entire workforce.
4. Re-prioritize and rerationalize all your research and development. Only focus on the key hurdles for your business.
5. Negotiate. You can always get better payment terms, and better contracts.
6. Everyone in your organization should be selling the product. Everyone from your secretaries to your executives.
7. For bonuses, offer equity instead of cash. You can also ask for a voluntary salary reduction program among employees.
8. Pay attention to where your cash is. Put it in something secure — move it into treasuries or some other grounded investment.
9. For the revenues you plan on getting, look for leading indicators. You may need to readjust. Basically, don’t take any revenue streams for granted.
10. Over-communicate. With employees, investors, and key customers. Don’t sugar coat anything.

Angel investor Ron Conway added a key eleventh point: Be open-minded to mergers and acquisitions. Always a good tip.

[photo: flickr/visulogik]

See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives.

Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones.

Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry.

This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.)

There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.

Azure is being released as a community preview today, which Microsoft says offers only a handful of the feature that will be available in the final version. I’m sitting in the audience of the Professional Developers Conference as Microsoft makes the announcement, and I’ll update with more info from the presentation.

That dilemma ultimately spurred a business, Private Access, which is coming out of stealth today at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The company allows people with health conditions to describe their problems anonymously. It also posts news of clinical trials of new treatments. It thus allows medical researchers and potential research subjects to find each other.

The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based business combines matters related to health, social networking, and search. The motto: “privacy and access in perfect balance.” It tries to reconcile the need for “data liquidity” with the need for data privacy.

How, for instance, does a sick patient find treatment options without revealing his or her condition to family members, who might “worry too much.” The patient may also need help with insurance intricacies but may not want to give the insurance agency a reason to deny coverage.

“The right answer on the release of information is different from moment to moment,” Shelton said.

Private Access has created a web site where people can describe their health matters and maintain precise control over who has access to the records. You can set parameters for what people see and how you want to be contacted.

There are four parts to the business. Recruit Source is a way for medical researchers to recruit patients for experimental trials. Trials Finder is a tool that lets patients search for possible treatments in ongoing or future trials. Records Agent lets people place orders for their health documents. And Privacy Layer is the platform that runs underneath the other applications.

Private Access will charge for the first three services but will give away Privacy Layer for free. Shelton said Recruit Source will cost $200 and take about 12 minutes to set up. That’s much less cost and time than alternative methods, which include searches that span six to 12 months that can cost $1,800 per subject recruited. The medical industry needs something like seven million people per year for trials.

Private Access also has a partnership with Genetic Alliance, a collection of 650 different disease advocacy groups, which will market Trials Finder to their members. With Records Agent, Shelton hopes to cut the costs of obtaining records by a factor of ten.

Shelton became interested in the idea as far back as 1998, when he filed a patent on the invention of a search engine for confidential information. The first patent was granted in 2006. The company’s suite of products will be ready for general availability in February.

The company has raised $2 million in friends and family money and has nine employees. Shelton’s second in charge is Marc Kirshbaum, who has a background in fraud and identity protection. He formerly worked at Experian. Shelton said his company will seek funding soon. He is concerned about the tough economic environment, but believes the company is solving a big enough problem that it will catch a good amount of investor interest.

Duncan Riley, former TechCrunch blogger, claimed last week to have insider info from a tipster who had seen new Apple price sheets. Laptops started at $800 instead of $1,099, said the tipster. Analysts - if you believe them - think a sub-$1,000 MacBook would be a big change for Apple.

Riley's rumor bubbled up from his own site to VentureBeat to the New York Times' new online Technology page, where news from VentureBeat and other tech sites is merged onscreen with the Times' original reporting. Some readers who didn't bother to unpack their trust issues took the headline (note the grammar error: "a $800 MacBook") as Times-grade truth. I don't blame them. The NYT accurately broke the story on Apple's $499 Mac a day before Steve Jobs unveiled it.

The only thing I remember from newswriting class is that journalists are telling stories, even when they think they're reporting the truth. Riley told a good story, peppered with enough details to make it plausible. Web surfers crazy for stock market guidance swallowed the tale without stopping to chew. Now that we all know there's no $800 laptop, journalists will pat themselves on the back about some important lesson they've learned. I'll do it myself, right after I stop by Daring Fireball to watch Duncan Riley's ritual spanking.

Shown above is Jacob Mullins, the manager in question. He started at Microsoft last week, but is still listed as VentureBeat's ad-sales contact on the site. We take that to mean Marshall has yet to find a replacement.

Odd: Marshall seems eager to explain a now-irrelevant personal connection that couldn't possibly prejudice his reporting. But he's reluctant to come out and state the obvious: He's lost the only guy bringing in money for his blog. That's worth disclosing. Matt, consider this a gratis job listing.

“I don’t regret it,” he told VentureBeat in a phone call on Thursday. “I’ll fight it. If they want to come after me, bring it on."

"This kind of witch-hunt mentality is wrongheaded," writes Takahashi. "When I was thinking about making a difference with our story this isn’t what I had in mind." We're just amazed that Microsoft's legal team made it through all six pages of Takahashi's story.

I'd long thought that Battelle's flip-the-bird photo, used here, was a reflection of his charmingly combative personality. As a founding editor of Wired, which set the tech world on fire in the '90s and helped inflate the bubble, Battelle failed to stack up the tall dollars. He founded The Industry Standard, which sold more pages of advertising than any other magazine in American in 2000 and then went bankrupt in 2001. Battelle, in short, has been adept at chronicling booms, but not profiting from them. Until now.

Battelle is just the latest entrepreneur to cash out before his company goes public, a practice once frowned upon in Silicon Valley. But Federated Media turned profitable last fall, we're told. Being cash-flow positive means never having to say you're sorry. And it also gives entrepreneurs leverage with investors that they never had in the '90s, when building Web companies was much more expensive.

So at last he's earned what they call in the Valley "fuck-you money" — enough money to simply walk away, should a job turn unpleasant. In fact, we hear that's what Battelle is planning to do, albeit temporarily. He's told investors in Federated that he plans to take a leave from the business to work on his next book, The Conversation.

Where Battelle's profane wealth may get him in trouble is with the bloggers he represents. Unlike him, most of them have yet to cash out, or even turn a profit. Federated Media's take of their advertising — typically 40 percent — strikes many as too high, though most have yet to try their hands at hiring and managing their own salespeople.

But they shouldn't worry. Having enriched himself, Battelle is now thinking of them. After hearing rumors that one of Federated's blogs was in merger talks, he approached the blogger and encouraged him to come talk to Federated first before taking an offer.

In other words, Battelle is now contemplating a blog rollup. Rather than see his customers picked off one by one, with their ad inventory walking out the door, Battelle may use some of the money he's raised to buy blogs himself. It only makes sense. He knows his customers' businesses well, since he organizes conferences, orchestrates redesigns, and performs other services besides for them, in addition to the mundanities of selling advertising.

Battelle likes to think of himself as more than just a business partner to his bloggers. He's their buddy. He's their pal! This bubble has everyone frothy, and the valuations may be making some of the bloggers under his care unduly giddy. While Battelle may enjoy a tipple now and then, friends don't let friends sell drunk.

Even though Marshall has raised $320,000 for VentureBeat, he would obviously be the junior partner in any deal. Which points to the most implausible part of the two blogs' coming together: Would Matt Marshall, the Jimmy Olsen of the tech-blog world, really work for Arrington, who is surely its Lex Luthor?

Marshall and Arrington agree on perhaps only one thing: They're tired of handing a hefty share of ad revenues over to John Battelle's Federated Media, the ad network which represents both blogs. Combining forces might give them enough traffic to justify hiring some of their own salespeople. Is that worth putting up with Arrington's tirades and outbursts? If talks progress, Marshall would do well to ask for an Arrington premium. Would it not be ironic if the biggest obstacle to realizing the TechCrunch editor's dream proved to be Arrington himself?

(Photo of Arrington via Gagglescape; Marshall via Bub.blicio.us)