We make fun of everything here, even death. But it's still too soon to laugh over the three SiPort employees gunned down by a coworker, or the misguided teenager who overdosed live on Justin.tv. That said, next week will be open season on the newest little Googler and Barack Obama's Warcraft-addicted policymaker. Life goes on, and we have a job to do. (Photo by acaben)

Layoffs suck. At least we're still alive. But still: Next week, I'll handle Valleywag all by myself while Owen takes an overdue vacation. Week after that, I'll be gone and Owen, my partner in misbehavior since 1996, will go back to early 2007's org chart: Owen Thomas, Owen Thomas, and Owen Thomas. (I have work, don't worry.) No crying allowed, but this is our last caption contest so please, please, make it a good one. We'll take the best comment and turn it into this post's permanent, permanent headline. Yesterday's winner is longtailwagsthevalley, for "I'm born lucky." (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

"Merman" shares a birthday and a favorite musician — Jimi Hendrix — with chubby-but-hardrocking guitarist Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder behind Seattle's Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Hall of Fame. After Seattle-based blogger Todd Bishop posted on TechFlash this morning, Merman took his profile private. Here's what Bishop saw:

First, there's the profile pic, showing a man playing a classic Fender guitar across his midsection. The face is cropped out, but it looks a lot like Allen enjoying one of his favorite pastimes. Even the ring on the right hand looks like one Allen has been known to wear. And the "interests" section lists many of Allen's favorite musicians, starting with Jimi Hendrix.

Continuing down the page, "Merman" identifies himself as as a single, straight Aquarius who wants children "someday" and attended "some college." (Allen dropped out of Washington State University before going on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates, another college dropout.) The background picture is of a man scuba diving. Even behind the mask, it's pretty clear who that is.

"15 people laid off there today," says a tipster via email. "On a FRIDAY... Ouch. Have confirmation it's across the board (sales, product, development etc.)" Our tipster didn't get it quite right — a company official says it was actually 10 out of 89 employees — just above the fashionable 10-percent cut high-profile VC firm Sequoia Capital established with its doom-and-gloom memo. Dear Buzznet employees: Please email us.

"Spammers and scam artists are abusing Microsoft's live.com and livefilestore.com properties to redirect visitors to sites that peddle fake pharmacy products, porn and Nigerian 419 scams." That's how WaPo security blogger Brian Krebs explains Microsoft's appearance on the list of Top 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs maintained by the non-profit Spamhaus Project. Krebs got a non-denial denial from Microsoft that overlooks the fact that many of the scams have been high-profile examples for months. As Krebs points out, even the directionless dweebs at Yahoo (I'm paraphrasing) fixed this problem on their own sites.

An unproar in the world of tech blogs is uncovering a broader fault line between writers and advertisers. Om Malik's GigaOm and his other blogs have dropped their outside ad-sales firm, Federated Media, a startup run by John Battelle. Federated isn't just another ad network, nor is Battelle just another entrepreneur; he helped start Wired and The Industry Standard and an author of a book about Google, thinks that the future of marketing is conversations. And he launched Federated around that notion. Rather than shouting at readers with ads, marketers will use blogs to engage with their readers — and pay handsomely for the privilege. That's his theory, at any rate, which he is expounding in a forthcoming book.

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)

This is why people love Apple executive turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, whether or not he knows what he's talking about. At a Commonwealth Club event, Kawasaki was asked about his insanely popular "Ten Ways to use LinkedIn." Watch him squirm for a minute before 'fessing up: LinkedIn flack Kay Luo provided Guy with his talking points for the post. "I really needed a post — it was four days!" Guy, next time feel free to raid our inbox. We get more helpfully-already-written posts than we'd ever imagined possible.

Thanks to this week's sponsors: Chevy Fuel Solutions, Cingular, Energizer, Gyration Air Mouse, HP MediaSmart Server, Livescribe, The Mercury Group, MSN, The New York Times Magazine, Nokia, Pernod, Register.com, Rovio, Sharp, Toshiba, Zune. To become an advertiser, click here.

Through the golden heart of every world-changing startup pulses an avaricious get-rich-quick scheme. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire-boy cofounders of Google, established this doing-well-by-doing-good myth. But Mark Zuckerberg hasn't been able to make the same magic happen for his employees. In his efforts to make good by them, he may end up quashing a nascent market in Facebook shares.

It's not for lack of trying. Silicon Valley's stock-options millionaire make money by getting the right to buy shares at a low price and selling them for a higher one. Facebook's soaring valuation — Microsoft invested $240 million for a tiny stake, in a deal which valued all of Facebook at $15 billion — threatened to undo that equation. How is Facebook supposed to soar past $15 billion in value' So Zuckerberg & Co. turned to issuing restricted stock units, or RSUs, instead. (Restricted stock units are common at large companies like Google and Microsoft, but unusual for a company Facebook's size and age.)

The restricted-stock plan has created a new complication: Once it has more than 500 RSU holders, SEC regulations may require Facebook to start publishing its financials, even if it doesn't conduct an initial public offering. Facebook's revenues still aren't pretty enough for public exposure.

Facebook's lawyers have sought, and obtained, an exemption. Part of the argument they made is that issuing RSUs won't create a market in Facebook shares.

Facebook, unusually for most of Silicon Valley's private companies, has not had many restrictions on what employees and other shareholders could do with the shares they own. Most have rules that force shareholders to offer shares to the company first — a right of first refusal — or outright prohibitions on unauthorized sales.

But the letter Facebook sent to the SEC says that even when the stock units convert to common shares, they have limits on their sale: "... the Plan has been structured to preclude any trading of RSUs or any interest therein from developing." Even if Facebook permits an employee convert their stock units to shares and sell them, the company can then prevent the buyer from selling.

Employees at Facebook — especially the early ones, whose holdings are now substantial — have been agitating for some time to sell their shares, and there are still, even with the public markets taking a beating, interested buyers. Zuckerberg finally bowed to this pressure and set up a program, now underway, to let employees cash out up to $900,000 in shares. (Note the symbolism of the figure: No one will become a millionaire.)

But that may be it. If Facebook extends its stock-sale restrictions to common shares, not just the restricted-stock units, both employees and the investors so eager to snap up their shares will be stuck, until Facebook sells out or goes public. Zuckerberg has made it clear he thinks both of those events are far off — and the 24-year-old CEO still owns 27 percent of the company and more or less controls the board.

It's a dicey gamble. The prospect of selling Facebook shares privately must surely have attracted some employees who counted on a relatively quick cash-out. But shutting down the prospect of further stock sales will make sure the Facebookers who remain will be more committed to the company for the long haul.

Zuckerberg doesn't have much choice. As long as Facebook employees can find buyers for their shares, they'll be tempted to leave rather than stay at a company going through a tumultous adolescence.

Already, the company has had far more turnover, from bottom to top, than Google did. Not a single high-ranking exec left Google for the first six years of its existence. Facebook has lost three of its four cofounders, and numerous people underneath them, from former COO Owen Van Natta on down. No wonder Zuckerberg wants to slam the exit door closed.

Into the jaws of an advertising recession comes the launch of the most hubristic media venture we've heard of: a "super-stealth new online company backed and funded by some legendary billionaires." The requirements for the top job go from laugh line to laugh line.

The startup seeks a candidate who is an editor-in-chief at a top business magazine like Forbes, BusinessWeek, or Portfolio. All, mind you, based in New York. And yet he or she must live in San Francisco. Oh, and having worked at Yahoo, Google, or eBay is a "big plus." All of this to run a website targeted at "SMB" — advertiser jargon for "small and medium businesses." Most small-business publications fail to draw an audience, precisely because they think of their readers' businesses, contemptuously, as "small."

Too bad. In every other way, these guys are dreaming impossibly big. This job description is curiously similar to one posted in October with the same Gmail address as a contact. The main difference' The newer listing plays up the billionaire backers, and no longer mentions that it is "bankrolled by a respected 50+ year old offline company." A 50-year-old company' Sounds way too old media.

Here's the job listing:

Editor in Chief (San Francisco)

Date: 2008-11-18, 9:15AM PST

Calling all Business Editors

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

Please read the following requirements before replying to this ad:

Looking for a super smart, and bursting with energy senior business editor to head up content for a super-stealth new online company backed and funded by some legendary billionaires. We aren't raising money, we don't need VCs, and we are hiring!

IDEAL CANDIDATE

EIC or very senior level editor at a top tier online business site/publication. (Think BusinessWeek, Forbes, Portfolio, etc.) Someone who can build and manage a team, and above all— someone who knows how to create a unique voice and product by combining original content, RSS and other 3rd party feeds, bloggers and user generated submissions into something smart and fast-paced and directed to the owners and managers of SMBs. (If you don't understand that term, this is not for you.)

NOT INTERESTED IN

People who do not live in San Francisco, Regional newspaper reporters, tech writers, marketing specialists, freelancers who have never managed a team or worked each day in an office. This is nothing against you in any way, but all about the specific focus and needs of this role. We need someone who knows SMB/SME readers and can fashion an innovative new online property for them, and who can work in our downtown SF office building a team.

Sound like you' Good, please read the official description. We are hiring immediately.

To apply, just send your resume and salary requirements to mavensource@gmail.com.

Editor in Chief

Confidential, San Francisco, CA

Well funded early-stage startup is seeking an Editor in Chief to join its senior management team and help launch and grow an exciting new online network for business professionals. This new company, bankrolled by a respected 50+ year old offline company and some very famous board members, will leverage the assets of the parent company, while creating a ground-breaking new online service specifically for business leaders. This is a ground floor of an exciting concept and major new product launch.

The venture is seeking cutting edge start-up veterans to make the vision into a marketable and scalable product quickly and effectively. Team members chosen for this opportunity will be entrepreneurial in nature, visionary, well versed in online trends and technology, and ready to take a concept to product in record time using the many assets of the parent company for content and market advantage. Leadership experience at top online companies like Yahoo!, Google, eBay etc. will also be a big plus.

Editor in Chief

Description:

The Editor in Chief is responsible for managing development, production, voice, and presentation of all online editorial content. The Editor in Chief will create and execute a new vision for presenting relevant business information and advice to readers in a rapidly evolving online environment, making the site a trusted and valued source for the SME business community.

Responsibilities:

' Develop and execute a comprehensive content vision, voice, and style
' Develop and maintain the editorial calendar, working with contributors to maintain freshness of content aligned with long-term vision
' Recruit and manage a team of freelance writers, staff editors, and respected contributors
' Edit all submissions to meet publishing standards
' Generate original content
' Continuously work with production staff on presentation and quality control
' Ensure all responsible parties ' design, freelance and others ' meet necessary deadline requirements
' Pursue deeper understanding of the information needs of readers and tailor content to fit these needs and interests
' Pursue reader submissions, as appropriate, to complement internally-generated content
' Occasionally attend business networking events as editorial representative of the company

Education, Experience, and Skills Required:

' Bachelor's degree, preferably in journalism
' Strong background in business publishing and business-focused content highly preferred
' Experience managing a team of writers and freelancers in an online media environment
' 5-7 years relevant work experience, including writing for respected print and online publications, reviewing and editing the work of other writers, and managing an editorial staff and budget.
' Candidate must demonstrate a creative mindset, enthusiasm for online media, and an understanding of business leaders' issues and information needs

Location: San Francisco
Compensation: DOE
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
PostingID: 924129721

President-elect Barack Obama has picked Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, rather than former Harvard University president Larry Summers, as Treasury secretary. That makes it unlikely that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who worked for Summers when he ran the Treasury for Bill Clinton, will return to Washington.

A tipster tells us that Palm, the troubled smartphone maker, is laying off 10 percent of its staff. I called a spokeswoman at the company, who confirmed the layoffs but not the number of employees affected; Palm, at last count, had about 1,050 employees. She also said the company would make "program cuts" — Valleyspeak for dropping some future products. Palm has been hammered by competition from Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry; it is in the midst of a turnaround led by its chairman, Jonathan Rubinstein, a former Apple executive and Steve Jobs confidant. Rubinstein, left, has hired many former Apple employees at Palm — so much so that, rumor has it, Jobs called Rubinstein up to scream about it. But the layoffs and program cuts suggest he may not be able to complete his ambitions for a complete revamp of Palm's product line.

With a name like SearchWiki, you know it's going to be clever, yet stupid. Google has spent ten years and I don't know how many hundred million dollars refining a rocket-science algorithm for ranking Internet search results. Now, a few Google coders have whipped up a feature that lets you boost or cut the scores of individual websites from your own future searches. For example, grudge-o-matic TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington can click his own posts to the top of any Google search he performs. With one more click, he can remove Valleywag entirely from his life. That frees us to post as many photos of Big Mike's girlfriends as we want. Everybody wins! Personal note to Google engineer Amay: Next time you make a video, try to go longer than seven seconds without saying "cool."

It was a fantasy left over from the last boom: Hire a movie star to pitch your startup, and the dusting of tinsel will turbocharge sales. Those William Shatner ads sold plane tickets for Priceline, right' But the career of hard-partying entrepreneur Andrew Frame did not follow that script. We hear he was just fired as CEO of the Internet-phone startup he cofounded, Ooma. His most notable decision, hiring actor Ashton Kutcher as "creative director," did not pan out; Kutcher made a few incomprehensible videos, and then faded from the scene.

Frame, a high-school dropout who'd nevertheless managed to get a job at Cisco, the networking-equipment maker, could have been at least a TV star himself; he looks eerily like Will Arnett's G.O.B. character on Arrested Development. And Ooma's products, the Hub and the Scout, are pleasant enough to look at, too. As if there wasn't enough of a Hollywood connection, Frame lied about the Palo Alto-based startup's age.

But a pretty face is not enough. Ooma's problem, minus the technical analysis, amounted to this: It was never as simple as a Hollywood pitch. Try as he might, Kutcher could never turn it into a movie trailer. (Perhaps if he'd hired the late voiceover artist Don LaFontaine to intone "In a world without phone bills ...", it might have had a chance.)

Cell-phone carriers long ago figured out that making phones cheap and charging more for monthly service helped win subscribers. Ooma tried to flip that around, charging $399.99 for a Hub device and offering phone service for free. It has since slashed the price to $249.99 — but enrolled all new customers in a $99.99/year service plan for extra voicemail features. (You have to cancel the service to after a 60-day free trial to avoid being charged for it.)

Frame tried to compensate for these flaws in his business plan with a crush of PR. Servile tech blogs like TechCrunch, eager to talk up the Kutcher connection, played along without asking hard questions about Ooma's product. Ultimately, that's what undid him. Our tipster tells us the board "is done with Frame's lack of integrity and moneywasting PR trips and took him out." Other executives have been reshuffled, and a former president of Vonage — a more conventional Internet-phone service that's also losing money — is trying to help the company raise money.

If this were a movie script, it would be time for the third act and a happy ending. But I don't think Ooma will go Hollywood in that way, either.

Update: Tim Weingarten, an Ooma board member and investor, has sent the following response:
I read your article today about Andrew Frame, and as an investor and ooma board member from when I first seed-funded ooma, I feel compelled to correct several inaccuracies. I think it's important you hear this directly from someone who is both a board member and also the largest investor in the company.

1. Andrew has not been fired from the company. The company has made substantial progress with Andrew as CEO. It has been Andrew's vision, leadership and guidance that made it clear to me and the other ooma investors to invest the $45m of capital that has gone into the company over the last 4 years. Andrew's involvement and vision for the future product direction is a critical aspect of the board's intent to invest more in ooma in the future.

2. Andrew's success and contribution at Cisco was the foundation for the original bet we placed on ooma. He joined Cisco at a very young age and excelled quickly to be a top respected technical expert and contributor throughout the organization. We place our bets on people and we performed significant due diligence on Andrew's accomplishments at Cisco and elsewhere and were very impressed with his references and contributions in companies small and large before ooma.

3. The company is growing revenue rapidly and we are pleased as a board with their progress.

This is why people love Apple executive turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, whether or not he knows what he's talking about. At a Commonwealth Club event, Kawasaki was asked about his insanely popular "Ten Ways to use LinkedIn." Watch him squirm for a minute before 'fessing up: LinkedIn flack Kay Luo provided Guy with his talking points for the post. "I really needed a post — it was four days!" Guy, next time feel free to raid our inbox. We get more helpfully-already-written posts than we'd ever imagined possible.

Pictures from Life's centuries-old archives will now be available as part of Google Image Search. The images will be hosted on Google servers, however they carry no clear usage instructions. At least it's now easier for bloggers to spice up their posts with something that has a bit more gravitas than 4chan images. (Image via Time Inc.)

My worst fears for a favorite writer have been confirmed: Dan Lyons told Valleywag alumnus Jordan Golson via phone that (A) Newsweek, his new employer, ordered Lyons to remove a blog post calling Yahoo publicists "lying sacks of shit," and (B) rather than continue to blog under the boss's watchful eye, Lyons — once Internet-famous as the Fake Steve Jobs — has stopped blogging altogether. The man has two kids and Newsweek pays real money, so I'm not going to toss rocks. Except at Newsweek, which hired Lyons because of Fake Steve Jobs, his hilarious fake-Apple-CEO persona; urged him to blog outside the magazine; then freaked out when Lyons continued to write honestly in his spare time. You maniacs! You blew it up!

Om Malik has some brash advice for Yahoo. Too bad no one will find it: Three different publications' logos clog the top of his article's page. The lead paragraph is disrupted with another promo link, a broken stock ticker link, and a blogroll for Kara Swisher, whose name really ought to link to Google Finance to disclose her wife's current worth in GOOG shares. Second paragraph: "Yang's decision isn't a surprise ... In June 2008, I wrote about ..." Om, I know you love it when we pick on each other, so here you go: Start your friggin' article already. I went deep-sea diving in Om's prose to fish out his admirably brazen suggestions to fix Yahoo without Yang:

Here is what Yahoo shouldn't do:

* Not hire from within, for the current senior management has proven to ineffectual and share the blame for Yahoo's current misfortunes.
* Sell out to Microsoft at today's prices. ($20-a-share would be something the company should seriously consider.)
* Merge with AOL, for that would be like tying too bricks with spider web, hoping that it would float.

What it should do:

* Look outside for someone with spark.
* Replace the current senior team with executives.
* Refocus Yahoo on the very qualities that made it great ' building technology products for the common people.
* Focus its energies on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search as well as Yahoo's e-commerce platform.
* Keep building on its Mobile offerings, for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst operators who are worried about Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
* Yahoo's ad-serving platform needs to become more real-time with a drastic improvement in customer service.

Chris Alden, CEO of blog-software maker Six Apart, understands his business so well that he posted his own internal memo before any pesky gossip bloggers could extract it from his loquacious employees. He's also sensible enough to admit that there's more to blame for the layoffs than the economy — like the integration of recent acquisitions. He also snuck in a well-disguised hint that the company is cash-flow positive. Well played, Chris! The company is laying off 8 percent of its 200-plus workforce, and shifting more resources into its services business. Cofounder Ben Trott is taking a bigger role running Six Apart's blog-hosting business. Alden and other top managers are taking a 15 percent paycut. The only disappointment: That the company didn't kill off Vox, its interminably boring free personal blogging service.

At a time when some blogs are trying to reinvent themselves as news websites, the Financial Times, a U.K.-based rival to the Wall Street Journal, is considering a redesign adapted from blogs' reverse-chronological-order presentation of stories. [Silicon Alley Insider]

My Wired essay "Kill Your Blog" has spawned a charmingly identical piece in The Economist's print edition this week. Same theme, same Jason Calacanis quote from July. But read this part out loud: "A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone." I'd love to meet The Economist's anonymous author, if only to confirm that anyone on Earth actually talks that way.

I love Dave Winer's blog. He's even crazier than me, but he's pathologically unable to lie. Winer's latest post admits something most Californians would deny: The first time he learned a friend was married to another guy instead of a gal, he blurted out, "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable." He got over it, but he remembers that feeling. Dave, don't ever change. Remember when you found out I was working for Denton' That was hilarious. (Photo by tobiashm)

I won't give up until I land automoronic rumor site LayoffGossip a hit in a major American newspaper. It's a perfect story for a lazy reporter: Web 2.0 uses Web 2.0 to document failure of Web 2.0. Three's a trend! Right now, the site's Valleywag entry says, quote, "General feeling is fearful. to be careful. Average salaries will be available next week." LayoffGossip has forced me to confess an ugly truth: TechCrunch is actually pretty good.

Valleywag is name-checked in the New York Times today. (Page B1 if you're holding the dead-tree version.) The article talks about how companies must now pre-blog their own layoffs to beat the rumor mill. What it doesn't talk about is the problem of false positives: On the Internet, you can find layoff rumors about any company on Earth. For example, look at LayoffGossip.com this morning. Valleywag layoffs! They're coming! I can confirm that layoffs are scheduled for October 3, 2008. Credit the losers behind LayoffGossip for building every Clay Shirky talking point into their site. You can vote for the truth/lie factor of a rumor. Awesome. I clicked True on this one 76 times.

"If you care about the Internet, Obama should have your vote." Just kill me, that seems easier than suffering through another 763-word endorsement for Barack Obama by a former TechCrunch writer who doesn't even live in America. Riley's no idiot. He's just a capitalist. Every four years, tech bloggers realize that political chatter draws far, far more traffic than tech ever will. So they decide to write about politics.

Look, Duncan. I read Boing Boing. I'm fully aware that net neutrality is the defining issue of our time, except for copyright law which is also the defining issue of our time. What I don't need is another overlong blog post endorsing a candidate who locked up the San Francisco/Brooklyn Web 2.0 voting demographic last year. At this point, the only good gossip is if there's a Mission hipster tweeting for John McCain from a table at Ritual Roasters — and I mean doing it 100 percent unironically.

Brian Sugar, cofounder of San Francisco-based blog network Sugar Inc., sent two ominous Twitters this afternoon: "Sad day." "First rain, will last for 5 months." Was he just talking about the weather' Less than an hour later, he'd gathered his staff into a conference room and told them he was laying off nine employees, mostly in editorial — 11 percent of the company's 80-person staff. What's worse: More layoffs could come over the next two quarters, if ad sales don't improve.

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.

Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette blogger, left our cozy Gawker family two years ago for a big gig with Time. A regular on TV and in wonky political magazines I don't read, Cox has been blogging for Time from John McCain's plane. But now Ana Marie is in trouble: Turns out her $1,000-a-day expenses on McCain's plane weren't fully covered by Time. Cox was making ends meet with paychecks from Radar, a pseudoinfluential New York magazine. Radar goes out of business every couple of years to stay trendy. Last week, the mag dutifully shut down for a third time. Cox, despite a "mid-six-figures" book deal in the works, was reduced to pleading for donations on her personal blog. There's a big lesson here, and I think it's: Owen, I want my travel paid in advance.

Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board' Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.) Eldon rapidly took the story down, but not before it was syndicated to The Industry Standard, where it caught the eye of Nicholas Carlson, my former charge at Valleywag who has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.

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.

Eyebrows cocked' Smirk at the ready' Then you, sir, are qualified to tack on wry analysis to the day's news at AllThingsD.com. Good thing Peter Kafka, Kara Swisher's latest hire at the Dow Jones-backed tech blog, is a continent away from John Paczkowski, Swisher's incumbent snark machine. Put the two in the same office, and they might just spend all day raising their eyebrows at each other.

Ruby on Rails 2.2, an upgrade to the popular Web application framework, was released Friday, featuring an internationalization framework and stronger support for HTTP validators, according to the Ruby on Rails Web site.

With a full-on internationalization framework, internationalization is offered by default. Support for HTTP validators is provided in the form of etag and last-modified, according to the site. This can make it easier to skip expensive processing and also makes it easier to use gateway proxies.

Also featured are thread safety and a connection pool for the Active Record capability in Rails. "So now all elements of Rails are thread-safe, which is a big boon for the JRuby guys in particular," a blog on the site stated. "For C Ruby, we still need a bunch of dependent libraries to go non- blocking before it'll make much of a difference, but work on that is forthcoming."

Rails 2.2 also features improved API docs and a new guides section. It is compatible with Ruby 1.9 and JRuby.

Connection pooling in version 2.2 enables Rails to distribute requests across a pool of databases, according to release notes for the framework. Transactional migrations in version 2.2 are supported on PostgreSQL out of the box. The code will be extensible to other database types in the future, the notes said.

The framework can be installed through the RubyGems packaging system for Ruby.

Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, and Ruby and Ruby on Rails were featured at this week's QCon conference in San Francisco.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who co-founded the company, stepped aside this week to the surprise of no one who has followed the recent travails of the company. While that ship continued to list, the IETF debated what, if anything, to do about the problematic DNS bug that was discovered earlier this year. And the BlackBerry Storm lived up to its name, if not entirely to its hype, as it debuted in the United States and the United Kingdom.

[ Video: Catch up on the week's news with the World Tech Update ]

1. Yahoo's Yang to step down as CEO and What's Yahoo's next move': From the "it's about time" file -- Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is leaving the company's CEO post, which he took over in July 2007. While he took charge to try to right what was wrong with the company, his CEO tenure didn't go so well, with the failed Microsoft buyout attempt, followed by a failed ad deal with Google, with two rounds of layoffs and slumping finances mixed in. Yang will continue as a board member, and when a new CEO is found he will resume his previous title of "Chief Yahoo." What happens next at Yahoo has been the source of much debate this week.

2. A future without programming: There are presently tons of codeless app dev tools available, tools that will help you create an app without having to do any of the coding yourself. This is a great boon to people who want to create simple apps without having to write all the code, or even noncoders who just want to make the app that they need themselves. But they could also be signaling a decline for developers as they see themselves replaced by applets.

3. Microsoft, Novell eye Moonlight beta, system management: As Microsoft and Novell near the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, they are announcing a beta of Moonlight, which will bring Microsoft's Silverlight RIA technology to Linux. The companies are also rolling out the Advanced Management Pack, which enables management of Windows and Linux servers from a single console.

[ For a two-year retrospective on the agreement, featuring comments from Microsoft, Novell and an opponent of the arrangement, see The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later. ].

4.JavaFX RIA technology almost ready: Sun says that general release products for JavaFX Desktop and JavaFX Script should be out by the end of the year. Featuring an application platform based on Java, a scripting component and runtimes for desktop and mobile systems, JavaFX, Sun officials said, gives the company a unique entrant in a market also featuring Adobe Systems, with Flash, and Microsoft, with Silverlight.

5. Five top spending priorities for hard times: Forrester, Gartner and IDC have slashed 2009 IT spending growth projections, with IDC forecasting a decline to a paltry 0.9 percent from its pre-financial crisis prediction of 4.2 percent. Analysts say that despite the grim financial scene, companies should not inflict deep cuts on IT. "Companies should tighten their belts, not take their pants off," says Forrester senior analyst Andrew Reichman. InfoWorld chatted up analysts and CIOs to find out which technologies should be funded regardless of what the economy is up to (or down to, as it were).

6. Hosted Exchange, SharePoint now widely on sale: About 500,000 users have already adopted Exchange Online since a limited release for large enterprises in October 2007, and Microsoft expects half of all enterprise employees with e-mail to use a combined online and premises-based system in five years. Naturally, the company hopes that its Exchange Online, now in full release, will capture a large part of that market.

7. Survey: U.S. IT spending forecast worst since 2001: Forty-five percent of those who responded to a new ChangeWave Research Survey said their companies aim to spend less on IT or even nothing at all on IT during the first quarter of 2009 -- the highest percentage response to that survey question since 2001. Researchers talked to 1,926 U.S. respondents who are involved with IT spending to get the dismal survey results. Just 10 percent said they plan to spend more in the first quarter, which was down three points from an August survey.

8. Microsoft drops OneCare anti-virus product: Microsoft is essentially giving up on its efforts to build a consumer anti-virus business as it is discontinuing its OneCare software. Microsoft pushed hard to get OneCare to be thought of as on the same level as products from Symantec or McAfee, but it was poorly reviewed and failed to establish itself as being able to run with the big boys. OneCare will be replaced with free anti-virus software called Morro.

9. Obama administration to inherit tough cybersecurity challenges: The administration of President-elect Barack Obama will wind up dealing with key cybersecurity initiatives begun during the Bush administration, but far from fruition. More progress has been made on other cybersecurity projects, but some of those have been found to be lacking. Those in the security industry say that the next administration will also have to focus on collaboration between public and private sectors.

10. Bush's exit to put new e-records system to the test: The National Archives and Record Administration expects to receive 140TB of data when the Bush administration ends after eight years with inauguration day, Jan. 20, when all paper and electronic records of the administration become the legal responsibility of NARA. The unprecedented volume of records has to be sorted, indexed, and preserved. Comparatively, the Bush years are expected to generate 50 times more data than the Clinton administration, which also went two terms.

Nemertes Research continued to throw cold water on the future of the Internet this week, releasing a study projecting that demand for bandwidth on the Web would exceed its capacity by 2012.

The study, which is a follow-up to similar research Nemertes conducted last year, projects that the current global economic recession will only delay rather than eliminate the increased demand for bandwidth the firm predicted last year. Then, Nemertes projected that traffic growth would eclipse supply by 2010, but the firm now says it has adjusted its projections to reflect deteriorating global economic conditions.

[ Does the bandwidth shortage mean out Internet future is in danger' ]

Nemertes emphasized it is not projecting that the Internet will crash or shut down altogether. Rather, the typical user probably will experience Internet "brownouts," where such high-bandwidth applications as high-definition video-streaming and peer-to-peer file-sharing will stop performing up to users' expectations, the firm says. 

During a presentation at an Internet Innovation Alliance symposium this week, Nemertes analyst Mike Jude said that one consequence of declining Web performance would be that users would look less to the Internet to deliver their desired applications. "More and more applications are coming online that will drive expectations for service quality even higher," he said. "I'm not saying that the Internet is going to crash in 2011, but that people's expectations are going to be throttled. People will stop going to the Internet for those services."

One big reason for the projected growth in traffic is the continuing emergence of virtual workers who work from home or in remote branch offices located far away from companies' central offices, Nemertes says. In particular, these remote workers "expect seamless communications, regardless of where they conduct business" and they "often require more advanced communication and collaboration tools than those who work at headquarters," including videoconferencing and Web conferencing, the report says.

Another factor is simply the large growth in high-bandwidth applications for users to employ. More ISPs in the coming years will follow the lead of such companies as Comcast and AT&T trying out bandwidth caps that will charge extra money each month for heavy bandwidth consumers, Nemertes says. Although Comcast now caps individual bandwidth consumption at a relatively high 250GB per month, average future users will easily reach or surpass that bandwidth limit as they find higher-bandwidth applications to use, the firm says.

"Though this traffic load is [currently] more than typical, it certainly isn't exceptional," Nemertes reports. "This type of usage will become typical over the next three to five years. The fact that Comcast's network is, by its own admission, not able to cope with such usage patterns is a clear indication that the crunch we predicted last year is beginning to occur."

Looking forward, Nemertes says that if this capacity issue is not addressed, the Internet will fracture into a tiered system where companies with the most money will pay for specialized network infrastructure that will ensure their content is delivered at higher speeds than non-favored content.

This fractured system -- where certain entities can pay extra money to give their content favored treatment -- is what advocates of network neutrality have been working to avoid by preventing ISPs from discriminating against certain types of content. The Nemertes report gloomily concludes that although the Internet will not shut down entirely, it will experience a dramatic slowdown in innovation because "new content and application providers will be handicapped by the relatively poorer performance of their offerings vis-à-vis those created by the established players."

Microsoft asked a federal judge Thursday to end the class-action lawsuit about its "Vista capable" tag that has been the source of a treasure trove of embarrassing insider e-mails that have showed the company bent to pressure from Intel and infuriated longtime partner Hewlett-Packard.

In a pair of motions filed with U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman, Microsoft's lawyers asked her to decertify the class and rule on a summary judgment to dismiss the charges.

[ InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely did a rundown of the legalese of this case -- and the humor of it ]

If Pechman rules for Microsoft on the decertification motion, the case could conceivably continue, although it would no longer be a class-action with a large pool of plaintiffs; instead, each plaintiff would have to sue Microsoft separately. A ruling for the company on the summary judgment would effectively end the case.

Unlike recent filings by the plaintiffs, which have been packed with quotations from internal Microsoft e-mails that covered everything from managers badmouthing Intel to others who worried how Vista would be compared to Apple's Mac OS X, Microsoft's motions were densely worded and full of case citations.

According to Microsoft, the plaintiffs have not demonstrated that the lowest-priced version of Windows Vista was not the "real" Vista, or showed that users paid more for PCs prior to the new operating system's launch because of the Vista Capable campaign. That means the plaintiffs have not met the legal standards set by Pechman, and so have no case, the attorneys argued.

"The evidence refutes Plaintiffs' claims that Windows Vista Home Basic cannot 'fairly' be called Windows Vista," Microsoft said in the motion for summary judgment. "Windows Vista Home Basic has nearly all of the same computer code as the rest of the Windows Vista family, and ... Microsoft never publicly defined Windows Vista in a way that would exclude Windows Vista Home Basic."

Vista Home Basic, the lowest-priced and least-capable version of the operating system, is a key to the Vista Capable lawsuit; the plaintiffs have argued that they bought PCs before Vista's January 2007 launch and expected them to be able to run more than just Home Basic. That edition lacks several advanced features found in some or all of the other versions, notably the Aero graphical user interface.

Elsewhere in the motion, Microsoft claimed that Vista Home Basic shared 93 percent of the code found in Vista Home Premium, the next-most-expensive version and also the most popular of the consumer editions.

The lawyers also hammered at the price inflation reasoning promoted by the plaintiffs. "Plaintiffs have no evidence that the Windows Vista Capable program ('WVC program') caused an artificial increase in the demand for or prices of Windows Vista Capable PCs ('WVC PCs') that were not Premium Ready," the motion continued.

Last February, when Pechman granted the case class-action status, she blocked the plaintiffs from arguing that Microsoft deceived consumers because that would have required an individual determination for each member of the class action. Instead, she allowed them to pursue a "price inflation" line of reasoning, which would argue that PC buyers paid more than they would have otherwise, after Microsoft's marketing boosted demand and increased the prices of systems that could run Vista Home Basic.

In the motion to decertify the class, Microsoft's lawyers said that the plaintiffs had not met the bar Pechman set when she allowed them to explore the price inflation line. "With discovery closed, Microsoft asks the Court to decertify the class because Plaintiffs have done nothing and propose to do nothing to further develop their price inflation theory," Microsoft said.

Discovery, the legal procedure where the each party is allowed to request documents from other, closed a week ago in the case. "The Plaintiffs have no viable method of establishing class-wide causation," the motion continued.

Over several pages, Microsoft argued that the economist the plaintiffs brought in as an expert witness, Keith Leffler, of the University of Washington, had been unable to come up with a way to quantify the impact of the Vista Capable program on PC prices in the run-up to Vista.

"Dr. Leffler admitted that he cannot develop a model that would quantify the price inflation, if any, that supposedly affected the class, much less do so across the entire class period," the motion said. "That fact, standing alone, mandates decertification."

Microsoft crafted the Vista Capable program to keep sales of PCs from flagging as the new OS's release loomed. A message by a Microsoft director working on the campaign made it clear that was the top priority. "The primary goal of Ready PC [ an earlier name for what would be recast as Vista Capable -- Ed. ] is to limit stall of XP PC sales as we continue to build Vista buzz," said Rajesh Srinivasan in October 2005. "We believe [the program requirements] strike a balance between limiting impact on XP PC sales, ensuring OEM support and participation in the program and providing a good customer experience after Vista upgrade."

The lawsuit, which began in April 2007, has become best-known as the source for hundreds of Microsoft e-mails that have been made public by the court. Earlier disclosures showed that Microsoft relaxed the requirements of Vista Capable to accommodate Intel, a decision that then enraged HP, and that company managers feared comparisons between Vista and Apple's Mac OS X more than a year before Vista went public.

The case is currently set to start trial next April.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

In separate moves this week, Sun and Microsoft both proceeded with previously stated plans to boost their software development environments

Version 6.5 of the NetBeans open source IDE was released by Sun and the NetBeans community, while Microsoft has added jQuery IntelliSense support to Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.

Accessible for download, NetBeans 6.5 features increased support for Web and Java software development, according to Sun and the NetBeans community. It includes localized versions for simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Also being offered is an early access version of NetBeans for Pythin applications, featuring an editor, debugger, and Python runtimes.

Version 6.5 features tooling for PHP, such as syntax highlighting and code completion. A JavaScript editor is included as well.

'Integration across multiple languages simplifies development. The NetBeans IDE 6.5 allows you to stay within one tool and move easily from PHP to JavaScript and back," said Ian Murdock, Sun vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun, in a statement released by the company.

Other capabilities include enhanced support for Spring, Hibernate, JavaServer Pages, and Java Persistence API. Support for Groovy and Grails also is offered in the editor. Ruby enhancements are offered within the editor and debugger.

Multithreaded debugging for Java technologies is featured as well.

Sun in December will offer a training and certification for NetBeans by way of its Certification Specialist for NetBeans IDE effort.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is offering JavaScript IntelliSense support via Service Pack 1, which can be downloaded. JQuery is a JavaScript library.

Users also must install the VS 2008 Patch KB58502 patch to support "-vsdoc.js" Intellisense files and download the jQuery-vsdoc.js file.

"Visual Studio 2008 SP1 adds richer JavaScript IntelliSense support to Visual Studio, and adds code completion support for a broad range of JavaScript libraries," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog.

Remember when a phone was just a phone' You'd no more give thought to its operating system than you would to the one that your microwave oven ran. Boy, have times changed.

Today's smartphones are pocketable, Net-connected personal computers, and the OSes they use have a huge impact on their power and their personality. Buy a phone, and you're committing to a platform just as surely as you are when you choose a PC or a Mac.

[ Check out Neil McAllister's SDK shoot-out of Android vs. iPhone as well as InfoWorld's Test Center review of  Android, Google's iPhone killer. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

To see how today's smartphone OSes stack up, I spent time with five leading ones as experienced on phones that show them to good advantage: Apple's iPhone OS (which I tried on the iPhone 3G, using AT&T's network), Google's Android (on T-Mobile's G1), Microsoft's Windows Mobile (on HTC's Touch Diamond, using Sprint), Nokia's S60 3rd Edition on Symbian (on the company's N96, sold only in unlocked form), and RIM's BlackBerry OS (on the company's own BlackBerry Bold, using AT&T).

(Consult PC World's Top 10 Smart Phones chart to see how the hardware compares.)

I judged the five operating systems on their capabilities, ease of use, and visual panache, and considered both their standard applications and third-party programs.

The Winners
The two most impressive operating systems were the two with the briefest histories: iPhone OS and Android.

Both are built for Internet-centric devices, both are not only functional but fun, and both make extending your phone's capabilities with new applications extremely easy. At the moment, iPhone OS beats the newer, rougher Google OS ; over time, Android's open-source design and lack of restrictions on third-party developers could give it an edge over Apple's more locked-down approach.

Among the old-timers, the BlackBerry OS is doing a solid job of preserving the strengths that made it popular in the first place while keeping up with the times. In contrast, I regret to report, Windows Mobile and S60 3rd Edition are aging badly. Let's delve more deeply.

Apple iPhone OS
What it is: iPhone OS is a pocket-size version of the Mac's OS X , shrunk down and redesigned to power the iPhone 3G.

How it works: As you zip your way around the iPhone 3G's multitouch interface with your fingertips, hardware and software blur into one pleasing experience. With other OSs, it's all too easy to get lost in menus or forget how to accomplish simple tasks; iPhone apps , however, are remarkably sleek and consistent. The OS's most infamous omission is cut-and-paste capability -- but to tell the truth, I haven't missed it yet.

How it looks: Terrific. Everything from the sophisticated typography to the smooth animation effects contributes to the richest, most attractive environment ever put on a handheld device.

Built-in applications: What's good is great--especially the Safari browser , which makes navigating around sites that were never designed to be viewed on a phone remarkably simple. And the OS's music and video programs truly are of iPod caliber. But as a productivity tool, the iPhone lacks depth: You can't search e-mail, and you get no apps for editing documents or managing a to-do list.

Third-party stuff: Just months after Apple opened up the iPhone to other developers, thousands of programs are available, and downloading them directly via the App Store is a cakewalk. The best ones, such as Facebook and the Evernote note-taker , are outstanding. But the limitations that Apple puts on third-party apps -- they can't run in the background or access data other than their own -- place major obstacles in the way of everything from instant messengers to office suites. And Apple, the sole distributor of iPhone software, has declined to make available some useful applications that developers have submitted.

Bottom line: iPhone OS is easily the most enjoyable and intuitive phone operating system in existence, but its growth could be stunted unless Apple keeps its control-freak tendencies in check.

Google Android
What it is: Google's new phone OS is an ambitious open-source platform intended to let companies customize it to their liking for an array of handsets. So far, however, it's available on just one model, T-Mobile's G1 .

How it works: On the G1, Android's interface feels like an iPhone/BlackBerry mashup -- much of it uses the touch screen, but you get a trackball and Menu, Home, and Back buttons, too. The highly customizable desktop is a plus. Overall, it compares well to older platforms but isn't as effortless as the iPhone.

How it looks: Android isn't an aesthetic masterpiece like iPhone OS, but it's fresh and appealing, and it makes good use of the G1's high-resolution screen.

Built-in applications: They're tightly integrated with Google services such as Gmail and Google Calendar -- the first thing you do when you turn on the phone for the first time is to give it your Google account info . (That's fine as long as you're not dependent on alternatives such as Microsoft Exchange .)

Android's browser lacks the iPhone's multitouch navigation but is otherwise a close rival. The best thing about its music features is the ability to download DRM-free songs from Amazon. The only videos it can play are YouTube clips, alas.

Third-party stuff: Developers are just beginning to hop on the Android bandwagon. The iPhone-like Market service lets you download apps directly to the phone from Google; unlike with the iPhone, you can also snag programs from third-party merchants such as Handango .

Bottom line: Android's potential is gigantic, especially if it winds up on scads of phones. On the G1, it's a promising work in progress.

RIM BlackBerry OS
What it is: This software powers RIM's BlackBerry smart phones, including the Curve , Pearl , and 8800 , as well as the new Bold and Storm models.

How it works: The basic concepts behind the BlackBerry interface have changed remarkably little in a decade. And why should they' In its own way, the BlackBerry interface is just as logical and consistent as the iPhone's: On most models you perform almost every function in every application with a trackball, a Menu button, and a button that lets you back out to the previous screen.

Master those three actions, and you can whip around the OS with extreme speed. (I haven't tried the Storm, which replaces the standard BlackBerry controls with an iPhone-style touch screen.)

How it looks: The BlackBerry OS is fairly mundane and text-centric, although recent models such as the Bold dress it up with crisper fonts and slicker icons.

Built-in applications: The BlackBerry's e-mail and calendaring applications still set the standard for efficient design and reliable real-time connectivity with widely used messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange.

The Bold introduces a much-improved new browser that rivals iPhone OS and Android in its ability to display sites the way their designers intended; its music and video apps are serviceable enough but still secondary to the productivity tools.

Third-party stuff: Once upon a time, users didn't have many BlackBerry programs to choose from, but recently the market has boomed--thousands, from productivity apps to games, are available now. Windows Mobile and S60 have even more bountiful selections, though.

Currently BlackBerry has no over-the-air storefront comparable to Apple's App Store or Android Market. RIM's BlackBerry storefront is expected to launch in March 2009.

Bottom line: The BlackBerry OS is an old dog, but a smart one -- and one that's proving itself capable of learning new tricks.

Microsoft Windows Mobile
What it is: As its name makes clear, this is Microsoft's mobile edition of Windows. Version 6.1 ships on a dozen phones from manufacturers such as HTC (with its Touch Diamond ), Motorola, Palm, and Samsung.

Here's a video showing the best of the new features of Windows Mobile 6.1.

Some manufacturers -- including HTC with the Diamond, Palm, and Samsung -- supplement Windows Mobile with their own software layer or tweaks to the underlying Windows Mobile OS.

How it works: Surprisingly, Windows Mobile acts like full-strength Windows , complete with a Start menu and system tray. That isn't a virtue -- who wants to squint at tiny icons on devices meant for on-the-go use' The Touch Diamond covers up part of Microsoft's stylus-oriented interface with a fingertip-driven system called TouchFLO that's nowhere near as elegant and intuitive as the iPhone.

How it looks: It's workmanlike. But it falls far, far short of iPhone OS's surface gloss.

Built-in applications: The version of Internet Explorer on current phones is profoundly archaic; the Touch Diamond dumps it for Opera Mobile . (Microsoft has released a new version of IE, but it isn't yet available on any phones.) On the other hand, the productivity apps -- basic versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint -- aren't bad.

Third-party stuff: The best thing about this OS is the sheer variety of available applications in every category. Utilities such as Lakeridge Software's WisBar Advance let you tweak the interface's look, feel, and functionality, compensating for some of its deficiencies. But you get no built-in app store à la iPhone OS and Android.

Bottom line: Windows Mobile has fallen behind the times on multiple fronts. Microsoft's next major overhaul isn't expected until late 2009 or 2010; by then, version 6.1 will be all but irrelevant.

Nokia S60 3rd Edition on Symbian
What it is: S60 3rd Edition is the version of the venerable Symbian mobile OS found in a variety of smart phones, not only from Nokia (including its new N96) but also LG and Samsung.

How it works: S60's interface dates from the days when even the smartest phones sported only a numeric keypad and a few other buttons, and it tends to make you shuffle through menus one laborious item at a time. (The BlackBerry OS does a much better job of making non-touch-screen devices fast and efficient.)

How it looks: It's pretty old-fashioned by today's standards, with blocky fonts and retro icons.

Built-in applications: The programs vary from phone to phone. The N96 I tried includes a reasonably comprehensive suite of apps, and judged purely on available features, they're respectable; the browser, for instance, has a zoom-in/zoom-out interface that's theoretically similar to the one in iPhone OS's Safari. But the clunky interface leaves them feeling less powerful than the apps on any other phone I tried for this article.

Third-party stuff: A profusion of useful S60-compatible applications is available at sites such as Handango -- one of the deepest libraries for any platform, thanks to Symbian's long life span and wide usage.

Bottom line: S60 3rd Edition is stale in comparison with iPhone OS and Android, but it's also heading for retirement. The new S60 5th Edition brings the OS up-to-date with features such as touch-screen support; Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic , the first phone to use it, won't arrive in the United States until early next year.

Former PC World editor in chief Harry McCracken now blogs at his own site, Technologizer. PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

A Taiwanese research institute on Friday revealed a folding display on a smartphone that allowed its screen to double in size to 5 inches.

The mock-up smartphone, developed to showcase the screen, is styled like other smartphones and opens like a book turned on its side so when open the display is on the top half and the bottom half is the keyboard.

[ Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

What users are actually seeing is only the top half of the display. The rest of the 5-inch screen is hidden underneath the keyboard and can be pulled up to reveal the full screen when required. To allow the screen to close down over the keyboard a 1-centimeter portion along the center is flexible.

Researchers at Taiwan's publicly funded Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) developed the TFT-EPD (Thin Film Transistor Electrophoretic Display) screen with smartphones in mind.

Currently 5-inches is the only screen size available, but work is being done on other screen sizes, said Nick Vasiljevic, managing director of Pilotfish, the company ITRI hired to design the smartphone model.

But for designers, the flexible 5-inch screen does offer other possibilities, he added. The hinge and flexible part of the screen can be in different places, so the screen could bend at the 3-inch mark instead of 2.5-inch mark.

Pictures of the smartphone appear to show a break at the center of the screen, so it looks almost like two separate screens, but that's not the case.

What looks like a break is actually a software taskbar similar to the one at the bottom of a PC screen. But the taskbar on the smartphone screen can be moved so the whole screen can be used for pictures, video, or anything else.

The flexible screen technology offers new possibilities for mobile phone makers, an important consideration at a time when companies are scrambling to develop Mobile Internet Devices, netbooks, smartphones, and other portable gadgets. Many companies say that finding the right screen size is key to such portable devices because people want to be able to surf the Internet or watch movies on as large a screen as possible.

ITRI worked with Pilotfish on the smartphone design to show off the concept because it's seeking handset makers interested in creating products around the technology. The technology will be ready next year.

ITRI is also working to add touchscreen technology to the flexible screens, which will also likely be ready later next year.

The U.S. government may be poised to reverse course on its market-only approach to rolling out broadband and a smart electricity grid to all corners of the country, advocates said Thursday.

With a Democratic Congress and a Democratic and tech-savvy president in Barack Obama, the upcoming months will be the time to push for government involvement in building network infrastructure, said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a communications policy advocacy group.

[ Google's CEO says private efforts not enough; government must take the lead. And Ted Samson's Sustainable IT blog reports how coalitions are calling on Congress for a clean energy economy. Your source for the latest in government IT ne