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Rumormonger: AOL layoffs begin today
There's not much surprise left, given the drumbeat of rumors that AOL would be pursuing mass layoffs later this year. But we now hear that layoffs have started at the Internet giant, even earlier than expected, with a number of middle managers getting the chop Tuesday afternoon. Anyone have more details on who's out, and which parts of the company are getting hit the hardest? Send in a tip.

Stats Feed: Today's most popular headlines are MySpace ...
Today's most popular headlines are MySpace millionaire says "whatever" to high school (7,586 views today), EchoStar buys Sling Media -- and a shot at the future (2,848) and What's up at Yahoo Brickhouse? (877).

Self-referential: Gawker book can't shake Jason Calacanis from its coattails
Even on YouTube, Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis dogs the every step of Nick Denton, the owner of this blog. A promotional video for a new book from Gawker, a sister site to Valleywag, lists an interview with Calacanis as one of its related links.

Rumormonger: RockYou wanted to pay $2M to draw on your wall
Facebook's platform has captured the hearts of Valley developers and the wallets of Sand Hill moneymen, but still has yet to prove it can make a buck. The question, five months after the Facebook frenzy began, is how much is a Facebook application worth? For an answer, let's turn to widget powerhouse RockYou, the startup known to users for its horoscope application and to backers for an intellectual property scandal which almost cost backer Sequoia Capital its investment. Here's what they thought one high-profile app was worth.We hear RockYou made a quiet pitch to the developers of Facebook application Graffiti soon after the Facebook platform launched. The offer? $2 million for the viral success story, mere weeks after it was introduced. The most bizarre part of this tale is the reaction from the developers Mark Kantor, and Tim and Ted Suzman: They turned down the offer, presumably because they were looking for a higher payout for their numerous sleepless hours spent coding...

Clips: Josh Kopelman's bad break
If you were wondering why First Round Capital VC Josh Kopelman has been walking around in a sling, here's your explanation. Embedded, above, is the video Kopelman posted of him breaking his shoulder trying to indoor skydive in Las Vegas. Beware: The mishap occurs around :90 seconds in, and it's totally not for the squeamish. But if you can stand it, it's as good a demonstration of the downside of the Valley's macho, testosterone-driven, thrill-seeking culture as you'll ever need.

Stats: Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the United ...
Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the United Kingdom, a media stronghold for the latter's parent company, News Corp. As one might write on Rupert Murdoch's Facebook wall, OMG embarrassing!!! [Financial Times]

Deathwatch: Vonage, the Internet phone service, has found ...
Vonage, the Internet phone service, has found itself besieged by more legal woes. A court has found it infringed on six Sprint Nextel patents, and ordered Vonage to cough up $69.5 million and a 5 percent royalty on future sales. Last March, Vonage suffered similar penalties after it was found guilty of infringing on Verizon patents. A royalty here, a royalty there, and soon you're talking serious money. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Online Advertising: YouTube not, repeat, not adding 30-second ads
Internet users are up in arms on Digg over a months-old report, mistakenly rehashed as news by Gizmodo, that Google's YouTube site was considering adding 30-second ads to run at the beginning of its online videos. The problem? The report, from April, has been overtaken by events. YouTube's current plans, unveiled last month, are to add "overlay" ads, like the teasers you see on TV for upcoming programming, to the bottom of some videos. In a statement, YouTube group product manager Shashi Seth says that testing found that users didn't like the ads. Consider the outrage, however mistakenly founded, as further confirmation of Google's testing.

Venture Capital: Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded ...
Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded by Firefox creators Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, were paid in cash, not shares, when Facebook bought the company. While they doubled their money in the $4 million sale, the cash payout means they were shut out of Facebook's future growth, which has left some of them quietly grumbling. [TechCrunch]

Virtual Worlds: Now Second Life avatars warrant trademarks?
Alyssa LaRoche has successfully obtained a trademark for her Second Life avatar Aimee Weber. Wait, what? Billed as one of the most recognizable figures in Second Life, LaRoche says she had to take steps to protect her virtual image because it's directly tied into her virtual design shop, Aimee Weber Studio. Her firm has produced everything from Second Life's virtual American Apparel outlet to a Peugeot concept car. Linden Lab actually permits Second Life users to keep some intellectual property rights in their unreal creations. But the account itself remains the property of Linden Lab, revocable at any time, without recourse. LaRoche is wise to seek protection for her creations. But she's ultimately foolish to think she really owns anything. She is seeking, in essence, a trademark on a figment of her imagination, in the service of a business of selling figments.

Quotable: "lame you took my song dedication off ;" ...
"lame you took my song dedication off ;" -- the urgent message Facebook spokesprofile Brandee Barker left for CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook profile, at 1:16 in the morning Monday, shortly before kicking off a week filled with Facebook news and rumors. [Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile]

Yahoo: Escape from the Brickhouse
Earlier today, we asked about Yahoo's Brickhouse -- the ostensible incubator of innovation in San Francisco's South Park charged with reviving Yahoo's reputation for Web cool. Departures from the Pipes project, the only notable product release from Brickhouse, raised questions about the operation. Brickhouse head Bradley Horowitz thinks his group is "thriving," but a recent ex-Brickhouse employee reports otherwise. His complaints range from the petty (the office "smelled like dirty socks") to the more troubling (Horowitz, he claims, "suffers from god syndrome and needs to get over himself"). The full email, after the jump.I worked at Brickhouse and quit. The place smelled like dirty socks and had no ventilation. In general the building feels cursed, probably from the old Organic days. [Organic, an online ad agency, used to occupy the same building, which Yahoo now shares with Wired. -- Ed.]I even question the seismic soundness of that building. Don't take your kids there either,...

Nicholas Negroponte: Oh, no laptops per child?
Nicholas Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child initiative is waking up to the business realities of equipping millions with low cost hardware: "I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written." No kidding. Some degree? A commitment for three million down to no orders for the production of 120,000 cheap laptops is some degree. To spur sales, the low-cost laptop will be offered to North American consumers for $399. The price includes an additional laptop donation for charity. But come on: Wal-Mart sells computers for less.Even while embracing reality, Negroponte clings to idealistic expectations: "Negroponte explained that if donations reached, say, $40 million, that would mean 100,000 laptops could be distributed free in the developing world. The idea, he said, would be to give perhaps 5,000 machines to 20 countries to try out and get started." These, of course, would be the same countries that have so...

Videogames: Microsoft's gaming division has struggled ...
Microsoft's gaming division has struggled to pull itself out of the red since its inception back in 2001. Its current console, the Xbox 360, has been plagued with manufacturing defects that could cost the company up to $1 billion to fix. But Microsoft expects its blockbuster Halo 3 to end its financial woes by tallying an estimated $140 million upon its release today. [BBC News]

Digital Music: Everybody hates iTunes
Well, maybe not everyone. But the tide is certainly turning against Apple's music and video store, which has held a near-monopoly on digital media distribution. Vivendi says the contract between its Universal Music Group and Apple is "indecent." We like the sound of that, but somehow it doesn't sound like Vivendi meant it as a compliment. Like NBC Universal, in which it holds a minority stake, Vivendi wants more control over pricing -- the option to charge more for new, in-demand content than old library tracks. While Apple has a few stalwart supporters, like Fox, at the moment, it's likely that many content providers are waiting for enough key players to take the plunge before determining whether to abandon ship or demand more flexibility. Particularly if they're getting a better deal from Apple's new competitor, AmazonMP3.

Satire: Oh pfeez! A new "game" is the perfect deconstruction of Web 2.0
"Pfeez : a worldwide game where people from all horizons enjoy taking photos of other people who are wearing the logo of the Pfeez community (photos taken without their knowledge)." When my editor sent me this pitch for Pfeez, his only comment was "Buh?" He must not have realized that this is the perfect crime: A reductio ad absurdum of contemporary social sites, and a profitable one at that.The deconstructionThose participating in Pfeez must wear its logo or take pictures of those wearing the logo. But what does the logo represent but the act of interacting with the logo? It is thus a self-referential symbol. And thus Pfeez points a mocking finger at Facebook, MySpace, and other networks that no longer represent real-world relationships but merely point at themselves. Even "useful" sites like Flickr, filled with photos of Flickr users taking photos of the cameras of other Flickr users, cannot escape the stinging satire of Pfeez.Phase 3: Profit!Someone's going to buy Pfeez's...

Social Networks: MySpace millionaire says "whatever" to high school
Many parents are worried about their teenage children obsessively spending all their time on MySpace and other social networks. Not Ashley Qualls's mother -- even though her 17-year-old daughter has gotten so involved with MySpace she dropped out of high school. Qualls has parlayed her MySpace designs into an ad-supported business worth millions of dollars. Her website, Whateverlife.com, has seven million unique visitors a month. The teenager has bought her family a new home and hired her mom.

Crime: New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has ...
New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling on him to increase policing of sexual predators on the site. From all appearances, though, the police who performed an undercover sting operation on Facebook need a refresher course on the site's privacy tools, which allow users to refuse messages from strangers and report abusive users. [Internetnews.com]

Amazon.com: The Internet retailer has finally launched ...
The Internet retailer has finally launched its long-awaited digital music store as a public beta, with prices that undercut Apple's iTunes by a dime. The music also comes free of digital-rights-management software, which raises the question: What will Boing Boing editor and anti-DRM crusader Cory Doctorow do with all his free time? [Amazon]

Amazon: The Internet retailer has finally launched ...
The Internet retailer has finally launched its long-awaited, DRM-free digital music store... as a public beta. Amazon's catalog of two million tracks only includes one major studio (EMI) but frequently undercuts Apple's iTunes with prices starting at $.89. [Amazon]

Deals: What if Facebook merged with Amazon.com?
FANTASY M&A --The buzz is all about Microsoft, or possibly Google, taking a stake in Facebook, the popular social network, at a lofty valuation as high as $15 billion. But the logic of those deals is driven by advertising -- the more targeted, the better. But what, exactly, are advertisers hoping to target, and why? Besides crude demographics and geographies, the most logical hooks for ads are Facebook users' expressed preferences -- the books, music, and movies they're increasingly listing on their profiles. And who has the best data on what consumers will buy? Why, Amazon.com, of course. The logic of a combination -- a merger of the two giant databases of consumer preferences is, at least on the surface, compelling.The companies, in fact, are such natural partners that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg invited Amazon.com to be one of the first to develop an application for Facebook -- for book reviews, naturally, complete with one-click buying. With Amazon's existing video...

Exits: What's up at Yahoo Brickhouse?
Remember Yahoo Pipes, the "interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" -- in other words, a website meant to help people build simple Web applications? It launched to some fanfare last February, with many taking it as a sign of Yahoo getting its mojo back. We hear that the project is starting to "implode," as our tipsters says, with most of its upper-level people looking to get out. Already gone, Wired's Epicenter notes, are the two cofounders of the project, Pasha Sadri, who left to pursue a "personal project," and Edward Ho, who just joined rival Google. Pipes was the first major release out of Yahoo's Brickhouse, the company's San Francisco-based startup-idea incubator. That Brickhouse's door is revolving so swiftly after six short months isn't a good omen to us. So, how are the rest of Brickhouse's projects faring? If you've heard anything, please fill us in.

Analysis: EchoStar buys Sling Media -- and a shot at the future
What does EchoStar's $380 million deal to buy Sling Media mean? In some ways, Sling's decision to sell out seems odd. Satellite TV is on the downswing, most people believe. Rupert Murdoch, after all, sold News Corp.'s stake in DirecTV, in part to raise cash to buy Dow Jones -- favoring content, in other words, over distribution. But Charlie Ergen, the obstreperous entrepreneur behind EchoStar, may have a larger plan for Sling's Net-connected set-top boxes. "This is just the beginning," says Sling founder Blake Krikorian in an interview with PaidContent. He's not kidding. The rich EchoStar buy, I believe, is a move by Ergen to prepare his company for life after satellite TV.Sling Media's main product, the Slingbox, differs in a key way from popular digital video recorders like TiVo. Instead of recording programs for later display in the living room, the Slingbox rebroadcasts what's on your TV, live, to your laptop, cell phone, or other Net-connected screens. While TiVo lets you...

Online Advertising: At Mixx, Seth Godin pimps Squidoo
NEW YORK CITY -- I'm at the Mixx 2007 online-advertising conference here, marveling at the brazenness of author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. "How do we use this medium in the way it wants to be used?" he asks, as he's interviewed by Charlie Rose. He's speaking, of course, about the Web, but he might as well be talking about the medium of the conference stage. And he's using it to promote his new website, Squidoo. Squidoo, as best as I can tell, is sort of a blog-hosting service like Google's blogger, sort of a social-bookmarking service like Yahoo's Del.icio.us, and sort of a hand-compiled search-results aggregator like Mahalo. Godin, of course, doesn't miss the opportunity to brag to Rose and the audience that Squidoo's Web traffic is larger than the Wall Street Journal's, without the benefit of any advertising. Except, of course, the kind of free advertising you get by being a best-selling author and getting invited to speak at conferences.

File Sharing: Porn industry insiders disagree on how they ...
Porn industry insiders disagree on how they feel about The Pirate Bay. Some would like American authorities to go after the file-sharing site to protect their copyrights. Others are uneasy about the idea of one country's laws reaching across borders, since many countries aren't as permissive about adult entertainment as the U.S. [TorrentFreak]

Acquisitions: EchoStar buys Sling Media -- and a shot at the future
Satellite TV is on the downswing, most people believe. Rupert Murdoch, after all, sold News Corp.'s stake in DirecTV, in part to raise cash to buy Dow Jones -- favoring content, in other words, over distribution. But Charlie Ergen, the obstreperous entrepreneur behind EchoStar, says it will shell out $380 million to buy Sling Media, a maker of Net-connected set-top boxes. "This is just the beginning," says Sling founder Blake Krikorian in an interview with PaidContent. He's not kidding. The rich EchoStar buy, I believe, is a move by Ergen to prepare his company for life after satellite TV.Sling Media's main product, the Slingbox, differs in a key way from popular digital video recorders like TiVo. Instead of recording programs for later display in the living room, the Slingbox rebroadcasts what's on your TV, live, to your laptop, cell phone, or other Net-connected screens. While TiVo lets you shift TV shows in time, Slingbox lets you move TV programming to other places. (This...