And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don't link at the right time and in two weeks when you're pushing your own headline, you'll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

What I'd like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Mens Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

Just the thought of being a part of something like that has held us back from raising any outside capital at all. I believe we have the beginning of a team that can play a role in this new Dream Team.

So think twice before taking that venture money, guys. You may be shutting more doors of opportunity than you realize.

The plan is to bring in news feeds from other sources, and build a reputation for good industry analysis from regular contributors including marketing guru Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and blogger Matt Marshall. The site will also contract with freelance journalists to write 300-to-500-word posts on Web companies and technology topics. Each contributor will be limited to three posts a week, to make sure no one writer dominates the conversation. "It's like the Huffington Post," says general manager Derek Butcher, "with the key difference that we will actually pay our contributors." Breaking news will be included too, but mostly as feeds from other sources.

Aside from tech news, the San Francisco-based site will also feature a "prediction market" where users place virtual "bets" to forecast events in the industry, such as mergers, or how many of a certain gadget might sell by year's end.

For instance, when news breaks that Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo, betters can begin voting on whether Yahoo will accept the deal.

Users will have profiles and be able to bet against a group of friends or the whole market.

Those with the best track records will accumulate the most net worth and be able to wager more virtual cash on their next bet, Butcher said.

Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind--for the laughs--we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. We acknowledge you as a serious opponent, and we are prepared for a long, long campaign. You will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your methods, hypocrisy, and the artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell.

One of the moderators on 711chan.org thought he had learned from a friend what the real server's address was on Friday.

The user, who was using the handle Splongcat, uploaded DDOS software configured with the supposedly secret address and urged others in an internet chat room to download and run the software. The software was intended to flood the specified IP address with rogue traffic in order to bring the server down.

But within minutes, users began complaining the software was crashing and others analyzed the traffic and found that the IP address didn't belong to the Church of Scientology, reporting that that the software was actually targeting a school in the Netherlands.

Immediately the IRC chat room hosted on 711chan.org (currently down) was filled with calls to stop using the program, and the 900 people in the chat room returned to their disorderly conversation about whether they should be flooding Digg with anti-Scientology links or making harassing phone calls to local Scientology branches.

Anonymous generated a powerful attack against Scientology.org, which was hit with several DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks over the past few days. According to Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, a company compiling data on Internet attacks, it seems that Anonymous' attacks flooded the Church of Scientology's web site with as much as 220 Mbps of traffic, which indicates that the group itself is based on some sort of organization.

However, shortly after these attacks, the Church seems to have moved its web site to a server hosted by Prolexic Technologies, a company specialized in protecting other companies from DDOS attacks.

A tipster believes Yahoo has created a list of 1,500-2,500 jobs that may be eliminated in the next two weeks. CEO Jerry Yang will reportedly make the decision to go forward with these layoffs--or not--next week. Jerry reportedly wants to announce the cuts with or before earnings (January 29th), but may not make them if the stock price recovers.

Puh-leeze. Not surprisingly, Denton is unapologetic (although Lam says he's sorry about disrupting the poor Motorola guy so many times during his presentation). Most of the events in the video are completely harmless, with TVs winking out as people are staring at them in the big hall - so what? I find it hard to get too excited about the whole thing, and much like Nick I find it refreshing that someone is standing apart from the slack-jawed and drooling coverage that CES gets in other places.

"The Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event," the C.E.S. said in a statement. "The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of C.E.S. media credentials and caused harm to C.E.S. exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future C.E.S. events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker are being reviewed."

New startup Mixx, which went in to private beta just two months ago, may be finding itself with the right product at the right time. Digg users, including top contributors, are showing an increasing amount of frustration with the Digg community, and many are leaving. Conspiracy theories that Digg auto buries stories with certain topics or linking to certain sites only compounds the problem.

Some users eventually go to Reddit, Propeller or any of a number of other Digg-like sites. But a disproportionate amount of them seem to be heading to Mixx, and writing about their choice.

But Eisner acknowledged that the studios and networks aren't entirely faultless. Their problem, he said, is hyping up digital platforms as being more profitable than they actually are. "It's a double-edged sword. The studios deserve what they're getting, because they've been announcing how great (the Internet) is. But then they open their books."

Eisner, a well-known critic of Apple (whose CEO, Steve Jobs, is a powerful member of Disney's board of directors), suggested that the profits may be getting sucked up elsewhere. The studios "make deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners. They make all these kinds of things, and who's making money? Apple! They should get a piece of Apple. If I was a union, I'd be striking up wherever he is."

"Cupertino?" Cavuto offered.

The problem, Eisner said, is that the Writer's Guild is lobbying for a bigger cut of the profits from digital distribution--and according to the former Disney chief, those profits simply aren't there. Eisner, now the head of a private investment firm called The Tornante Company, has launched an online video studio called Vuguru, and said that it's still more or less a fruitless labor. Vuguru's debut series, a serial mystery called Prom Queen, "didn't make money," he said.

Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that everyone hates but still reads, always practiced excessive internal linking but good sense prevailed at Gawker and they have suddenly changed that habit.

Blog posts on Valleywag look clean and more readable than ever before and it's now very easy to spot the phrase that links to the source of the story - no more looking at the status bar of the browser to find where a link leads to.

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, but otherwise, Newsvine will continue to operate independently, Tillinghast said.

Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com's newsroom, "is just a great fit."

"Newsvine is local, small, nimble - they don't come with a lot of things you don't want," he said, such as complicated partnerships and contracts. "There isn't a lot to rearrange."

1. Increased exposure for Newsvine writers. Remember when Killfile broke the news of the Virginia Tech shooting 22 minutes before the Associated Press? What about when Corey Spring got an exclusive interview with Dave Chappelle? When important moments like these occur on Newsvine, why shouldn't they also be put in front of 29 million people on msnbc.com? What about when a Newsviner builds up an audience for a weekly entertainment column like Steve Watts' Lost in the Vines? Why shouldn't great content like that be put on an even bigger stage? We think it should, and although Newsvine and msnbc.com will remain independent brands, we're going to spend the next several months figuring out ways to get the best content in front of the biggest audiences possible.
2. A bigger, more diverse community. Msnbc.com's user base is spread across the world in every age, income, and demographic group. You'd be hard pressed to find a town in the United States which doesn't count some of its residents as readers. It is our hope that eventually, readers of both Newsvine and msnbc.com will be able to jump from site to site and share in the benefits that each destination offers.
3. Speed, reliability and uptime. As a cost-conscious startup, Newsvine has made do with an efficient hardware footprint and no full- time operations staff. The upshot of this is keeping expenses down. The downside, however, is that during heavy spikes of activity and off-hour periods, the site can occasionally slow down or seem less reliable. Under this new partnership, Newsvine will move to the geographically redundant, world-class data centers that house msnbc.com. Bigger, faster machines and more of them. 24/7 monitoring. There may not be a news site in the world which scales better than msnbc.com, and we look forward to benefiting from their excellent infrastructure.
4. A slightly bigger staff, able to evolve the site and provide features and support to the community without cutting any corners. Thus far, each Newsvine employee has had to wear a great variety of hats, and in some instances we have been strung very thin. The ability to add staff members in needed areas is crucial to our success as a business, as a web site and as a community. We look forward to providing excellent support and service to our users as our community grows dramatically during the forthcoming months and years. The team that set out to create the vision from day one will be freed up to continue developing the features and tools that make the magic of Newsvine possible. We will be armed with the resources and access to bring the best content produced by Newsviners to the world at large - bridging the gap between citizen and journalist.
5. More news and images from more sources. Newsvine's mainstream news and images have always come directly from the Associated Press, and in fact, being the quickest wire-to-web news site in the world has always been something we've taken a lot of pride in. However, with the welcoming of msnbc.com into the fold, we now have the potential to bring you more of the best reporting in the world and some of the most stunning news imagery you'll ever see online.

What is MSNBC getting, other than a slick and feature-packed website? Newsvine is also a thriving Citizen Journalism community, with solid stats. In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer's desktop. This is a big sign of things to come.

In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.

Gloomy news indeed--if any of it were substantiated. As the head of the non-freaked-out editorial department, let me say a few things. AOL did just launch a Netscape-branded portal, designed to accommodate those members who don't wish to participate in a social news site. (Those members also have the option of using a personalized portal over at My.Netscape, not to mention the regular AOL portal itself.) No doubt some members will jump ship. But since the social news version of Netscape launched more than a year ago, most of the people with a yen for an old-fashioned portal have already left. Certainly the 323,589 individuals (as of this moment) who have joined the community didn't do so simply to check the weather and headlines.

Our director, Tom Drapeau, already responded to Arrington's post on TechCrunch itself. So did Marcien Jenckes, identified by TC as an "AOL spokesman" but actually a senior vice president in charge of some of the company's premiere properties, including AIM and Userplane.

"I want to echo Tom's post," noted Jenckes. "Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do."

We are launching our latest blog - Earth2Tech, a site devoted to the business of clean technologies, its innovations and everything else. While there are many sites that help consumers live "greener," we are focusing our energies on the business of clean and green.

One part clean tech startup coverage - (a quick look at clean tech venture numbers shows the growing ranks of startups in hot areas like solar and biofuels); One part reviews of tech giant's eco-initiatives (is Google's carbon neutral initiative more marketing or responsible plan?); One part a resource page for entrepreneurs and Valley types looking for green tech [tools, rules, tips] - LBS meets ethanol?

It took a bit to convince Om to go GigaGreen - read his rendition here. But if investors and founders like Sunil Paul, and the oft-quoted John Doerr, and Vinod Khosla, are all aiming at energy over IT and the web, then he felt we're in pretty good company. It might be a bubble, even mainstream pubs like NPR and the Economist are now debating that fact. We're agnostic. As always, through bubble or boom we'll keep the same GigaOM skepticism on this new site.

The 18 bloggers were invited to join the CNET Blog Network to bring fresh perspectives; CNET will be adding more topics and bloggers in the coming months. These bloggers are expected to uphold the same journalism standards as the CNET editors, so users can expect the same level of editorial quality from contributors to the CNET Blog Network as they do from CNET editors. The Blog Network will comprise 14 new blogs, including:

Cellular Obsession - Popular talk-show host Ronn Owens from San Francisco's KGO Radio has talked so much to his listeners about the latest cell phones that it's become a passionate hobby. Owens offers his opinions on the latest phones with the CNET audience.

Design and Technology - Design enthusiast Jean Aw finds the most incredible things in the most unlikely of places and loves bringing them to the attention of her readers.

(parent.thesis) - Author of a book titled, "Mojo Mom", Amy Tiemann and her husband Michael Tiemann offer the latest news and musings about raising kids in today's hyper-connected, 24/7 world.

Sports Tech - As one of the founders of golf's leading fitness resource, the Titleist Performance Institute, Dave Phillips writes about technology's significant impact on golf today, and the sports gear that is giving today's players an inside edge to every game they play.

Additional blogs include: The open road with Matt Asay, a blog focusing on open source; The digital home with Don Reisinger; The Macalope, a blog focusing on Apple; Politics, Policy, and Technology with Donnie Fowler; Speeds and Feeds, with Kevin Krewell, Peter Glaskowsky, and Jim Handy; Green Tech, with Vinod Khosla, Neal Dikeman, and Martin Tobias; The Web Services Report with Harrison Hoffman; Music and Technology with Matt Rosoff; Media Sphere with Josh Wolf; and Searchlight: an SEO blog with Stephan Spencer. In addition to this original content, CNET plans to syndicate blog content from Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban.

Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we've been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we've started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we'll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post.

Malware -- surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer -- is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed "drive-by downloads". To protect Google's users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised.

The WSJ story says "Yahoo doesn't appear interested in a major deal with Microsoft, say people familiar with situation."

Another storied print magazine is coming to an end in print, and the focus is shifting to online and events: InfoWorld, the weekly magazine owned by IDG, is closing down, and the announcement will come Monday morning, paidContent.org has confirmed. It was first reported in MediaSurvey premium newsletter here. InfoWorld has been a pioneer online and has been the earliest to embrace new techniques and forms of journalism and advertising, including blogging, podcasts, RSS (and ads in it), screencasting and others, so this move probably makes sense.

The worst thing: the staff internally didn't know about this until this story came out, and got picked up by SF Chronicle and Valleywag among others. From what my sources told me, there won't be too many layoffs as most of the team had been working on multiplatform already: print, online and events. And don't discount the events side, as that was a major source of revenue for the brand.

I have the pleasure of confirming the rumors: Heather Harde, currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, will start her new job as the CEO of the TechCrunch Network (and my boss) by the end of the month. This isn't the way I hoped to announce this news, but Om Malik broke the story after an internal Fox email got out.

It was tough to talk Heather into leaving Fox, where she’s been for the last ten years. In that time she's had a combination of operating and corporate development roles. Most recently, she was part of the founding executive team of Fox Interactive Media. At FIM she ran the mergers and acquisitions team, which was responsible for eight acquisitions, totaling $1.3 billion, and two equity investment deals. Prior to Fox, Heather was at business school at Harvard.

At a "global summit" of its most-valued software developers, Microsoft repeatedly declared that it would "win" in search and other parts of its Windows Live internet strategy.

"The words are empty," Scoble responded. "Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that's 'in it to win', then I don't get it."

He continued: "Microsoft isn't going away. Don't get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the inter-net? Come on.

"Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative."

Scoble's comments reflect wider concerns - shared by some Microsoft insiders - that the poorly understood Windows Live initiative is failing to make the impact expected when it was unveiled 18 months ago.

Let's say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?

Probably too many for most people to even try, if the numbers run by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, are accurate. On his blog (lsvp.wordpress.com), Mr. Liew determined that even the type of site that can get the largest advertiser payments per user would have to be immensely popular before it made that kind of money.

The analysis is "sobering," wrote Tim O'Reilly, the chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books. "This may be why more entrepreneurs are going for low-investment sites that don’t need an exit but provide 'lifestyle businesses' for their owners," he wrote on Radar, his company's blog (radar.oreilly.com).

That is, rather than seek venture financing and hire a staff, it may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site — say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts — and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on.