If you don't know about Dan Lyons, here is a quickie roundup: he's a pretty funny writer, used to be senior editor at Forbes, now writes for Newsweek, and got fame and glory for having a parody blog called The Fake Steve Jobs, where he pretended to be Apple CEO (pre-fake heart-attack, one assumes?). Got that?

Now Lyons has his own blog, cleverly titled The Real Dan Lyons, which is under Newsweek's jurisdiction, because they've made him take down several posts where he railed against Yahoo's PR for promising him that CEO Jerry Yang wasn't going anywhere and that the Google/Yahoo deal was going through.

And now of course Yang is axed, and Google got some intense cold feet about buying up another search engine in this economy.

Whoops! Luckily, this is the Internet, so even though Lyons was forced to remove his post, it was reprinted elsewhere. So how does the fake Steve Jobs really feel about Yahoo's lying flack?

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Google fell below $300 yesterday, in the first time since 2005. Today isn't looking much better, either. Solution? Using Google-owned YouTube to start selling ad-supported pages, a la Google's own search engine.

And don't worry advertisers, your ad dollars will most certainly be well spent!

An advertiser — or a video maker who wants to promote a work — can bid on keywords like “silly cats,” “financial crisis,” “James Bond,” or anything that strikes one’s fancy.

Perfect! My James Bond cat/ mortgage crisis business would like 1,000 pages of YouTube, please.

Understandably, some potential clients of the site are wary about marketing their product on the DIY video producer:

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Charlie Kaufman-lookalike and Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell was the focus of a profile piece by Jason Zengerle, who seemed to somewhat unnecessarily try to put Gladwell's sphere of influence at war with each other: the dedicated writer or the cultural prophet. Pick one, you can't be both! Unless you are like, Truman Capote or Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Woolfe or something. (To be fair, yes those last two were more culture-finders than they were culture gurus.)

But despite the problematic crux of the piece, Gladwell comes off sufficiently wry and self-depreciating, calls himself a "parasite" and talking about how much smarter books are than Google.

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So by now you've all realized that searching for most network television clips on YouTube can be a pretty fruitless exercise. If you want to watch The Daily Show, you have to go over to Comedy Central's website, because Viacom is all up in YouTube's business when it comes to copyright infringement. Unless it's a fair use, fifteen second thing, and even the candidates are not really sure how to deal with that when it comes to the Internet.

So while Viacom dukes it out with YouTube's papa bear over at Google headquarters to the tune of one billion dollars, they've also been in the works to team up with MySpace so you can legally watch episodes of your favorite season of Punk'd (it's the third season, isn't it?) on Rupert Murdoch's social networking service.

Hear that Google? That's how you do it when you're Sumner Redstone! Although wait… Redstone's the chairman of Viacom, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace…does that mean the two competitors are actually making nice to screw over YouTube and Google?

Ah, you got to love the sweet smell of capitalism in the morning.

479% — The bump in search traffic for the word "kindle" the day Oprah threw her support behind the product, according to Google Insights. It went up even more on Saturday.
-Ad Age

If Oprah can do that for the Kindle (which, even with a 400 percent increase in Google searches, is still only owned by the eight people who invented it), imagine what she could do for a presidential endorsement!

Oh, wait…

"Google Inc., the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have settled a class-action lawsuit over Google's book-scanning project. The company and the book groups said Tuesday that Google will pay $125 million to resolve claims by authors and publishers and to pay legal fees." [AP]

A study done by Google shows that 95% of people who make $1 million or more annually bought their last luxury good online. Why buy online, when the experience of shopping for wealthy (one assumes) includes the atmosphere of the upper class that comes with going to Saks or buying a boat in the Hamptons. It's not if buying a boat with your new iBook comes across as any more nouveau riche than buying it with a Windows 95 operating system, because with the anonymity online, your Paypal account talks, and bullshit, well, you know the rest.

So what's the point of having all the Benjamins if the only way to show it is winning all your bids on Ebay?

And yet…

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Last night during Stylista, there were a lot of commercials for that new Google/T-mobile phone, the G1 Android. It kind of seems like a shitty iPhone? But apparently not? Because it is Linux-based and that is awesome.

Linux, for all those not in the tech service industry, is the open-source operating system that is basically every elitist nerd's wet dream. As those who are paid to know about such things put it, "It's open, collaborative and community-based, in other words, everything the iPhone and Windows Mobile aren't."

Yay! More community oriented (Socialist!) software! Like Wikipedia, except for your phone (that is not how Socialism or Wikipedia works).

Queen Elizabeth has her own YouTube channel, which makes her approximately four hundred times better at the web than John McCain, who still thinks Google is something you do to yourself to relieve stress before a debate.

Here's the Queen visiting London HQ of the Google opperations, wearing the most amazing outfit in the world. If you are queen, you get clothes designed out of mermaids. Awesome:

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Today, while all good Americans celebrate a menacing, imperialistic Italian who systematically murdered brown people, Google is wishing a happy 50th birthday to Paddington Bear. Slate was right about those gazillionaire bastards.

From some unfathomable reason, Google is celebrating it's 10th anniversary with a special 2001 theme that let's you use the search engine of yesteryear. Okay, so it's not exactly 10 years old yet (give it another 3 years), but the engine does harken back to a time before September 11th, when typing in 9/11 just brought back results pertaining to home emergencies.

Also, is it a sign of our spoiled times that we look at Google's search of "1,326,920,000 web pages" and think "how quaint?"

Below, the biggest mindfuck of 2001:

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When two of the biggest search engines on the Internet start placing ads on each other's pages, people get a little squeamish at the thought of a dystopian future where there will just be one giant search engine and it is owned by Big Brother. Or something.

But things are a little more complicated for the companies in question. Yahoo saw lagging sales this quarter, while Google's reach only expanded. Without the boost from Google's ad sale dollars on Yahoo's engine, the smaller corporation might end up being eaten up by Microsoft. Bill Gates is no stranger to the Federal antitrust department himself, which regulates monopolies in business to make sure competition remains fair.

Unfortunate for Yahoo? Maybe. But worse for consumers, who, if Yahoo ends up going under or being bought out by Microsoft, could view this as the first sign that the current economic hardships are now hitting the 'net.

Luckily, we're all well versed on what to do if the bubble bursts again (go back to waiting tables).

Were you under the impression that fun, exciting wars were reserved for disputes between races, religions, tribes and nations? Wrong, silly. Computer companies can do battle also. Sure, it's even more stupid and offensive than regular combat, but at least the only casualties are money and dignity.

The image at right that looks like it was taken from an Apple ad was, in fact, taken from a Microsoft ad. Is your mind blown? That's the point. After pulling their ineffective, strange Seinfeld-Gates ads only two weeks after they premiered, Microsoft is striking again with a hipper, slicker attack. Sick of being pigeonholed as the computer for boring old turds, Microsoft is co-opting Apple's "nerd" character to do its PC bidding.

In a new 15-second spot, the "nerd" announces, "Hello. I'm a PC. And I've been made into a stereotype." Viewers are then introduced to a decidedly un-nerdy group of happy PC users, including children, Deepak Chopra and Pharrell Williams. Cool, right? Fuckin' Chopra, man.

Like a sleeping giant, Google continues to plot in the shadows, patiently awaiting the day when Microsoft and Apple kill each other and make room for its total world domination.

"Display ads have fallen on hard times. The graphic ads that border a Web page are among the slowest-growing formats in the online-ad marketplace, and they are seen by many marketers as stodgy and ineffective. But some ad-technology and Web-measurement companies are trying to engineer a comeback for display ads, offering data that they say show display advertising is more effective than marketers think. Microsoft is the latest company to make this declaration, with new evidence coming next week that it says proves display ads are actually better than searches at triggering consumers." [WSJ]

In unrelated news, Microsoft has all but admitted defeat in the text web advertising industry, which Google basically owns, where most advertiser dollars are being funneled, and what's stealing all the business from display ads.

It's all fun and games until the conservative Christians hire lawyers.

Yesterday, after a months-long standoff, leftist king of the Internet Google acquiesced to the Christian Institute's demand that anti-abortion groups be allowed to advertise against searches like "abortion help" and "abortion." Initially, Google said they were going to fight the Institute in court, but it capitulated soon thereafter.

Now, frightened young women and men looking for information on Google are definitely going to be subjected to biased scare tactics. But the Christian Institute wants you to note that they won't be the visual scare tactics of the loonies who show up at marathons with posters of aborted fetuses. Mike Judge, a spokesperson for CI, promises they are "not a group of headbangers, and would set out [their] position in a pretty factual, pretty sensible way." Well, at least as sensible as one can be while telling a woman she needs to become an incubator for 18 years and nine months because she made a mistake.

Glenn Tilton, the CEO of United Airlines, must be pretty freakin' pissed at everybody from Bloomberg News, Google, Tribune Co.'s Florida Sun-Sentinel, and financial newsletter Income Securities Advisors, which turned a six-year-old news story about the airline's 2002 bankruptcy filing into a current, breaking alert — sending shareholders into fire sale mode and driving down the price of the stock so low and so quickly, NASDAQ froze all trading. So what retribution does United have? Well, they could sue any of those parties. Except they'd probably be laughed out of court.

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Because causing United Airlines stocks to plummet below two cents isn't enough damage done in a day for Google, the search engine has announced plans to begin archiving 244 years worth of newsworthy articles online.

Hilarity ensues when news of a bombing at Pearl Harbor get picked up in The New York Times and jump-starts World War III.

Yesterday we told you about how United Airlines went from a $12 stock for a $0.01 in a single morning, when a reporter from the financial newsletter Income Securities Advisors found a six-year-old story about United's former bankruptcy (it entered protection in 2002, and exited in 2006), treated it like it was breaking news, and posted the item to Bloomberg News, which got picked up by Tribune Co.'s Florida Sun-Sentinel. It turns out, Income Securities was just performing a regular Google News search when it found the item, which was posted to the Sun-Sentinel's list of most-viewed stories, but without a 2002 date. Which means Google News, supposedly powered by a complex algorithm superior to human editing, erroneously pulled the story into its newsfeed and treated it as a brand new article, leading others to believe the story was fresh. Shareholders jumped on the news, selling off United stock, and driving the shareprice down rapidly before trading was frozen. Congrats, Brin & Page.

'Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine. The Mountain View-based company took the unusual step of announcing its latest product on the Labor Day holiday after it prematurely sent out a comic book drawn up to herald the new browser's arrival. The free browser, called "Chrome," is supposed to be available for downloading Tuesday in more than 100 countries for computers running on Microsoft's Windows operating system. Google said it's still working on versions compatible with Apple Inc.'s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.' [AP]

Though it's not offering much in the way of higher salaries these days, media giant Viacom is offering New York staffers one perk: a revamped dining room/cafeteria space/whatever-the-classy-word-is-for-mess hall at their headquarters on Broadway. Now the space is 12,000 sq. ft and includes such bonuses as a "8-ft. by 8-ft. projection screen broadcasting MTVN Networks channels 24 hours a day" as well as a bocca ball light fixture(?). No word yet on the food stuffs, but that's not what the place is really for.

NEway, Viacom's revamp comes not a moment too soon, as it was desperately losing the unnecessarily elaborate Eating Space Awards, which we just made up.

But how does Viacom's new foodie digs compare to other media companies' digestive offerings? Let's check in on the free Skittles:

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