Photo sharing site SmugMug uses a paid referral program to encourage word-of-mouth growth. To kill referral links, photo site dpreview.com banned all mentions of SmugMug from its forums, letting SmugMug's CEO know by e-mail. The CEO blogged the e-mail and dpreview owner Phil Askey threw a fit. Now Phil has deleted threads and lied about it, turning a simple issue into a PR nightmare for dpreview. [Mike Lane Studios]
Oh noes! Where is the industry going? Another techie's exit gets scooped by an outside blogger. Laughing Squid owner Scott Beale says Yahoo project manager David Beach (pictured) is moving to social search startup Wink. Not as major as the exit of Bill Gates from Microsoft (or even of blogger Robert Scoble from same), but hey, this is the guy who founded the first record label on the Internet. [Laughing Squid]
Rumor says that Yahoo's building curriculum software — gotta get kids into Yahoo while they're impressionable — under an in-development project codenamed "Elmo."
For startup founders and de facto press reps: this list, "When a Reporter Contacts You..." gives advice like, "Deadline: This drives the interview timing, but it also tells you how much of the story you might appear in. If it is a roundup story, or the reporter is on deadline, your source better be quotable as your window of opportunity just got smaller." [Bad Pitch]
