Earlier today, we were sent a link to Change.gov, the amusingly named official government website of President-elect Obama's transition team. The site is a wholesale transfer of Obama's Apple-inspired fancy millennial Brand to an official White House website, which is still jarring and a bit, uh, hard to believe. The site links to Obama's acceptance speech, a blog, and, tantalizingly, jobs. Obama administration jobs!! Everyone in America needs jobs, right now, so of course now Change.gov has crashed, and it returns only an error message when you try to visit. Breaking promises already, Senator Hopey! Click for the screenshot of the New America that was too good to be true, while you endlessly refresh the page and fine-tune your resume.

No company has embraced Twitter quite like Zappos, the online shoes-and-whatever-else retailer — from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, on down. It even hosts a live feed of all Zappos-related messages on the microblogging service. That has made it easy to gather that the company is going through a tumultuous round of layoffs.Zappos_Jackie reports that she was laid off an hour ago; other ex-employees are proclaiming their lasting love for Zappos. We look forward to the New York Times updating its trend story about how companies blog about layoffs. They must now Twitter them instead, lest misinformation spread quicker than sluggish RSS feeds. (Oddly, Hsieh never mentioned the pending layoffs in an interview he gave to the Times about Zappos' vaunted corporate culture.)

♦ Momofuku's David Chang is opening a "bakery and milk bar" in the next few weeks. It'll offer up a selection of flavored milks, soft-serve ice cream, and desserts. [Eater]
♦ The West Village restaurant Charles, which opened less than a month ago, has already lost its chef, John McAllister. [Feedbag]
♦ Former Tia Pol chef Alex Raij plans to open a tapas bar on Ninth Avenue this fall. [The Feed]
♦ Frank Bruni weighs in on Irving Mill and says he feels "blessed" by new chef Ryan Skeen's beef cheek and fatback hamburger, although he's pretty unimpressed with everything else. [NYT/Diner's Journal]
♦ A guide to the best Cuban food in New York. [NYT]

Oh no, Keith Olbermann, The Left's Old Favorite Cable Person, is attacking Campbell Brown, The Lady Who Yelled At Tucker Bounds! They share a timeslot on competing networks so it was certain to happen. Clip below. Campbell is a fine interviewer who does admirably call bullshit when she hears it, but her show's self-congratulatory "keeping them honest" segments still invariably boil down to "both sides stretching the truth, as usual, what are you gonna go?" meaninglessness. And hey, she got some history wrong! In attempting to explain why a single party controlling the legislature and the White House is bad, a terribly annoying bugaboo repeated only by media people and minority parties and not so feared by voters who vote for single party rule, Campbell explained that the last time this happened was in the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter. Hah. That's not true! Nor was it in the 90s, with Bill Clinton. It was, as Keith explains, in the 2000s, with the current President, Mr. Bush. Keith doesn't explain that Campbell's point about all of those situations being disasters is actually borne out by the evidence, but whatever. Unified Democratic government also brought us Vietnam and Civil Rights, for those keeping score at home. Mixed bag, right? Click to view

Brooding Hero Saves IMAX: The Dark Knight's billion-dollar windfall last summer helped nudge IMAX closer to its old, profitable days, with the megascreen exhibitor regaining last quarter more than half of its $7.3 million loss from this time last year. The company has taken a hit from ongoing digital rollouts at more than 275 theaters globally; it anticipates another boost when Dark Knight is rereleased in January '09 and when James Cameron's Avatar arrives next December. If/when Disney ever accedes to the rumored Hannah Montana 2: Miley Day Massacre, look for the black ink to gush once again at IMAX's Toronto headquarters. [THR]

Not only did the Dow plunge another 400 points today, the Department of Labor reported that the number of people collecting unemployment has reached a 25-year-high. Some of the local companies that announced layoffs today: Hearst, Time Inc., and Steve Cohen's SAC Capital. [CNNMoney]

Affluent urban professionals are so happy that Obama is our next president! They're educated and urbane and liberal and they are simply in love with our elected leader, for a change! But now that they've finally gotten over their election night party hangovers, they're starting to realize: whoa, these Democrats might not be so good for our beloved Fashion/ Advertising/ PR/ Entertainment industries, which give us affluent urban professionals our paychecks! After the jump, we take a brief look at how these industries of liberal elites really feel about the prospects of an Obama presidency:

BitTorrent cofounder and president Ashwin Navin is leaving the company. He has plans for a startup incubator in San Francisco's Mission District. Good! That means he'll be screwing up far less consequential companies from here on out. Navin deserves credit for persuading Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, for building a company around it. But that's about it.Navin wasted years and millions of dollars trying to turn BitTorrent Inc. into a competitor to Apple's iTunes store. He struck splashy deals with Hollywood studios by paying them large upfront guarantees, which depleted BitTorrent's bank account but got Navin into the right parties. Meanwhile, BitTorrent's other line of business, which used file-sharing technologies to deliver content more efficiently for corporate customers, suffered from lack of focus, and more established competitors like Akamai moved in. Sometimes losing a founder is bad for a company. In this case, it's nothing but good.

A new workplace harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit has blown the doors wide open on the world of "branding agents"—even oilier than a regular agent, these Audi-leasing Hollywood barnacles can transform your garden-variety Jessica Simpson into a Jessica Simpson: The Jean. Todd Shemarya, the man named in the suit, was one such brand agent. Perhaps even the biggest, Variety reports, having handled endorsements and brokered baby photos for the likes of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, and Salma Hayek. So what is plaintiff Heather Devlin, a fired Shemarya assistant, accusing her ex-boss of? For starters, pooping in a doorless bathroom for all the office to see. And making fun of Brad Pitt's wee! And much, much more! From Courthousenews.com:

Craigslist has agreed to crack down on the sex workers who use the site's "erotic services" section. That this news came about an hour after it was announced that Eliot Spitzer would not be prosecuted for having sex with prostitutes? A delightful coincidence! [NYT]

Didn't make it to ZendCon08 for developer Terry Chay's expletive-laden talk on Ruby? Chay, the original PHP terrorist, is headlining the PHP meetup with an encore presentation of "Making Frameworks Suck Less" at CBS Interactive, the company formerly known as CNET, from 6:30-10 p.m. Now that the Internet has won the presidency, head to the Commonwealth Club for an update on new media's right to express itself. From 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Four Seasons in Silicon Valley, representatives from YouTube, Veoh, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be dissecting the impact of Viacom's attempt to sue YouTube off the Internet. For those of you missing out the raucousness of Web 2.0 Summit, the Fall Social Mixer at Roe Restaurant is giving meetups a chance to meetup. Tonight, join peeps from the SF Bay Area Tech Entrepreneurs, Fashion Replant, the Art Scene, and the Real Estate List Network for a runway show benefiting GreenPasture.org. Also getting together tonight, Tweets and Drinks will be at Mars Bars from 6:30-8 p.m. (Photo by Sebastian Bergmann)

Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of Thomas Friedman paints the Times op-ed columnist as a driven, hyper-competitive workaholic. But, like, a useful one. The full text of the article can be viewed in The New Yorker's new digital reader, where you can get the full details on Friedman's crazy operation: his manic work habits, his everlasting love of buzzwords, and the hate he holds in his heart for fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman's Nobel win.This anecdote about Friedman's massive ego is joke fodder at the Times' D.C. office:

Any reality star worth his or her salt has two things going for them: a complete lack of shame, and a very handy, self-applied Google Alert. So it is, then, that not long after respected newsman Anderson Cooper accessorized his Real Housewives of Atlanta endorsement with the now-immortal statement, "Honey, I don't even know where to begin with NeNe," NeNe herself knew exactly where to begin: by getting herself over to E! to ride the silver fox press wave! She spoke to the network's Marc Malkin:

Writer John Leonard has died, according to Vulture. He was 69. Leonard, an out-and-proud liberal, was the longtime TV critic for New York magazine and wrote a book column for Harper's. He has also been the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a book critic for The Nation, wrote for the New York Review of Books, and was a commenter on CBS's Sunday Morning. His most recent book is titled When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. He was also the father of Salon's tech editor, Andrew.

Time to give out the award to the first world leader who came up with something quasi-racist about Barack Obama following his victory on Tuesday. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi described the President-elect as "young, handsome and tanned" at a news conference today. (Of course, Sarah Palin had some color in her cheeks, too, but that was for other reasons.) By Berlusconi standards, this is pretty mild stuff. This is the same guy who turned up at the New York Stock Exchange and suggested Americans consider investing in Italy because "the secretaries are beautiful." Video of his remarks (in Italian) after the jump. [Guardian]

What about the children? Palo Alto High School teacher Esther "Woj" Wojcicki took time away from educating future reporters to write about America's teens for the Huffington Post. In the piece, she promotes a nonprofit letter-writing project sponsored by Google and touts the use of Google Docs. No surprise there: Woj, whose daughter Anne is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin and whose daughter Susan is a Google executive, has been promoting Google's pet causes from the first. But only now, after Valleywag has twice pointed out Woj's failure to disclose family conflicts of interest, has she started to include a disclaimer. Too bad it's deceptive.Woj's new disclaimer reads:

How did fameballs get famous in 18th-century Britain? They died! Now that we have the Internet, you don't have to wait for your own death to get written up in the papers—you can publish all your career-killing overshares yourself. But back then, "research by the University of Warwick shows [that] death gave birth to the modern cult of celebrity, as the sudden rise in the popularity of obituaries of unusual people in the 1700s provided people with the... equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine," says Eureka Alert. It was often the eccentrics "from all walks of life" that people loved to read about, such as a man who would "hire himself out to impersonate a doctor and tell fortunes in a fur cap, a large white beard and a worn damask night gown." Hm, what sort of eccentrics would we write about today in those obits? Perhaps a girl from the Midwest who came to the big city, and whose quest for any sort of fame involved buying 180 candy bars, removing the wrappers, and stitching them together to make an eye-catching outfit:

What's a struggling network to do when faced with last-place ratings, corporate inertia and a few dozen mouldering costumes from a hit going off the air? If you're NBC Universal, you invite the world to a yard sale, as it's planning to do Jan. 16 in order to cash in on the final season of Battlestar Galactica. The geek gold rush is on, and its nervous hosts in Pasadena are stocking up on canned goods and bottled water as we speak.NBCU has been plotting a Battlestar prop auction since the summer, trickling out such must-sorta-haves as Cylon War-era flight suits and War Room chalkboards on a Web site ranking right below asthma inhalers among fanboy essentials. The network has hosted such events before, previously cashing in at last year's Heroes/Office/30 Rock sale. But the international interest in Battlestar sparked a recent run on hotel rooms in and around the Pasadena Convention Center, we hear, with the artifacts' online clearing house now offering a handy guide to making the most of that slavering southern pilgrimage. Which, in the end, is fine with us; anything that helps pay off NBC's Olympics debt and keeps us in Jeff Zucker profiles is a true public service in the long run.

What's the only thing worse than another "Open Letter to Jerry Yang?" A freaking poem to Jerry Yang. Shakespeare was so much better at this, plus he didn't put his vanity site's URL in the final stanza.

Sarah Palin says she plans to return the six-figure wardrobe that got her into so much trouble in the run-up to the election. But she's already had to part ways with another campaign perk: the plane that jetted her around the country over the past couple of months. The Embraer E190 that the McCain campaign leased from JetBlue to fly the Wasilla hillbillies from place to place touched down in Anchorage yesterday to deposit the governor in her home state. It's now on its way back to New York where it will be stripped of its McCain/Palin logo and rejoin JetBlue's fleet of jets based at JFK. At least now there's a very good explanation if you happen to come across a Neiman Marcus shopping bag stuffed under your seat.