After just a few months, the new head of Netscape wants out. That's why he's fomenting controversy over his newest job offer — paying his competitors' top users to seed Netscape. When the smoke clears, the site will have a shot in the arm, and Netscape's boss will be closer to leaving for a better gig at AOL.

Two web portals, figuring out new ways to hemorrhage money, are paying people to play on the Internet.

Let's get down to some nitty gritty — who's moving where in this big dumb game we call the tech industry?

Much love to our crusading sibsite Consumerist for unearthing an actual copy of the legendary AOL Customer Retention Manual. Within the pages of this dark grimoire are all the essential tools of psychological warfare, many verging on light BDSM. Enjoy with headset phone and riding crop.

Our big brother Consumerist scored a major find today — a mole sent a copy of AOL's manual (cover designed by Fox News) for "customer service" reps fighting to keep people from unsubscribing.

Need to make fun of someone this morning? Try the curmudgeons from Netscape who came to AOL exec Jason Calacanis's blog to tell him they don't like what he did to their site. How did they find his blog? By reading the new Netscape.

Not sure how we missed this, but Donna Hanover — the former Ms. Rudy Giuliani, thrown over for the ex-NYC mayor's secretary and current wife — has chugged her womanly reclamation train to AOL. Hanover now serves her dark net master as "love & sex coach," dispensing video tidbits of startling simplicity. Is it OK to have sex with the ex? "It's up to the two of you!" chirps Hanover helpfully. So much for realizing that nonconsensual grudge-fuck rape fantasy. The New York Daily News imagines what Hanover might have advised her replacement in the Giuliani household: "if you respect marriage, probably the best thing to do is back off and go a different direction." The NYDN then crows "Too late for that!" in response to its own quotation misappropriation. Burn.

• Ailing humorist Art Buchwald stays alive long enough to make his 5 millionth Medicaid joke. [WP]
• No one at Time Warner has ever heard the phrase "throwing good money after bad." [WSJ]
• CJR finds a way to make even gossip boring. This essay will make you long for the sweet embrace of the grave. [CJR]

• New York-based e-mail startup Daily Candy gets a sweet deal: an investment valuing the company at $130 mil, which lets the company take down its "For Sale" sign and get back to the important business of making urban women feel inadequately shoed. [Gawker, link being fixed]

Kudos to Fortune Magazine for catching that AOL is the new Yahoo. But that's not the whole story, is it? Google's also the new Yahoo — and Yahoo's the new Yahoo too. The top of the software/dot-com industry is built like so:

As AOL goes on another self-discovery retreat ("What is my business model? What is my power animal?"), here's what's beleaguering the portal/ISP/messaging service/media conglomerate in the real world.

The business divorce between Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron and anchor Amanda Congdon gets bitchier by the hour. (If you just tuned in, see Amanda's original announcement and Andrew's rebuttal.)

The point of schwag (and the reason the Valley is buried in it) is to remind a consumer of an otherwise ethereal product or service. The less physical (or popular) the thing the schwag markets, the more the burden of cost falls on the schwag giver. (This is why Apple can sell its t-shirts while, say, Browster.com must give them away.)

Video-blogging celebrity Amanda Congdon's exit from the daily Rocketboom show is getting all the blogosphere's love today. The general feel is that Rocketboom's screwed and Amanda's a golden girl.

The Washington Post and "don't call me the Segway inventor" Dean Kamen want geeks to be famous. Rather than letting creative geniuses get all the glory for their piddly "Oscars" and their "works of timeless art," the Post and Kamen want kids to worship real role models like the Google guys and YouTube founders.

• Apple's iPod maker says the sweatshop story isn't true, and they've vaguely threatened a lawsuit over the claim, made by the UK's Daily Mail. Can we resolve this peacefully so the slaves can crank out more toys? [Apple Insider]

Five Internet giants are pooling their resources to create the largest child porn library on Earth.

As promised in Valleywag, New York Magazine profiles Jason Calacanis this week. Netscape PR asked writer John Heilemann (whose last mention of Calacanis got three days of angry e-mails from the sensitive AOL exec) to interview the man who's turning Netscape into a clone of Digg.com.

What we have here is either an actual bug-eyed-insane AOLer gloating over his own company's failure in the Internet access business, or an equally bug-eyed-insane AOLer seeding lies to discredit Valleywag, defame AOL, or both. Either way, the grammar and spelling prove this tipster really is from AOL.

Last year, New York Magazine tech writer John Heilemann mentioned, in passing, AOL exec Jason Calacanis and his "Web 1.0 flameout." Calacanis was pissed — sure, his 90s mag, the Silicon Alley Reporter, didn't sell for much, but did Heilemann (pictured here dressed as the dot-com bubble) have to call its demise "a comforting sign that there was some justice in the world"?